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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 duri
by 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 agoWe 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 agoBut 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
- thearn4 12y ago> And does water exist anywhere outside Earth Was this a big pop science mystery back in the day? The simplicity of the composition of water ("burned hydrogen gas") would lead me to think that we should expect to find it in some phase of matter fairly regularly. Caveat though: I'm not a chemist.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoI think the big question was whether there is liquid water somewhere else in the universe.