Research Suggests How Alien Life Could Spread Across the Galaxy 107
astroengine writes: As astronomical techniques become more advanced, a team of astrophysicists think they will be able to not only detect the signatures of alien life in exoplanetary atmospheres, but also track its relentless spread throughout the galaxy. The research, headed by Henry Lin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), assumes that this feat may be possible in a generation or so and that the hypothesis of panspermia may act as the delivery system for alien biology to hop from one star system to another.
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From our present position in the galaxy, yes, the chances of that are a mathematical impossibility. However, a few billion years ago our star system was part of a cluster of stars which were in very close proximity to one another, possibly having a protoplanetary disk that overlapped with these other systems.
I personally think panspermia is not only possible, but even likely, as it would explain why we haven't been able to find the right conditions for abiogenesis on this planet.
Re: Panspermia! (Score:2)
I never thought I would ever have to say this but...
WHOOSH!!!
these guys are so amazing: (Score:3)
resistant to heat, cold, vacuum, desiccation, radiation, pressure, toxins, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
you realize they could leave earth (ejecta from a sever impact) and colonize other planets
then you think... wait a second, maybe we're here because these guys colonized earth
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no, i know
they are very ancient though, the cambrian
makes you wonder if perhaps they are precambrian and they had some guests in their gut...
ok, i'll stop now ;-)
Mankind and aliens will prefer orbital colonies (Score:5, Interesting)
In short, we're just not gonna live like pale, stick-figure trolls in underground caverns on the moon or mars. Mining will be done by pulling a big bag over an asteroid and breaking it up from the outside in. Attached refining equipment will separate useful elements and chemicals. This will be mostly-automated. We'll use the tailings as concrete to build our colonies. A gigantic mirror will heat the crushed rock and sinter it into shape, like an enormous 3d printer. There is enough material to build millions of them in OUR OWN solar system, and they'll be essentially self-sustaining once they've been established. Conditions inside will be perfect for human life. It's a far better prospect than making do with low-gravity moons and poisonous planetary atmospheres. Groups of colonies might form "countries" and others will operate independently. The colonies will be built robotically, so the cost will eventually drop to the point where one might be owned by a single family or other social group.
While most colonies will participate in a humanity-wide economic and social network, a life of physical isolation and self-sufficiency will be the norm for most. We'll be in communication, but not often physically visiting other colonies. Some of these may try hurtling themselves onward to the next closest star. They'll stay in touch the whole time, they'll just be permanently out of reach from then on.
The stars DO NOT need to be sun-like, nor do they need Earth-like worlds! They just need to have exploitable resources in easy reach. Red and brown dwarfs are more plentiful than any other type, and they'll last orders of magnitude longer, too. This is probably where the majority of intelligent life will live at some point. Not to miss out on any exploitable resource, those who live around dwarf stars will push onward to practically every type of star within reach. A million years or so, and we'll have colonies throughout the galaxy, and hundreds of alien neighbors to enrich our culture and science.
Re:Mankind and aliens will prefer orbital colonies (Score:4)
A sufficiently advanced and adventurous colony might even redirect their host star through a series of gravitational slingshots sufficient to set in on a course to another galaxy. Sure, hurling stars around is a bit of a herculean task by our current standards, but a dwarf star isn't *that* big, and if you've got the long-term vision to consider intergalactic travel, the acceleration phase shouldn't deter you.
By the same argument though, I would advocate for terraforming other worlds in our own system, once we've determined that they don't host life of their own of course. No sense destroying such a potentially vast scientific resource for a project that will take thousands of years.
The beauty of terraforming though is that, done carefully, it may not need much human intervention at all. Just release the right mix of engineered microbes with an optimized mutation rate, and let the planet develop into a primordial "slime world" on it's own. Then, once it has a robust and thriving microbial biosphere, introduce the thin veneer of complex life that we are more familiar with. Maybe it takes thousands of years, so what? As long as it's a self-guided project we just need to get it started, and maybe give it an occasional nudge if it starts destabilizing.
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tl;dr version of the above 3 posts.
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Sure, planets are optional - stars however are kind of appealing - massive nuclear reactors bound together by the mass of their own fuel - sufficient fuel to continue generating energy unflaggingly for hundreds of billions of years, with nothing to break down and no maintenance required.
Of course, if you're orbiting one of those long-burning dwarf stars you need to worry about the fact that they're prone to not-infrequent superflares. Might be nice to have a big chunk of mass for radiation shielding, prefe
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Oh, and to address your "millions of times the surface area" remark - are you so sure you would want it? After all the surface is vulnerable to radiation, impact, radiant heat losses, etc. You could just as easily turn the whole planet into a honeycomb of underground colonies with ample resources available. A molten cores would be an issue, though a passive heating system might be worth the resource loss, but smaller planetoids such as the moon wouldn't offer than problem.
The primary benefits of an orbita
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You seem to completely miss the point of building orbital colonies. The object is to provide quality living space for modern humans living off-world. They're not built for portability or convenient access to Earth. Virtually every orbital colony will be non-mobile. They'll be custom built for the orbit they're constructed in
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Well, you prefaced your comment with "A civilization sufficiently advanced enough to move their whole star system would probably not be...", so I responded to that. I should also make clear that I'm a huge fan of the concept of orbital colonies, both as a stepping-stone for human expansion to the stars, and the romantic appeal of the fierce independence and cooperation such a society will likely breed. But I think it's important not to lose site of the limitations, and the fact that planets offer their ow
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I'm at a loss to understand why you're so fixated with living on planets. That you would consider almost any planet or moon over a colony. Colonies will be easier to build with existin
About Planets (Score:2)
For the sake of clarity I'm going to split this post into two - one pro-planet, and one for habitat discussions:
I'm not fixated on living on planets - I'm saying they have a lot of their own advantages which make them desirable locations TOO. Basically:
Planet advantages:
- serious radiation and impact protection
- real gravity
- abundant resources (almost all mass close enough to our star to not be effectively interstellar)
- a large enough ecosystem to absorb large disruptions without lasting damage (at le
About orbital habitats (Score:2)
I have to agree with you about giant windows being a bad idea. Observation domes, etc. on the outer surface would certainly have their place, who wouldn't want to look down through the transparent floor and see the stars spinning past beneath them? But such chambers should be easy to isolate from the main habitat in case of the inevitable impacts and radiation surges. Giant windows letting you see stars overhead may make for good science fiction, but I doubt many people would want a scant sheet of "glass
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By the time you've reached that point, the number of people living in orbital colonies wouls mean that they are the norm, and it is people who live at the bottom of a (gravitational) hole who would be considered dumb, crippled dwarfs.
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But, get back to me in a thousand years when we've adopted, and abandoned, hundreds of totally new ways to communicate with each other and observe the he
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Glad you got all that worked out, George.
Now, if you don't mind, could you quit surfing /. awhile, at least long enough to put the cylinder heads back on that Honda Civic you've had for two days?
Sorry to disturb you but the owner is getting testy and wants his car back.
weasel words (Score:3)
I skipped the Discovery link to avoid hype and went directly to the Harvard link.
Disappointing. One expects a certain sobriety from scientists and yet something is terribly wrong here. The article is peppered with weasel words: an unusually vague 'theory'; and words like: could, might, if, potentially, would, and the ever dreadful 'assumes'. Let's hope that the actual paper will have a more solid foundation.
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It used to mean jugglers, comedians, dancers, singers and usually a novelty act.
P.S. ITYM "revue".
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I'm not sure why Harvard is supposed to be doing something that building inspectors normally do.
Though maybe you meant "peer", not "pier"...never mind.
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And what exactly did they "discover"? What's the "research"?
Meteorites from Mars have been known for a long time. The theory of panspermia was invented many decades ago. What did these researches add to the discussion that we didn't know already?
Ashley Madison? (Score:4, Funny)
Were the alien's exoplanetary atmospheric escapades discovered in the Ashley Madison database?
Oh, this article isn't the hourly Ashley Madison tripe? Pardon me... I apologize. Carry on!
Basically, it's like this -- (Score:1)
We need to seed the universe with our sort of DNA so that by the time we get around to getting there the local cuisine is tasty and delicious even if somewhat exotic, and not yucky and disgusting or even toxic. You reap what you sew.
And if you cook it right it's mighty tasty.
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No, you sew what you rip.
Where's the Appeal? (Score:3)
Given that life had to originate somewhere, and that we know next to nothing about the distribution of life in the universe, panspermia seems to me like a solution looking for a question to be the answer of. I am bemused by the fact that some people seem to find a universe having panspermia more satisfying than one without it, just as I am bemused by people who find a universe with reincarnation more appealing than one without (if you can't remember anything about your former selves, what's the difference? - they are as good as dead.)
I don't deny panspermia could happen; my attitude is essentially 'call me when you have something that goes beyond speculation.'
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I think it's basically that, given some fairly plausible assumptions, panspermia would make it almost inevitable that the galaxy is full of at least simple life, and probably at least some complex life as well. And a galaxy full of ife is far more exciting proposition than a field of hundreds of millions of dead rocks.
Of course at present we have no particular reason to believe such a setting is real, but it makes for a much more compelling story - and humanity is built upon it's ability to tell stories of
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Spontaneous: "Performed or occurring as a result of a sudden impulse or inclination and without premeditation or external stimulus".
So all these theories suggest that non-life->life happens without any external stimulus? They are indeed crap.
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panspermia (Score:2)
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The more important point is using spectography to analyze planetary atmospherez for signs of life. This should be possible.
And if it is, and life is detected, we should be able to tell enough about it to make a guess as to whether it evolved independently, or was related to each other (or us) the way we can relate all life here via DNA.
A hypothesis cannot act. (Score:1)
A widely publicized hypothesis might cause mass hysteria while being neither proven nor disproven.
Could "A hypothesis of panspermia" "act as the delivery system for alien biology to hop from one star system to another" ?
NO. Any "delivery system" requires instantiation of a mechanism, which might follow from a provable hypothesis.
Panspermia - ducking the question. (Score:2)
While OOL (Origin Of Life) is by no means a settled question on Earth, we do at least have good evidence of what happened here. Otherwise, being able to determine that life originated
Re:It can't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Habital planets are so rare and far apart that alien life wouldn't be able to spread across the galaxy. Hell, even earth is so far away from the nearest possibly habitable planet that if we could travel 90% of the speed of light, it would take something like 10,000 years to get there. Much less a population and equipment and supplies enough to start a society.
Actually, we don't know if habitable planets are rare. We are finding a bunch and have barely look at what the universe holds. Now the traveling thing could be a problem, but maybe there are civilization on other planets that don't waste their time and resources killing each other and actually focus on science and space.
Re:It can't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now the traveling thing could be a problem, but maybe there are civilization on other planets that don't waste their time and resources killing each other and actually focus on science and space.
This. There's 7 billion of us. I'd wager less than 100 million of us are engaged in productive activities besides life-sustention, probably less than 10 million using their immense brain computation ability to do it. But this is due to war and inequality, not that the rest of the world are idiots. Not that they were born idiots. Some may have been brainwashed so thoroughly that they might as well be idiots, but that's still not necessarily a permenant condition. If everyone was given equal opportunity, and people with brilliant ideas didn't have to struggle just to survive, the average citizen struggle just not to die from all the corporate poisoning etc, then something closer to 4-5 billion of us could be doing productive stuff. Amazingly productive stuff. Stuff that probably less than 10000 people alive today could even imagine under current society.
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Because the right is known for its stiff upper lip...
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"everyone was given equal opportunity" How would you go about doing this for 7 billion people? I guess one solution could be to wage world wide war until there is only a few thousand people left alive and they can restart the perfect society where everyone has equal opportunities. Since the beginning of human history civilizations and societies have been created by war and then eventually destroyed by war.
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Correction, 0.001% (Score:1)
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"We need to stop warring " Since the dawn of time there has always been at least one war raging somewhere on the planet. Every border on the planet has been drawn in blood. Power and influence has been built on top of mounds of corpses. There are currently numerous wars raging all over the world providing the blood needed to redraw existing borders while also increasing the body count. Pleas for love and understanding are just empty words no matter how loud you shout them. Instead of solving the problems in
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I take it you haven't met average people, have you? I'll bet you're surrounded by upper-class Ivy League (or wished they had gone to an Ivy) intelligent people like yourself all day long, and have used that great intellect to project those characteristics onto the rest of humanity. Why don't you actually get out there and talk to some of them? You'd be horrified, and withdraw into a gated community like so many of your fellow travelers have already done.
Just think of how stupid the average person is.
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How do you get the hundred million engaged in productive activities besides sustaining life? Most people in the US do not work in agriculture or the clothing or construction industries, and that's pretty much what you need to sustain life. Add in Europe, and you're clearly talking hundreds of millions. Do you count engineers designing new machines and prototyping them as unproductive or life-sustaining? I'm in the support structure for that activity.
Realistically, lots of the seven billion of us do n
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Are we top predators? We are certainly the dominant species but that is not the same thing.
It seems like our success has been brought about by our ability to engineer the environment to our liking. After we were able to increase our population due to agriculture we started impacting on predator species partly by hunting them directly but more by crowding them out of their ideal territory.
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Actually, we don't know if habitable planets are rare.
It depends on what you mean by "rare". Habitable planets that are hundreds, thousands, or millions of light years apart are rare on the scale of living organisms.
Re:It can't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, even earth is so far away from the nearest possibly habitable planet that if we could travel 90% of the speed of light, it would take something like 10,000 years to get there.
Spores are patient.
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Indeed, especially if kept near absolute zero within a chunk of rock and ice potentially miles across . And you don't even necessarily need spores - a single strand of RNA capable of replicating itself from naturally occurring organic molecules might be all you need to jump-start a biosphere on a new planet.
Re:It can't. (Score:4, Interesting)
The team issue is radiation. We're talking about journies of hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. I can imagine nucleotides specifically protected by some heavy duty shielding making it (in other words big ass gene pods built by aliens), but accidental hitchhikers on meteors seems far less probable.
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Ice. Water is very good at stopping radiation. There's lots of ice in comets. One RNA strand, encased in ice in a comet, ejected from a solar system.
Chances are tiny. Number of trials is huge. Time span is extreme. Need more data.
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Hitchhikers *in* asteroids, not on. I agree any on the outer surface would be unlikely to last on an interstellar journey, but an asteroid hundreds of feet across is pretty tiny really,, and offers *far* more radiation shielding than we have on the surface of the Earth - the atmosphere offers only about 10-15 feet of rock equivalent, and the magnetosphere only protects us from charged particles that wouldn't make it far through solid rock anyway.
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That's a pretty impressive feat for a mere strand of RNA. Has anyone ever witnessed such an incident?
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(Some) RNA self-replicates from amino acids all the time, and is one of our current best guesses for the earliest forms of proto-life - it's can forma an amazingly versatile range of nanomachines. The question is whether it's more likely that a self-replicating strand forms spontaneously on a hospitable world or gets seeded from elsewhere. After that it's just a matter of evolution.
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But based on what we know about the basic building blocks of life as we know it there's nothing to suggest they would have to originate from a planet that is habitable, nor that they would even all have to come from the same place to get combined somewhere that is habitable in the same way they were combined here on Earth.
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Re:It can't. (Score:4, Insightful)
Panspermia doesn't involve a bunch of Oregon Trail style settlers heading out and populating an empty world. You fire microbes, or possibly even just the precursors of life out and they start multiplying and evolving if they land somewhere they like.
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And even the "firing" doesn't necessarily need sapient life - the impact that flung the material that formed the moon free from the Earth probably flung some pretty large chunks of material completely free from Earth, and possibly even from the Sun. There may even now be primitive cryogenically preserved microbes in the heart of some of those planetary fragments slowly coasting across the cosmos, just waiting to impact a promising new world. If the fragments are big enough the microbes could survive reent
Re:It can't. (Score:5, Informative)
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It doesn't have to be something as large as that. Much smaller impacts throw up material from rocky planets that can seed the solar system. Escaping the sun would be a bit harder, but it could happen via occasional very large impacts, or comets being seeded by small impacts and then ejected from the solar system.
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So let me get this straight.
An AC from Slashdot poo poos a paper written by a PhD, reviewed by other PhDs and accepted into a recognized journal, in just two sentences.
I guess Dr. Lin should have just sent it to you for review first.
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And you know habitable planets are rare how?
Re:It can't. (Score:5, Interesting)
There's something I've never figured out about this particular theory. All life, even some sort of "patient zero" alien life, had to arise from non-organic substances somewhere, right? If it can happen once, then it should be able to happen any number of times given a set of similar conditions. Given the size of the universe, and even our own galaxy, that's like to be a *lot* of places.
As such, why would anyone think it's more plausible for a chunk of life to hitch a ride on some piece of space debris, and then survive re-entry on a coincidentally habitable planet on which it can flourish... than for life to have sprung into existence here, where obviously conditions were optimal for it (or at least life as we know it)?
I have to wonder if the enthusiasm for this theory is partially based on the admittedly exciting prospect that we could be the descendants of exotic alien lifeforms rather than some homegrown slime mold.
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That or they fantasise about meeting women who are just like the ones here except with pointy ears, bumpy foreheads or some other prosthetics budget friendly difference. And who have the hots for nerds.
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And who have the hots for nerds.
Being aliens doesn't make them any more desperate than earth women.
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There's something I've never figured out about this particular theory. All life, even some sort of "patient zero" alien life, had to arise from non-organic substances somewhere, right? If it can happen once, then it should be able to happen any number of times given a set of similar conditions. Given the size of the universe, and even our own galaxy, that's like to be a *lot* of places.
I think you are right, and probably most researchers of this subject would agree. My personal feeling is that life didn't happen because of some amazingly unlikely combination of lucky accidents, it happened because it was likely enough that it must happen almost anywhere the conditionas are right. There is a book that you might enjoy - "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane; a bit technical, but that's why I like it. According to him, prokaryotic life more or less has to happen, but he isn't so sure that eukary
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This is the problem of big numbers. You're multiplying a really big number (number of solar systems) times a really big number (time) times a number of unknown smallness (chances of life emerging from inorganic materials). We only know it's happened once. We haven't seen it anywhere else in the universe. We've tried our hardest and never seen it in a lab. So we have no idea what order of magnitude that chance is. A few orders of magnitude in one direction and there's life everywhere. A few orders of magnitu
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