Astronomers Look for Potential Life Zones 35
js7a writes "An Australian team of astronomers has an article in the latest edition Science describing a 'Galactic Habitable Zone,' which contains about 10% of all the Milky Way's stars including the Sun. Stars within this band are likely to have rocky planets large enough to hold atmospheres, are sufficiently distant from supernovae, and have existed for at least four billion years. They haven't actually found any life or earth-like planets yet, but presumably this zone is a reasonable place to narrow such searches."
No life? (Score:3, Funny)
That's good, because I'd be pissed if they had and I hadn't heard about it.
More like.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:More like.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More like.... (Score:3, Interesting)
How about... (Score:2)
Re:More like.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The better question is, how do you define life?
Re:More like.... (Score:1)
Re:More like.... (Score:3, Funny)
SETI. (Score:2, Interesting)
Missing the forest for the trees (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine someone said 30 years ago that life is likely to be found on "terrestial planets" and we should concentrate on such and convinced key decisions makers about it: There would be no Pioneers 10 and 11, no Voyagers 1 and 2, no Galileo and no Cassini, and no one would be bold enough to even propose JIMO; and we would have no idea on the existance of "a little solar system in the solar system" in the form of the Jovian moons, and we would not have come to speculate that currently, the most likely site in our neighbourhood to find some form of life outside Earth is on the moon Europa.
Just concentrating on finding "live as we know it" might mean we may miss something right in front of our noses. Somehow it makes me think of those floating jellyfish like creature living on a habitable zone (for them, at least) at some depth on a gas giant that Dan Simmons wrote about in the Endymion books... and that real extraterrestial life, if it exists, may take forms more exotic than even what our imaginations can create. Keep an open mind, and two open eyes.
Missing the facts for the theories (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, 30 years ago people did say that life was likely to be found on "terrestial planets." That's why the Viking missions to Mars had experiments to try to detect life--and why the Voyager and Pioneer missions didn't.
Now, if we have a near-infinite amount of resources, then narrowing the choices down is silly. But, as you might suspect, if we have a very limited amount of resources--and you'd better believe time on the large telescopes is pretty scarce--then trying to use that small amount of resources on the best canidates is sensible.
Re:Missing the facts for the theories (Score:3, Insightful)
Completely different attitudes. (Score:4, Insightful)
and inconclusive results at best
That's the reason I want us to go back. If you get weird results, you shouldn't shrug and go on to the next planet; you should find out exactly why the weird results happened. (That is, without interrupting any work for current missions, missing any favorable planetary alignments, totally blowing the budget, or rushing off without careful planning of how to avoid the ambiguous results with the next mission.)
Re:Completely different attitudes. (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately that is not what the "political masters" realised. Congress shifting fundings around missions as the political wind shifts. Suddenly the good idea of the Internat
Re:Missing the facts for the theories (Score:3, Insightful)
If we just picked some place at random on the theory that we shouldn't focus on the place where we might expect life, we'd probably end up sending probes to someplace like Charon, which is an extremely unlikely place to find life.
W
Re:Missing the facts for the theories (Score:4, Insightful)
What I was saying is that we should not be too preoccupied by it alone. Keeping in topic, if we start producing, at exponential rate - as Prof Hawkings observed - scientific journals; some of them like these kind of "habitable zones" thingy, sooner or later people, and more importantly policy makers do get into the preoccupied mode - a tunnel vision - and losing the greater picture at the periphery.
There has been two scores of missions to Mars. Jupiter, despite the complexity - was only visited by 3 crafts (2 Voyagers and Galileo), Saturn 2, Neptune and Uranus - once, and Pluto and beyond - sadly none. We are talking about an order of magnitude difference here.
The thing about Europa is that it is the place many people think to find life outside Earth, at this moment and we know that only because we had the sense to look and poke beyond the most likely targets - Mars, Mars and Mars. Cassini may find if Titan or any other Saturnian moon may be as interesting... but we will not know about the Neptunian and Uraninan moons.
I would say we should boldy explore forward... what are we doing, as humanity is that betting on only Cassini to Saturn, forgetting the rest of the Solar System beyond Mars and are very happy that somehow, against all odds, we still have Pioneers 10, Voyager 1 & 2 leaving the solar system - almost like basking in past glories - those were launched a generation ago, before the internet was unleashed on the general public. When will a man made ship pass Pluto's orbit again? When will we try to look at the Kuipers belt, if there is an Oort cloud, or try to find the termination shock? If we don't have the vision to think of going there - because it is not the most likely place to find life, as we know it-, what is the chances of securing the funding, the resources, the inspired commitment of scientists and engineers to propose, design and fight for the means to get there?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against the search for extreterrestial life form - just had my SETI 4th anniversary and currently beta testing BOINC. But the search for life is only a small part of exploration of the universe as a whole, and rightly so. For if it is out there, and when we have explored far enough, long enough, no matter what form they take - we will find it.
Re:Missing the forest for the trees (Score:1, Interesting)
The problem is that we don't have good methodologies for identifying life that ISN'T like us. We're starting with what it would be easiest for us to identify. After all, how could we identify life in another solar system living in the atmosphere of a Jovian?
By the way, the "little solar system in the solar system" description for Jupiter isn't too different from how Galileo described it 400 years [liberliber.it] ago.
Re:Missing the forest for the trees (Score:2)
The existence of the Jovian moons was known even before the invention of decent optical telescopes. Up until the last decade or so, you could still find bushmen who could easily pinpoint the four Galileian satellites with the naked eye. (I read that westernization of Africa is causing many traditional hunting skills to disappear through disuse. Many traits that are prized for hunting
Cool (Score:3, Funny)
There is a University of Not Safe for Work? And furthermore, there are doctors working there? Sweet mother of pr0nage!
Re:Cool (Score:1)
A Fire upon the Deep- Nice guess! (Score:4, Informative)
It is nice to see that sometimes SF authors, maybe by accident, invent some pretty accurate ideas...
Case in point here is the book A Fire upon the Deep[1] by Vernor Vinge. The book describes our Milkyway galaxy at least 30,000 years in the future. The galaxy is divided into a number of concentric zones (the zones of thought): the Unthinking Depths, in which no intelligent life is possible, the Slow Zone, in which only moderately intelligent life such as ourselves is possible, and after that the Beyond and Transcent.
The first two zones seem to pretty accurately be fitted by the results in the article. I do not know where Vinge originally got his ideas, but it's a nice match anyway.
In Vinge's outer two zones, the Beyond and the Transcent, additional nice tricks such as faster-than-light travel are possible. Personally, I can highly recomment this book: it is well written hard technological SF.
[1] A Fire upon the Deep [amazon.com].
Re:A Fire upon the Deep- Nice guess! (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm glad you mentioned it, as that's what I thought when I saw the graphic. A few comments ...
1. Tas the Transcend, not the Transcent.
2. The Slow Zone excludes only *artificial* intelligence and faster than light travel/networks/etc. The actual sophonts in the Slow Zone are equal in intelligence to those of the Beyond ([spoiler] notice for instance that the maximum number of Tines who can form a pack is the same, 8, in the Slow Zone and the Beyond). The Slow Zone's physical laws are pretty much our rea
Re:A Fire upon the Deep- Nice guess! (Score:1)
Narrow Search (Score:1)
Space sim (Score:1)
The meaning of Life (Score:3, Interesting)
What we want to find elsewhere in the Universe is Intelligence. Intelligence we can communicate with. Otherwise, who cares? Intelligence without communication is an ent falling in a forest with no one to hear. SETI's search for communications signals is sensible, because we're interested in a signaling partner. When we find one, it will think differently than us, unless there's some common intelligence ancestor, or a surprisingly constrained selection criterion for intelligence development. Every possible combination of feedback paths through the multilayered models of intelligence offers a different way of intelligence. Once we find each other, the important question will become how to live together.
Conceit (Score:1)
Doo, Doo, Doo, Looking out our back door... (Score:3, Interesting)