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Could the Earth be an evaporated gas giant planet?

demystifyingscience.com

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Re: Could the Earth be an evaporated gas giant planet?

#91

Post by grayed-down »

rowanG077 wrote: post #37
retpirato wrote: post #35

NO. If solar wind caused a gas layer to evaporate, Earth shouldn't have the atmosphere it does. This planet should be like those surrounding it. Those same solar winds/radiation would have made sure of that. The issue I have with this is the same issue I have with evolution. If conditions were not created to favor life why are we the only planet with any known life & which is perfectly suited to a variety of life? Do…

Huh? No scientist claims to have ultimate knowledge of why there is life on earth. But to claim that Earth was created for life is leap too far. I mean we used to believe storms where conjured up by the gods because we didn't understand how they really are created. What you are saying is essentially the same. We don't know so it must have been created. You are essentially invoking the God-of-the-gaps fallacy.

Maybe not created, but...tweaked?

Re: Could the Earth be an evaporated gas giant planet?

#92

Post by grayed-down »

retpirato wrote: post #35

NO. If solar wind caused a gas layer to evaporate, Earth shouldn't have the atmosphere it does. This planet should be like those surrounding it. Those same solar winds/radiation would have made sure of that. The issue I have with this is the same issue I have with evolution. If conditions were not created to favor life why are we the only planet with any known life & which is perfectly suited to a variety of life? Do…

I hear you. Intelligent and abundant life on a planet that is PERFECTLY suited for it is a coincidence? Maybe, but it's tough proposition for me personally.

Re: Could the Earth be an evaporated gas giant planet?

#93

Post by saagarjha »

quotemstr wrote: post #89
saagarjha wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s mostly because the “to be” gets a folded into the verb.

No, that's not right. Latin has a separate copula --- sum, est, and so on. What gives Latin its terseness is that it supports dropping words implied by context (like the copula in many contexts) and that it's highly inflected, allowing single words to communicate grammatical information that we need word spam to spell out in English.

Uh, yeah, what you said. I'm not a linguistic expert so my experience with this is just "that's what it does" rather than "you can drop copulas" ;) Another one of the nice ones is that you can drop pronouns from context too–compared to English the Romance languages are pretty cool.

Re: Could the Earth be an evaporated gas giant planet?

#94

Post by koheripbal »

Razengan wrote: post #84
Insanity wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but in animated things (like rick and morty) they, occasionally, have aliens that are vaguely essentially anthropomorphic animals and give those expressions. So it's not entirely.. human. My point being that we can have the expressions of a human face on a non-human face

> My point being that we can have the expressions of a human face on a non-human face To bring up the example of the octopus again, you can still get some sense of "expression" like anger etc. when they change their skin colors, without having a relatable face at all. Or something more common: Dogs wagging their tails, cats pointing their ears, and so on.

Dogs and cats only work for us because we're already so familiar with those.

Re: Could the Earth be an evaporated gas giant planet?

#95

Post by chottocharaii »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #70
dumbfoundded wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be mixing up the causation. How probable our universe is, we'll never know (until we can see other universes). We do know that in this universe, life exists. Thus our universe has to be "fine-tuned" for us to exist because we do. As for the universe "favor"ing life, that doesn't really make sense either. I think it's safe to say the universe favors stars, gas giants, black holes but it's pretty hard t…

> Thus our universe has to be "fine-tuned" for us to exist because we do. Because we of course do not exist in this universe because we're fine tuned to exist in it. I can't think of a better way to describe it than the late Douglas Adams did : “This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me…

Bad analogy. A puddle is a local system, governed by local random conditions (e.g. the sun as in that example)

The strong anthropic principle makes a statement about the fine tuning of the one and only, non-random, system that governs all systems.

I.e. the rudimentary physics & chemistry that happens to favours determine carbon based life generally.

Re: Could the Earth be an evaporated gas giant planet?

#96

Post by BLKNSLVR »

Razengan wrote: post #28
hirundo wrote: post #4

"The Chthonian process effectively selects for retainment of water and carbon dioxide, which are heavy and tend to rain back down upon condensing in the upper atmosphere." So earthlike planets would be more plentiful than otherwise. This could be a boon to scifi plots that entail conveniently breathable atmospheres. It would also tend to support the strong anthropic principle.

> This could be a boon to scifi plots But can they outgrow the trope of every alien being a human-in-a-mask?

The central "alien" in the novel Blindsight (by Peter Watts) is, quite specifically, not this human-in-a-mask trope. One of the key points I remember (possibly not-quite-accurately) is that the various attempts that humanity makes to communicate with the alien could be construed by the alien to be attacks: bombarding it with the kinds of signals that we use to communicate.

It's a memorable point, making it plain that normality in our sphere of experience is something that's evolved through many needles' eyes over millions of years. Different human cultures can't even relate to each other very well, and we share 5-nines of that evolutionary history.

Re: Could the Earth be an evaporated gas giant planet?

#97

Post by JoeAltmaier »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #96
Razengan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This could be a boon to scifi plots But can they outgrow the trope of every alien being a human-in-a-mask?

The central "alien" in the novel Blindsight (by Peter Watts) is, quite specifically, not this human-in-a-mask trope. One of the key points I remember (possibly not-quite-accurately) is that the various attempts that humanity makes to communicate with the alien could be construed by the alien to be attacks: bombarding it with the kinds of signals that we use to communicate. It's a memorable point, making it plain that…

Yes! This!

Fundamental 'human' values are likely entirely at odds with any alien life morality we ever encounter. Thou Shall Not Kill? What about an amoebic life-form that honors its ancestors by absorbing their protoplasm, thus retaining their memories? Honor Thy Father And Mother? An insectoid race may become adult by the brood attacking, killing and eating their parent colony thus proving their fitness. Thou Shall Not Steal? That one's easy: what if property ownership is an ideal unique to territorial monkey-troop creatures with strong attraction to bling (us)? Sharing tools and food may be fundamental to every other successful race in the galaxy, humans being some aberrant race of moral deviants that prosper despite all logic to the contrary.

Re: Could the Earth be an evaporated gas giant planet?

#98

Post by JoeAltmaier »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #97
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The central "alien" in the novel Blindsight (by Peter Watts) is, quite specifically, not this human-in-a-mask trope. One of the key points I remember (possibly not-quite-accurately) is that the various attempts that humanity makes to communicate with the alien could be construed by the alien to be attacks: bombarding it with the kinds of signals that we use to communicate. It's a memorable point, making it plain that…

Yes! This! Fundamental 'human' values are likely entirely at odds with any alien life morality we ever encounter. Thou Shall Not Kill? What about an amoebic life-form that honors its ancestors by absorbing their protoplasm, thus retaining their memories? Honor Thy Father And Mother? An insectoid race may become adult by the brood attacking, killing and eating their parent colony thus proving their fitness. Thou Shall…

Add to that: the speed of interaction. Even on Earth we have everything from Sloth to Hummingbird. How will we get along with Hummingbird aliens? Aliens that move and think at the speed of a Giant Sequoia?

Even a tiny mismatch could be disastrous. What if they perceived the world only slightly faster? We would speak at the very low end of their perception; our flickering lights and video images would drive them mad. We would appear slow and stupid in every personal interaction.

Re: Could the Earth be an evaporated gas giant planet?

#99

Post by three_seagrass »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #42
three_seagrass wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you can calculate the probability of an abiogenesis event on pre-biotic Earth (or in our Universe in general), and then run the probability against the known number of solar systems/planets/atoms in the known universe. Whether or not the universe favored life can be interpreted from the resulting improbability and the current results. Stars, gas giants, and black holes are probable.

The assumptions probably dictate the probability more than anything else. We don't even know how life originated on Earth

Abiogenesis implies natural means, but I agree that we simply do not know.

Re: Could the Earth be an evaporated gas giant planet?

#100

Post by three_seagrass »

tsimionescu wrote: post #71
three_seagrass wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you can calculate the probability of an abiogenesis event on pre-biotic Earth (or in our Universe in general), and then run the probability against the known number of solar systems/planets/atoms in the known universe. Whether or not the universe favored life can be interpreted from the resulting improbability and the current results. Stars, gas giants, and black holes are probable.

How could you calculate the probability of an event that we have no idea about? We don't even know for sure that life originated entirely on earth itself - life or some crucial substances required for it could have originated on some other planet with conditions we know nothing about and been brought to earth on some meteorite; or it could have originated in some extreme conditions like a comet tail in close proximit…

Life seeded implies that life still went through abiogenesis somewhere else.

I agree that we can't know the exact means, just that abiogenesis happened, but we can still calculate the probability of our conditions needing to occur for abiogenesis to happen.

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