We are rapidly approaching the day where humans can colonize other worlds. maybe that is how we got here.
NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
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Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
>sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. Why? Sentience just happens to be an evolutionary trait that was beneficial to us, like wings on a bird. There millions of species animals on our planet, and only a handful of them are sentient. We have a bit of a cognitive bias towards thinking that sentient life is something that evolution would work towards, but that isn't really how evolution works.
> that isn't really how evolution works. Taking this a step further, finding intelligent life out there is simply impossible. The reason our intelligence is unique to only humans on our planet is largely because we defined intelligence as traits that only we possess. We defined it based on our own nature. Finding life out there that would be socially compatible with us is ridiculously unlikely. That life would have h…
> Taking this a step further, finding intelligent life out there is simply impossible
What? How can you take this position? That's absolutely crazy. Really, you're going to take observations from just a couple of decades and determine that finding something is "impossible"?!
No way. There's absolutely no way that finding intelligent life is impossible.
> The reason our intelligence is unique to only humans on our planet is largely because we defined intelligence as traits that only we possess
Slow down there. Nobody is looking for "human intelligence" on other planets. Maybe that's why you think it's impossible. I'd say dolphins are intelligent. So are some of our computer systems. There's a lot more intelligence that we can recognize that isn't like ours.
> Finding life out there that would be socially compatible with us is ridiculously unlikely.
I agree. That has nothing to do with intelligence though.
> That life would have had to spring up in an evolutionary environment identical to ours and that's so unlikely that it might as well be impossible.
identical? Sure, nearly impossible. But why bother making it identical? Do you need 20.946% O2 in the atmosphere? Nope! There are probably billions of planets in the Milky Way alone that could support Earth-like life, if we extrapolate from the Kepler mission data.
The chances are better than you might think.
Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#13I recommend reading _How to Find a Habitable Planet_.
The first half of the book is about why Earth is habitable, and then it goes to project that against what the search for a similar world requires.
The "snowball earth" scenarios were terrifying (basically, you get an ice ball that is very reflective and thus stays ice, unless you have something like plate tectonics to dirty-up the atmosphere to the point where some insolation can be retained).
Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
>sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. Why? Sentience just happens to be an evolutionary trait that was beneficial to us, like wings on a bird. There millions of species animals on our planet, and only a handful of them are sentient. We have a bit of a cognitive bias towards thinking that sentient life is something that evolution would work towards, but that isn't really how evolution works.
> that isn't really how evolution works. Taking this a step further, finding intelligent life out there is simply impossible. The reason our intelligence is unique to only humans on our planet is largely because we defined intelligence as traits that only we possess. We defined it based on our own nature. Finding life out there that would be socially compatible with us is ridiculously unlikely. That life would have h…
Well I mean, how would you define intelligent life that does not possess metacognition at a minimum?
Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#15Kepler has certainly made a lot of discoveries. It should be fairly clear to us now that planetary systems are pretty common and, by extension, sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. But I have to wonder how many assumptions go into this so-called "habitable zone". Doesn't it greatly depend on the atmospheric composition? With a different atmosphere, couldn't Venus be habitable (actually it might be in our…
>sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. Why? Sentience just happens to be an evolutionary trait that was beneficial to us, like wings on a bird. There millions of species animals on our planet, and only a handful of them are sentient. We have a bit of a cognitive bias towards thinking that sentient life is something that evolution would work towards, but that isn't really how evolution works.
There's a fundamental flaw in that argument. Once a sentience, or as i would define it, a species capable of creating technology, exists, it is highly likely to not die out as other traits easily can. It only needs to occur once. One could argue it has -almost- occurred on earth many times, including dolphins, elephants, octopus along with apes right now.
Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#16Kepler has certainly made a lot of discoveries. It should be fairly clear to us now that planetary systems are pretty common and, by extension, sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too. But I have to wonder how many assumptions go into this so-called "habitable zone". Doesn't it greatly depend on the atmospheric composition? With a different atmosphere, couldn't Venus be habitable (actually it might be in our…
The 'habitable zone' is overly simplistic in general. Look at Europa - it's nowhere near the habitable zone, but is one of the most Earth-like plants in our Solar System. That's just inside the one Solar System we have a fairly complete planetary record of!
It also assumes that liquid water and an oxygen atmosphere are prerequisites for life. Extremophiles [1] living on our own planet prove that this is not so.
Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#17I remember when Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" series was first shown on PBS; the episode when the Drake equation was covered was one of my favorite, although even as a teen I understood how small were the chances of finding other sentient life as we hadn't found a single extrasolar planet at the time, let alone in the Goldilocks zone of a star.
Planetary discoveries (like this one) in the past few years are so cool to me.
Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#18We are rapidly approaching the day where humans can colonize other worlds. maybe that is how we got here.
We are in a new space race, since we are also rapidly approaching the day that our Earth will be inhabitable.
Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#19What's the gravity on the surface? It's 2.4 times the size of earth, is the density the same? If so, that amount of gravity may very well make it uninhabitable.
Re: NASA Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
#20What's the gravity on the surface? It's 2.4 times the size of earth, is the density the same? If so, that amount of gravity may very well make it uninhabitable.
They don't know the density yet, but future observations should tell us. Probably next year, I think.