8 ms·

The Solar System and Beyond Is Awash in Water

100 points by dodders 12y ago

crimsonalucard 12y ago
Water being common doesn't mean life is common. We have the intuition to be aware that the exact atomic configuration of a boeing 747 getting replicated by pure chance on a planet 500 light years away is impossibly low. So impossibly low that I'm willing to bet my life that it won't ever happen, not just on a planet 500 light years away, but on every planet in the universe. What are the chances of life being on a planet 500 light years away? Unfortunately the definition of life is vague and the chemical processes required by life aren't even completely understood. Without knowing the processes/materials necessary to ignite the self replicating processes required for life we don't possess the information necessary to know whether life is probable or improbable. Even in a universe with plentiful water and plentiful habitable planets, without context on what started it all we can't make any meaningful prediction. Is life like the boeing 747 or is it not? I always find it ludicrous when someone says the universe is just so vast that life has to exist somewhere else. We just don't have enough understanding/context to know.
- throwaway344 12y ago
  Of course, there is a planet that astronomers and others are very familiar where 747s appear all the time. They just happen through complex chemical reactions. Apparently they do that near some hive of theirs called "Seattle"
  - crimsonalucard 12y ago
    every planet, OTHER then this one.
    - meric 12y ago
      The probability of humans colonising another planet and setting up a museum with a 747 is a little bit more than impossibly low.
      - crimsonalucard 12y ago
        ha! I meant the spontaneous formation of a 747. Like a tornado throwing all the materials together and a 747 being formed just off of pure chance. I'd still bet against that museum though.
- lucianmarin 12y ago
  It’s called Abiogenesis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis I think life is created right now on Earth from scratch (chemical elements), but we need to find proof.
- IndianAstronaut 12y ago
  To answer the question about if life is rare we need to visit Europa and Enceladus in our solar system. If those places have life, then life might be quite common in our universe. If they do not have life, then we are likely very alone in the universe.
  - crimsonalucard 12y ago
    Maybe the probability that that life will occur is one planet out of every thousand planets. Then the probability of Europa having life is small. However one out of a thousand in a universe with billions of planets is a meaningful number. If this is the case, then examining our own solar system for life, which is comprised of far fewer then 1000 planets, will not be a worthwhile endeavor. I think the key is understanding the process itself. What does it take to create the minimal self replicating machines necessary to evolve into the complex forms we see today? Once we are aware of the processes involved in the formation of life then we have the context to hypothesize about the probability that these reactions will spontaneously occur. Things like the Drake equation are meaningless and made up. You can easily make up an identical bullshit equation about the chances of a 747 spontaneously being thrown together on another planet. We can easily see that it's impossible because we know how the 747 is made, we have context. For life? We have no context, no knowledge of where it came from, and therefore the drake equation and any other statement about life on other planets is meaningless.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      We have plenty of context for how life forms - organic chemistry! Lets not pretend life is some magical thing - its an organization of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. And those things just adore linking up in enormous variety given the right temperature and water. Early Earth was an unimaginably huge petri dish where every grain of sand on every beach was an organic experiment, with the sun, tides and seasons trying every combination of heat/cold/wet/dry/acid/base... in endless cycles. Those conditions are far from unique in the universe. You could argue its inevitable that life/chemistry will unfold in the same patterns on millions of worlds.
codeshaman 12y ago
When I was young, the big mystery of pop astronomy was: are there any other planets like Earth? And does water exist anywhere outside Earth. At some point during my lifetime, exoplanets have been discovered and at some other point, the idea that planets, including earth-sized planets are almost as widespread (or rarefied) as stars themselves. At least 10 billion earth-sized planets in our galaxy alone. So it seems like the Universe is full of Planets and a lot of those planets contain water. The next logical step is that extra-terrestrial Life is just as common as water, planets and stars. If that is the case, that means that life is a natural consequence of star formation/runtime, which is extremely interesting. Which, if we now really think about it, is not entirely out of the question, in fact, it's quite probable.
- duaneb 12y ago
  > The next logical step is that extra-terrestrial Life is just as common as water, planets and stars. If this is logic, it's purely inductive. We have no evidence for how likely it is that life form under water-like conditions.
  - Teapot 12y ago
    We have proof. So far we already have detected a planet with Earth-like conditions (called Earth). Life formed on it. Possibly several times independantly. The statistics for life on very earth-like planets are staggering.
    - duaneb 12y ago
      > The statistics for life on very earth-like planets are staggering. 1/1. Sample size seems pretty shitty. Maybe if we find any other form of life in the galaxy OFF this planet, we might be able to bound the probability of it forming at all.
    - vbcr 12y ago
      But this line of thinking eventually leads to Fermi Paradox. The apparent size and age of the universe suggest that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
clavalle 12y ago
I wonder if they can tell anything about a possible Mars water and atmosphere burn off by studying the asteroid belt. It may be detectably frosted since the solar wind would push it in that direction.
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
And at the edge of the known universe, an expanding shockwave from a supernovae fuses hydrogen into oxygen, forming the largest known water bubble totaling ten trillion times all the water on earth.
- venomsnake 12y ago
  A little napkin math gives that as 6000 solar masses ... so quite a big thing.
- cygnus_a 12y ago
  For future reference, fusion happens in stars (and at the center of supernovas). H combining with O2 is a chemical reaction rather than a nuclear reaction. On the other hand, the question regarding how supernovas combine/mix heavy atoms to form chemicals would be a very interesting PhD thesis. :D
- chatmasta 12y ago
  This sounds fascinating. Do you have a link to good reading on this?
  - jonreem 12y ago
    Possibly this: http://www.space.com/12400-universe-biggest-oldest-cloud-water.html http://www.space.com/12400-universe-biggest-oldest-cloud-wat...
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Wow! Even bigger! But no explanation of how it formed in that link...
  - jonreem 12y ago
    Possibly this: http://www.space.com/12400-universe-biggest-oldest-cloud-water.html http://www.space.com/12400-universe-biggest-oldest-cloud-wat...
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
pdx 12y ago
Recently verifying its thousandth exoplanet, Kepler data confirm that the most common planet sizes are worlds just slightly larger than Earth. I found this interesting in terms of the rocket equation[1] and the fermi paradox[2] If most planets are larger than we are, their populations will struggle even harder than we do, getting off their rock. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/exped... [2] no link needed
- Udo 12y ago
  On the other hand, Earth is a very dense planet (in part due to the accidental formation of the Moon), so bigger planets might still have a lower gravity on average. Also, if they spin faster, getting into orbit will be easier. Maybe Earth is indeed at a comparatively bad place in the gravity spectrum of habitable planets. Getting things up there is difficult enough that we can't have big payloads, but it's still easy enough to justify not building a self-sufficient infrastructure out there.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  Only if they insist on using chemical rockets, like we do.
  - maaku 12y ago
    And the other options are...? I can think of nuclear thermal, which has its risks, and Orion-like bomb propulsion which no sane civilization would use. What else? Most non-chemical propulsive mechanisms considered for space travel do not have the ISP necessary to launch from the bottom of a deep gravity well. We will probably continue to use chemical rockets to leave this Earth, at least until the first space elevator is built, and that itself will require quite a bit of up mass.
    - a3n 12y ago
      I can't jump from the bottom to the top of the hill. I also can't throw a ball from the bottom to the top of the hill. But I can ride a bike from the bottom to the top, and if I can't ride straight up then I can weave back and forth, taking a shallower and longer path. When I get near the top I can throw the ball to the top of the hill, or maybe even ride my bike all the way to the top. So why can't large planet dwellers ride one optimized vehicle as close to orbit as they can get, and then launch another one or more stage vehicle (of whatever propulsion system) from there?
kellyabraham 12y ago
Seems like NASA announces every few months that we have found water for the first time on Mars, or in the universe. Isn't there a meme about this?
cygnus_a 12y ago
It doesn't surprise me how much water there is in the solar system, considering how simple of a chemical water is. Life itself is a chemical reaction that takes much longer to complete (though I'm starting to think that it's more abundant than I think :P).

100 points by dodders 12y ago

Water being common doesn't mean life is common. We have the intuition to be aware that the exact atomic configuration of a boeing 747 getting replicated by pure chance on a planet 500 light years away is impossibly low. So impossibly low that I'm willing to bet my life that it won't ever happen, not just on a planet 500 light years away, but on every planet in the universe. What are the chances of life being on a planet 500 light years away? Unfortunately the definition of life is vague and the chemical processes required by life aren't even completely understood. Without knowing the processes/materials necessary to ignite the self replicating processes required for life we don't possess the information necessary to know whether life is probable or improbable. Even in a universe with plentiful water and plentiful habitable planets, without context on what started it all we can't make any meaningful prediction. Is life like the boeing 747 or is it not? I always find it ludicrous when someone says the universe is just so vast that life has to exist somewhere else. We just don't have enough understanding/context to know.

throwaway344 12y ago
Of course, there is a planet that astronomers and others are very familiar where 747s appear all the time. They just happen through complex chemical reactions. Apparently they do that near some hive of theirs called "Seattle"
- crimsonalucard 12y ago
  every planet, OTHER then this one.
  - meric 12y ago
    The probability of humans colonising another planet and setting up a museum with a 747 is a little bit more than impossibly low.
    - crimsonalucard 12y ago
      ha! I meant the spontaneous formation of a 747. Like a tornado throwing all the materials together and a 747 being formed just off of pure chance. I'd still bet against that museum though.
lucianmarin 12y ago
It’s called Abiogenesis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis I think life is created right now on Earth from scratch (chemical elements), but we need to find proof.
IndianAstronaut 12y ago
To answer the question about if life is rare we need to visit Europa and Enceladus in our solar system. If those places have life, then life might be quite common in our universe. If they do not have life, then we are likely very alone in the universe.
- crimsonalucard 12y ago
  Maybe the probability that that life will occur is one planet out of every thousand planets. Then the probability of Europa having life is small. However one out of a thousand in a universe with billions of planets is a meaningful number. If this is the case, then examining our own solar system for life, which is comprised of far fewer then 1000 planets, will not be a worthwhile endeavor. I think the key is understanding the process itself. What does it take to create the minimal self replicating machines necessary to evolve into the complex forms we see today? Once we are aware of the processes involved in the formation of life then we have the context to hypothesize about the probability that these reactions will spontaneously occur. Things like the Drake equation are meaningless and made up. You can easily make up an identical bullshit equation about the chances of a 747 spontaneously being thrown together on another planet. We can easily see that it's impossible because we know how the 747 is made, we have context. For life? We have no context, no knowledge of where it came from, and therefore the drake equation and any other statement about life on other planets is meaningless.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    We have plenty of context for how life forms - organic chemistry! Lets not pretend life is some magical thing - its an organization of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. And those things just adore linking up in enormous variety given the right temperature and water. Early Earth was an unimaginably huge petri dish where every grain of sand on every beach was an organic experiment, with the sun, tides and seasons trying every combination of heat/cold/wet/dry/acid/base... in endless cycles. Those conditions are far from unique in the universe. You could argue its inevitable that life/chemistry will unfold in the same patterns on millions of worlds.

codeshaman 12y ago

When I was young, the big mystery of pop astronomy was: are there any other planets like Earth? And does water exist anywhere outside Earth. At some point during my lifetime, exoplanets have been discovered and at some other point, the idea that planets, including earth-sized planets are almost as widespread (or rarefied) as stars themselves. At least 10 billion earth-sized planets in our galaxy alone. So it seems like the Universe is full of Planets and a lot of those planets contain water. The next logical step is that extra-terrestrial Life is just as common as water, planets and stars. If that is the case, that means that life is a natural consequence of star formation/runtime, which is extremely interesting. Which, if we now really think about it, is not entirely out of the question, in fact, it's quite probable.

duaneb 12y ago
> The next logical step is that extra-terrestrial Life is just as common as water, planets and stars. If this is logic, it's purely inductive. We have no evidence for how likely it is that life form under water-like conditions.
- Teapot 12y ago
  We have proof. So far we already have detected a planet with Earth-like conditions (called Earth). Life formed on it. Possibly several times independantly. The statistics for life on very earth-like planets are staggering.
  - duaneb 12y ago
    > The statistics for life on very earth-like planets are staggering. 1/1. Sample size seems pretty shitty. Maybe if we find any other form of life in the galaxy OFF this planet, we might be able to bound the probability of it forming at all.
  - vbcr 12y ago
    But this line of thinking eventually leads to Fermi Paradox. The apparent size and age of the universe suggest that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

clavalle 12y ago

I wonder if they can tell anything about a possible Mars water and atmosphere burn off by studying the asteroid belt. It may be detectably frosted since the solar wind would push it in that direction.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

And at the edge of the known universe, an expanding shockwave from a supernovae fuses hydrogen into oxygen, forming the largest known water bubble totaling ten trillion times all the water on earth.

venomsnake 12y ago
A little napkin math gives that as 6000 solar masses ... so quite a big thing.
cygnus_a 12y ago
For future reference, fusion happens in stars (and at the center of supernovas). H combining with O2 is a chemical reaction rather than a nuclear reaction. On the other hand, the question regarding how supernovas combine/mix heavy atoms to form chemicals would be a very interesting PhD thesis. :D
chatmasta 12y ago
This sounds fascinating. Do you have a link to good reading on this?
- jonreem 12y ago
  Possibly this: http://www.space.com/12400-universe-biggest-oldest-cloud-water.html http://www.space.com/12400-universe-biggest-oldest-cloud-wat...
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Wow! Even bigger! But no explanation of how it formed in that link...
- jonreem 12y ago
  Possibly this: http://www.space.com/12400-universe-biggest-oldest-cloud-water.html http://www.space.com/12400-universe-biggest-oldest-cloud-wat...
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago

pdx 12y ago

Recently verifying its thousandth exoplanet, Kepler data confirm that the most common planet sizes are worlds just slightly larger than Earth. I found this interesting in terms of the rocket equation[1] and the fermi paradox[2] If most planets are larger than we are, their populations will struggle even harder than we do, getting off their rock. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/exped... [2] no link needed

Udo 12y ago
On the other hand, Earth is a very dense planet (in part due to the accidental formation of the Moon), so bigger planets might still have a lower gravity on average. Also, if they spin faster, getting into orbit will be easier. Maybe Earth is indeed at a comparatively bad place in the gravity spectrum of habitable planets. Getting things up there is difficult enough that we can't have big payloads, but it's still easy enough to justify not building a self-sufficient infrastructure out there.
marcosdumay 12y ago
Only if they insist on using chemical rockets, like we do.
- maaku 12y ago
  And the other options are...? I can think of nuclear thermal, which has its risks, and Orion-like bomb propulsion which no sane civilization would use. What else? Most non-chemical propulsive mechanisms considered for space travel do not have the ISP necessary to launch from the bottom of a deep gravity well. We will probably continue to use chemical rockets to leave this Earth, at least until the first space elevator is built, and that itself will require quite a bit of up mass.
  - a3n 12y ago
    I can't jump from the bottom to the top of the hill. I also can't throw a ball from the bottom to the top of the hill. But I can ride a bike from the bottom to the top, and if I can't ride straight up then I can weave back and forth, taking a shallower and longer path. When I get near the top I can throw the ball to the top of the hill, or maybe even ride my bike all the way to the top. So why can't large planet dwellers ride one optimized vehicle as close to orbit as they can get, and then launch another one or more stage vehicle (of whatever propulsion system) from there?

kellyabraham 12y ago

Seems like NASA announces every few months that we have found water for the first time on Mars, or in the universe. Isn't there a meme about this?

cygnus_a 12y ago

It doesn't surprise me how much water there is in the solar system, considering how simple of a chemical water is. Life itself is a chemical reaction that takes much longer to complete (though I'm starting to think that it's more abundant than I think :P).