Imagine one human probe, with one little algea splash landing in a ocean there. We would be the re-creators of the green goo scenario.
We planetary protection directives, you know.
A New Recipe for Hunting Alien Life
21–30 of 40 posts
Re: A New Recipe for Hunting Alien Life
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there's no requisite that ATP/ respiration is the direction life is going to take Based on the article I linked in my other comment I would say that on oxygen-rich planets, respiration is likely to happen simply because life needs to find a way to deal with it's toxicity, or perish. Although that presupposes that photosynthesis is inevitable, which also doesn't have to be true. I kind of wonder how much we truly kn…
As one example on a physical rather than a chemical level, I read that marsupials are stuck for this reason. They need claws to climb into their mother's pouch after birth, so there are certain ecological niches closed off to them. You'll never see a hoofed marsupial, for example.
Found a source: https://synapsida.blogspot.com/2011/11/why-marsupials-cant-f...
Re: A New Recipe for Hunting Alien Life
#23TL;DR: With existing technology it’s tough to detect oxygen on smaller far-away planets. However, what we could instead look for is a combination of gases that likely means presence of life on earlier stages, before oxygen becomes abundant in the atmosphere. (The assumption is that the alien life we might find would likely be on early stages of development anyway.) This research is about how such a combination of gas…
I'm not a scientist by any means, but since childhood when I was first exposed to the fact that life on Earth needs oxygen (and many other things, in extremely basic terms) to exist, I've been thinking to myself what if there are other distant planets where life has bootstrapped itself from completely different (or maybe opposite) components and conditions. I'm sure someone with more knowledge than I in biology and p…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemi...
Silicon has a lot of chemical possibilities similar to carbon.
Also methane can perform a lot of the same functions as liquid water (though at very different temperatures).
Re: A New Recipe for Hunting Alien Life
#24I'm going to try to put into words something about our methods of hunting for alien life that has always bothered me, and I'm probably going to fail. What is intelligence in the context of extraterrestrial life? I posit that we have no good model for what intelligence actually is, and that it makes no sense to assume any alien lifeform would share our goals of seeking knowledge, reproduction, preservation, or "living…
I'm going to fail in my response too, since it's not my field. :)
Starting from the beginning of the search, there are some gases (like oxygen) which are pretty volatile and react with many things. If volatile gases and compounds are in the atmosphere, two possibilities exist:
1) It's young, and hasn't burned through all the reactions that its raw materials would present.
2) There's some process actively creating more volatile gases, which could be a sign of something akin to life, because it doesn't drop into an expected low-entropy chemical makeup.
People much smarter than I in the field would be able to distinguish more "non-living" sources like geological cycles than less-expected "maybe life" activity. But basically, if there's some life-ish process on the planet, it should affect the entire atmosphere enough to be detectable.
Certainly it's only 1 way that chemical activity can be detected, because if things are bound into subterranean caverns or don't involve gases in their activity cycles, it probably wouldn't be visible in its atmospheric composition. However, this sort of search doesn't necessarily target earth-like life, but any "huh, that's strange" observance of chemical makeups, which is good.
So we have one additional means of defining "life", in that it goes against the chemical entropy-reducing direction of its planetary environment; there are sustained complex active processes that aren't just raw chemical or physical potential energy releasing itself. If we find something "living", only then the question of whether or not it's "intelligent" becomes meaningful, because the only metric we currently have for that is "thinks like humans" which isn't enough to work with.
Re: A New Recipe for Hunting Alien Life
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is a step in the right direction, but it still has the central issue that looking for oxygen rich planets (or any atmosphere with a disproportionately high quantity of some suitable agent for reduction (respiration). We didn't even get around to the whole respiration thing on this planet for quite a long time, and there's no requisite that ATP/ respiration is the direction life is going to take, and equa…
> there's no requisite that ATP/ respiration is the direction life is going to take Based on the article I linked in my other comment I would say that on oxygen-rich planets, respiration is likely to happen simply because life needs to find a way to deal with it's toxicity, or perish. Although that presupposes that photosynthesis is inevitable, which also doesn't have to be true. I kind of wonder how much we truly kn…
>Although that presupposes that photosynthesis is inevitable, which also doesn't have to be true.
there are options. For example radiosynthesis like is done by these fungi discovered in Chernobyl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus
Re: A New Recipe for Hunting Alien Life
#26The fermi paradox bothered me quite a bit, like all paradoxes and they should bother everybody. They are a flag that something does not add up and there must be some sort of wrong assumption somewhere. As most of our combined "knowledge" does not add up correctly just one example is quantum mechanics and relativity - no, they do not add and therefor need higher dimensions to have a model (a emergency hatch). It is qu…
> It is quite funny when you understand that 2 general believed assumptions are the root cause for all the strangeness in our psysical models Eh.. no? That's literally the opposite of how it works: it's not two strange assumptions causing all this weirdness, it's two very strange observed phenomena for which these two models give the best predictions, so far .
That is not what I meant. Both are objectively measurable results - of course if you look at critic voices the details in their implementation differ, but in general yes.
But there are different ways of implementing something and which one you choose depends on assumptions. If you use Field Equations for describing relativity you need a certain set of assumptions. If you use a different mechanism to describe relativity, you need another set.
You can't build a theory without assumptions.
Re: A New Recipe for Hunting Alien Life
#27If it bleeds, we can kill it.
That's from Predator
Re: A New Recipe for Hunting Alien Life
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not really a paradox, right? It's just a big equation and we're guessing at the variables.
We also have no reason to believe that we'd be able to detect other civilizations, even if there were millions out there. They might well be using other means of communication. Even if they were using the very thing we were looking for, it's still likely we would miss them - even if they were right next door to us. From SETI's FAQ[1]: > If an extraterrestrial civilization has a SETI project similar to our own, could…
From the perspective I gathered through understanding a very beautiful unified theory (not my model) - this is exactly my point.
EM waves as we use it are useless for long distance communications. I even doubt that those waves will still be detectable in a different solar system as the general assumptions that our vacuum is a very homogeneous is not true for me (the underlaying dimensions are for me, but not the vaccum as we know it). I have much more effects that cause disturbances of such waves.
Inside a solar system, there are also better techniques that are more stable in propagation then our Hertz EM waves. But unfortunately, we adopted a form of Maxwell Equations that are not suitable to describe the phenomena (the original equations in quaternion math can however). Nicolas Tesla did a lot of research in this area, but it is not very well known/understood. (From the model I'm using 3 forms are derived. As far as I dug into Tesla, he worked with 1 form. The 3rd form is the interesting one but very hard to produce /detect.)
Re: A New Recipe for Hunting Alien Life
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is a step in the right direction, but it still has the central issue that looking for oxygen rich planets (or any atmosphere with a disproportionately high quantity of some suitable agent for reduction (respiration). We didn't even get around to the whole respiration thing on this planet for quite a long time, and there's no requisite that ATP/ respiration is the direction life is going to take, and equa…
> there's no requisite that ATP/ respiration is the direction life is going to take Based on the article I linked in my other comment I would say that on oxygen-rich planets, respiration is likely to happen simply because life needs to find a way to deal with it's toxicity, or perish. Although that presupposes that photosynthesis is inevitable, which also doesn't have to be true. I kind of wonder how much we truly kn…
It would be Life's technical debt :D
Re: A New Recipe for Hunting Alien Life
#30The fermi paradox bothered me quite a bit, like all paradoxes and they should bother everybody. They are a flag that something does not add up and there must be some sort of wrong assumption somewhere. As most of our combined "knowledge" does not add up correctly just one example is quantum mechanics and relativity - no, they do not add and therefor need higher dimensions to have a model (a emergency hatch). It is qu…
It's not really a paradox, right? It's just a big equation and we're guessing at the variables.
It is a paradox in the sense that most of the educated guesses result in a universe which is very different from the one we observe. The paradox exists between:
1. the admittedly weak evidence for each of the guesses
2. and the evidence that at least one of the guesses must be wrong.