Comment Life in a cold cold place... (Score 1) 123
The current state of xenobiology and proof of the existence of life in deep space is still "WAY THIN"!!! I won't argue that the possiblity is tantalizing, and that there is good science to point at a solid possibility, it just doesn't mean anything certain, and until you find yourself shaking ET's hand (or whatever psuedolimb it may have.) You've got to keep your head screwed on straight, your skepticisms on full bright, and keep asking the hard questions. That's the only way you keep yourself any kind of honest.
We've proof that heavy organic molecules form in cold molecular clouds in our part of this galaxy. Quinones and amino acids and even structures that ressemble cellular membranes do in fact just form out of the building blocks of interstallar dust and gas. We have done some truly cool experiments in the lab, and demonstrated, with a level of confidence that the building blocks of life can and do form in the cold clouds found in this neighborhood of the Galaxy. This doesn't mean that life is in any way ubiquitous. Let's look at this by the numbers;
1. Our kind of life is very specific. Virtually all of our proteins have a right handed turn, and and our sugars a left. This is almost certainly do to the fact that the bright young stars we formed near, polarized the cold molecular clouds with their UV radiation. That doesn't happen everywhere, and that in turn, may be essential for the formation of DNA/RNA type life.
2. You need to have a good dust, chemical mix for the right things to happen. A cold molecular cloud without sufficient dust grains to seed gas condensing and forming ice, or the right chemistry to assemble the primitives of life from, preclude the beginning of life as we know it.
These two facts alone cut the odds of life being everywhere way down. In fact the conditions for life may uniquely exist just right here... but that's also a low probability.
3. You then have to gather a bunch of proto-life together... put it on a new forming planet without it ending up crushed and cooked inside the new planet, cooked on entry colliding with the planet, destroyed by hard UV from a young star, fried by hot solar wind, or blasted by young unstable neighbors going nova or supernova. Actually, that's a pretty tall order right there.
4. The proto-life has to hide far enough from the surface of a new planet with a cool crust, so that if/when atomosphere and oceans form, it can get to the necessary water, but not be abused by the hostile environment at the surface of a world in a forming solar system.
5. You have to have a world that has few enough cataclyms that life isn't totally destroyed, but that the change for real evolution to occur, exists.
This doesn't sound like such a big deal, but think about it... if we didn't have Jupiter blocking for us, and the moon sweeping up the untiddy bits, we'd be a cold desolate rock with no trace of life. On the other hand, add another Jupiter, or a couple more moons, and we'd never have gotten past bacteria. I mean as it is we spent two thirds or the history of life as prokaryotes. We almost missed higher lifeforms altogether.
6. So that's the next part... evolution... sex... eukaryotic cells, multi-cellular organisms... and finally the evolution of a sentient being. None of these are givens, all of them a rarity (looking at lengthy stretches of our own biotic history suggesting the machinery of life did just fine without the existence of any or all of these things.) The chance of another intelligent species is astronomical (pun intended). If it wasn't for the shear number of possible places for life to happen it would almost be a dead certainty that we are all there is.
So life is probably a spotty affair happening in little clumps in around third or forth generation star forming regions. It requires pretty exotic conditions to occur, but those conditions exist here and from what we can see elsewhere as well. We only know about life like our own (RNA/DNA organic life). There may well be other forms that we have no idea about, and won't until we see it for ourselves. I would hesitate to call it ubiquitous, but it very well could be in many more places that just here. I'm guessing thinkers are rare, and if they exist, are so far ahead of us that we don't show up in their scale of consciousness... we're just too primative. That's what happens when you have countless tracks of stars and galaxies, and billions of years to fiddle around with. It's a cool conversation though!
Genda Bendte
- In magnificent fit of idiocy, this nation has made the choice of going from a President who can't tell the truth to one who can't pronounce it.
We've proof that heavy organic molecules form in cold molecular clouds in our part of this galaxy. Quinones and amino acids and even structures that ressemble cellular membranes do in fact just form out of the building blocks of interstallar dust and gas. We have done some truly cool experiments in the lab, and demonstrated, with a level of confidence that the building blocks of life can and do form in the cold clouds found in this neighborhood of the Galaxy. This doesn't mean that life is in any way ubiquitous. Let's look at this by the numbers;
1. Our kind of life is very specific. Virtually all of our proteins have a right handed turn, and and our sugars a left. This is almost certainly do to the fact that the bright young stars we formed near, polarized the cold molecular clouds with their UV radiation. That doesn't happen everywhere, and that in turn, may be essential for the formation of DNA/RNA type life.
2. You need to have a good dust, chemical mix for the right things to happen. A cold molecular cloud without sufficient dust grains to seed gas condensing and forming ice, or the right chemistry to assemble the primitives of life from, preclude the beginning of life as we know it.
These two facts alone cut the odds of life being everywhere way down. In fact the conditions for life may uniquely exist just right here... but that's also a low probability.
3. You then have to gather a bunch of proto-life together... put it on a new forming planet without it ending up crushed and cooked inside the new planet, cooked on entry colliding with the planet, destroyed by hard UV from a young star, fried by hot solar wind, or blasted by young unstable neighbors going nova or supernova. Actually, that's a pretty tall order right there.
4. The proto-life has to hide far enough from the surface of a new planet with a cool crust, so that if/when atomosphere and oceans form, it can get to the necessary water, but not be abused by the hostile environment at the surface of a world in a forming solar system.
5. You have to have a world that has few enough cataclyms that life isn't totally destroyed, but that the change for real evolution to occur, exists.
This doesn't sound like such a big deal, but think about it... if we didn't have Jupiter blocking for us, and the moon sweeping up the untiddy bits, we'd be a cold desolate rock with no trace of life. On the other hand, add another Jupiter, or a couple more moons, and we'd never have gotten past bacteria. I mean as it is we spent two thirds or the history of life as prokaryotes. We almost missed higher lifeforms altogether.
6. So that's the next part... evolution... sex... eukaryotic cells, multi-cellular organisms... and finally the evolution of a sentient being. None of these are givens, all of them a rarity (looking at lengthy stretches of our own biotic history suggesting the machinery of life did just fine without the existence of any or all of these things.) The chance of another intelligent species is astronomical (pun intended). If it wasn't for the shear number of possible places for life to happen it would almost be a dead certainty that we are all there is.
So life is probably a spotty affair happening in little clumps in around third or forth generation star forming regions. It requires pretty exotic conditions to occur, but those conditions exist here and from what we can see elsewhere as well. We only know about life like our own (RNA/DNA organic life). There may well be other forms that we have no idea about, and won't until we see it for ourselves. I would hesitate to call it ubiquitous, but it very well could be in many more places that just here. I'm guessing thinkers are rare, and if they exist, are so far ahead of us that we don't show up in their scale of consciousness... we're just too primative. That's what happens when you have countless tracks of stars and galaxies, and billions of years to fiddle around with. It's a cool conversation though!
Genda Bendte
- In magnificent fit of idiocy, this nation has made the choice of going from a President who can't tell the truth to one who can't pronounce it.
