Complex Life May Be Possible In Only 10% of All Galaxies 307
sciencehabit writes The universe may be a lonelier place than previously thought. Of the estimated 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, only one in 10 can support complex life like that on Earth, a pair of astrophysicists argues. Everywhere else, stellar explosions known as gamma ray bursts would regularly wipe out any life forms more elaborate than microbes. The detonations also kept the universe lifeless for billions of years after the big bang, the researchers say.
Let's do the math (Score:5, Insightful)
Um 7?
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I think you'll find that the density of life is indeed important to our chances of ever discovering any.
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If that's what you're worried about, we already know that this particular galaxy supports life. Our chances of finding it in one of the others was astronomically smaller anyway.
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And if you read TFS they are only talking about life similar to ours; there is nothing saying that in other regions life hasn't evolved to be able to handle those kinds of environments.
This is exactly why it is impossible to predict the finding of "life" in non-earth environments, there are just too many variables that we don't even know to look for. I.E. life based on something other than carbon, life than can flourish in extremes we could never dream of surviving... be it temperature, pressure, or even ra
Re:Let's do the math (Score:4, Interesting)
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That's just your opinion built on limited knowledge of physics. Our progression in the last 100 years is more than 1000 fold all previous years combined so imagine what we can do in the next 1000 years.
Re:Let's do the math (Score:4, Funny)
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I dunno. Are gamma rays the ones that they try and capture down at the bottoms of mine shafts?
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Our progression in the last 100 years is more than 1000 fold all previous years combined so imagine what we can do in the next 1000 years.
Will there even be an organism recognizable as human in another 1000 years? There's more than one way for humanity to cease to exist.
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I get your sentiment, but your time line is orders of magnitude off....
In 1K years we will be almost exactly the same.
In 10K years we *might be slightly different but probably no one will notice.
In 100K years we may be a different species, but still easily recognizable as "human"
In 500K years we might be very different from our current form.
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We don't know what will be possible in the next 1000 years, but it's entirely possible that out inability to travel faster than light is not a technological problem. That is, as our knowledge of physics becomes deeper, we might only confirm that FTL travel is simply impossible, no matter what technology we bring to bear. It's impossible for us to say with certainty, at least at this point in our development, but there is no reason to think that we can actually develop technology for FTL travel, time trave
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"All indications at this point are that it's simply impossible. If we were to posit that mankind will someday achieve inter-galactic travel, I would guess that it would be by developing suspended-animation and AI capable of piloting a ship over that kind of time frame. The logistics of planning that kind of trip are pretty unimaginable"
Perusing you own argument, I'd say it is not pretty unimaginable but, on the contrary, quite easy to imagine: we've been flying around in a Noah-ark type of spaceship for as
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Maybe not FTL, but what about worm holes or other forms that can cause information to travel without going between two points.
Quantum teleportation and subsequent "real" teleportation. Transporters that use entangled particles to create a new body for us at the destination. Rips in the universe.
All science fiction, true. But can we say with 100% certainty that none of them will ever be possible?
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Even though he's probably right, it's unimportant - let's assume you're right, there really is some way to move at at least a high fraction of c, and even that it can open the stars themselves to humans. - WE certainly won't be looking for life in other galaxies before we have even looked around our own. We won't be looking for life closer to our own galactic core before we have looked at the immediate neighborhood in our own spiral arm. We won't even be looking as close as Tau Ceti until after we have chec
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A thousand years? We may even have a stable, well-liked version of Windows by then.
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physics. Our progression in the last 100 years is more than 1000 fold all previous years combined
You think!? In 1914 we already had quantum mechanics and relativity (which limited speed to 'c' ). ... a bit of refinement. General relativity was published in 1916, but I would not call that a thousand-fold increment.
Since then
Now the greatest minds of our generation bang their heads against the brick wall of string theory.
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lol. "Interesting".
Slashdot was never mighty but, God, how low it's fallen.
Yeah, wondering at what might be possible. Pssh! Who needs that? This is a serious site, after all!
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If we create those Machine Descendants Incorrectly, we Automatically make them our Descendants. :)
Remember, Weight that SkyNet() Function really high, to minimize this outcome in Your Code!
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The laws of probability suggest humanity is doomed, at least in our current form. We as human ponderers are roughly a sampling of the average human pondering their existence. About 60 billion humans have come before us, which suggests roughly just 60 billion will come after us since we are most likely to be in the middle of the pack rather than near the beginning or the end of the pack. (Roughly the Copernican principle as applied to human population density and time.)
If most of our future is to be Borg-lik
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Re:Let's do the math (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it's definitely false. Current data strong favours a universe that is flat (ie infinite), while it only narrowly supports a universe that is open (ie infinite and shaped like a foliation of saddles), and only slightly better favours a universe that is closed (ie finite and shaped like a foliation of spheres.) More carefully speaking, I believe the constraints at the minute are something like \Omega = 1.02 +- 0.03 (at one sigma, or aroudn 67% confidence). Meaning that while it is possible the universe is open or closed our best evidence at the minute is that it is entirely consistent with flat, and that this consistency linked with Occam's razor suggests that we may as well take it as flat.
Meaning that the universe is probably infinite.
These considerations do not take into account the universe's topology, of course. The universe can be flat but finite if it is, for instance, on a torus. It could also be on any number of absurdly-shaped topological structures. This is because cosmology is based on general relativity which is, by definition, a local theory. Topology is, by definition, a global theory, and unless the characteristic length-scale of the topology of the universe happens to be within the characteristic length scale of the universe itself (ie if the "radius" of the torus is roughly of the order of the horizon), we're not realistically going to tell the difference between an infinite, flat universe and a flat, toroidal universe.
Occam's razor can again come into play here and suggest that the universe is, as a result, flat but we should probably begin wondering whether that razor's getting a bit blunt.
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Experimental evidence suggests that the universe had a beginning. and that based on observation, this appears to have been about 13.8 billion years ago.
13.8 billion years ago is not an infinite amount of time. The universe is not infinite.
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What if our universe isn't expanding due to dar
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What evidence is there of an infinite universe that had no beginning?
Bear in mind also that if an infinite universe exists, which had no beginning, then light would also have had infinite amount of time to travel to here from absolutely everywhere else, and although the intensity of radiation that reaches a point is inversely proportional to the square of the distance to that point. the volume of space that is an average of some given distance away from a point is greater than an amount proportional to t
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What evidence is there of an infinite universe that had no beginning?
Bear in mind also that if an infinite universe exists, which had no beginning, then light would also have had infinite amount of time to travel to here from absolutely everywhere else, and although the intensity of radiation that reaches a point is inversely proportional to the square of the distance to that point. the volume of space that is an average of some given distance away from a point is greater than an amount proportional to the square of the distance from that point, and so the number of things in that volume which produce radiation at that distance would be be correspondingly greater, more than cancelling out the inverse square relationship to the intensity of radiation reaching a point some fixed distance apart. Every point in the universe would be perpetually saturated in radiation that is reaching it from every other point in the universe, infinitely far away, and certainly things like life bearing planets could not exist.
Critical observation suggests that the universe is finite.
This is known as Olber's paradox, and it is not valid for expanding universes where red shift reduces the wavelength of light from distant sources until it drops below visible wavelengths and there ends up being an observable horizon, even in an otherwise infinite space and unbounded lifetime.
Although your point about distance and volume is wrong for other mathematical reasons. The number of light sources expands as the square of radius, not volume. The *total* number of sources is proportional to the cub
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And I was not double counting anything. The actual volume of such a shell is: 4/3*Pi*(r+dr)^3-4/3*Pi*r^3. This is a value that is admittedly less than proportional to R^3, b
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I don't know about your universe, in mine it's, I'm the center and it's H0/C in every direction!
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Not really, space may be infinite but as far as we know there's a finite amount of energy which by E=mc^2 means a finite amount of mass and since there's a lower bound on the mass of a star and stars to form a galaxy the number of galaxies must be finite.
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Space is not infinite. It is expanding.
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Both statements are so arguable as to be nearly meaningless.
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Only by those who have no fucking idea what they're talking about.
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Fancy adding a bit of weight to the random abuse? I don't know where Kjella got the idea that as far as we know there's a finite amount of energy around, for one thing. While there may be a finite amount within our horizon, that's a very different thing, since all we need to do is move a few megaparsecs and we've got a slightly different horizon. The statement that there is a finite number of galaxies within our horizon is completely uncontroversial (and indeed obvious, not least since our horizon extends b
Re:Let's do the math (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm I think you've confused ridiculously large number with infinity. They are not the same thing.
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Ummm I think you've confused ridiculously large number with infinity. They are not the same thing.
Clearly you do not understand how calculus works.
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Depends on who you're asking. I've known physicists to take expressions where infinity is mentioned and substitute 10 because it was "big enough." The frustrating part of course is that they got the right answer. . . .
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There is no real evidence to support an infinite amount of mass. So your "math" has no relevance.
Of course, when dealing with 100 billion galaxies, 1 in 10 is still really good odds.
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While the Universe may be infinite, the Observable Universe is not infinite (limited by the speed of light).
The Universe within a radius of a certain number of light-years (and thus of age comparable to our location) is also finite. So considering the galaxies younger than 5 billion years, the number of those galaxies that can be observed (and can contain life that could communicate/meet with us) is finite.
A quick calculation gives me that the number of galaxies is 170 million. Neglecting very small, dwarf
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But if you look merely at the number of stars in the entire universe, approximately 300 billion billion, that's essentially 10 to the 20th power. That means in order for life to be unique in the universe, all we need are 20 one out of ten possibilities in a row.
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More like 34.
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haha, blaze it
Practically alone... (Score:3, Insightful)
So there are only 10 billion galaxies out there that can support complex life like that on earth? We're practically alone!
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If you're stranded on a desert island, with no ability to reach another island- you are very much alone. Doesn't matter how many billions of other people there are out there, if you have no chance at reaching or talking to them.
If this math holds up, the next interstellar island is further away than we thought... and we are likely going to be a very lonely species.
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This math says pretty much nothing about our neighborhood. Remember, one in ten can just as easily be 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 as 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1.
Even more importantly, this say nothing about our galaxy's likelihood of having life (basically, 100% right now)....
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This math says pretty much nothing about our neighborhood.
Yeah, this is the equivalent of using the presumed sterility of the moon to measure the number of people within 1 km of my house. ;)
Still, from what I've seen of the equations, odds are the median distance between tool-using civilizations is likely well over 100 ly. :(
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Actually, it's only 17 million. A quick calculation gives me that the number of galaxies within 5 billion light-years is 170 million. Neglecting very small, dwarf galaxies, which are more numerous but have drastically fewer stars, I multiplied the stellar mass density by the comoving volume up to z=0.5.
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In mathematics "almost" denotes an infinite set minus some finite subset, so if there are only 10 billion galaxies that can support life and the universe is infinite, then the universe is "almost lifeless": infinitely lifeless except some finite subset with potential life.
sooo.... (Score:3)
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Well, eventually there won't be any fusion potential left in the universe, which isn't so grand for life's prospects either.
Re:sooo.... (Score:4)
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Mod parent up, +1 Asimov.
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We are only the initial stage of an elder race. Einstein didn't start off with general relativity, he started with addition and multiplication. Don't give up hope yet. The fact that the world is clogged with retards doesn't mean we can't aspire to become the Great Old Ones.
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In the time between these bursts, maybe a few species got lucky and made it almost to space colonization before getting scrubbed.
Maybe we're one of them.
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The stars that are close enough to Earth for a GRB to be dangerous can't produce a GRB. So it's not so much "in between bursts" as being in the right place.
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Yes things are settling down. The universe was much more energetic 10b years ago and will be much less energetic 100b years hence.
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That's Life... (Score:2)
.
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Relativistic Species (Score:4, Insightful)
I always like to think that any suitably advanced civilization eventually develops space-drives that can reach appreciable percentages of the speed of light. The time dilation effects would make traversing the galaxy relatively(heh) reasonable. The only hitch is that relative to all other lifeforms not moving at a such a speed would blink in and out of existence in the time it would take them to burp. Our current sliver of space-time is sooo tiny if you think about it like this.
What if there was a whole...dare I say...confederation of relativistic societies? In order to join you have to catch up. Otherwise you'll be gone in a blink.
Re:Relativistic Species (Score:5, Interesting)
What if there was a whole...dare I say...confederation of relativistic societies?
The question would be where are they and where are they going?
You could probably achieve some meaningful dilation if you orbited a black hole or something. But other than that, presumably the society that can hop around the galaxy still wants to have something to go to. And those locations would experience just as much time as the rest of us. Not that we all experience the same amount. Whole sections of the universe travel at different speeds and times. Like, you know how galaxies are accelerating away from the origin? Yeah, some are moving faster than others. And consequently experience different time dilatation. Dunno what sort of ranges we're talking about. Even at 90% lightspeed, you're only looking at a 1:7 ratio. A 142,000 years as opposed to a million years is still a society-crushing amount of time.
I'm not sure why you'd want to have a space-faring society that was rushing as fast as they could towards the heat-death of the universe. I guess some people would want to wait and see if anything interesting happened.
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I always like to think that any suitably advanced civilization eventually develops space-drives that can reach appreciable percentages of the speed of light. The time dilation effects would make traversing the galaxy relatively(heh) reasonable. The only hitch is that relative to all other lifeforms not moving at a such a speed would blink in and out of existence in the time it would take them to burp.
That's why it isn't useful. You can't use it for anything interesting to anyone but you. So why would anyone do that? There's no real point to moving at near-relativistic speeds because your civilization will be gone by the time you get home from anywhere worth going. After poking around your own solar system, you really need to be able to travel faster than light to achieve anything meaningful by going anyplace. Sending out probes to other places might still be worth it, but if everyone you ever knew will
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That's why it isn't useful. You can't use it for anything interesting to anyone but you
And if the only problem remaining to you in life is boredom?
So, what would a star moving at near-C look like to the rest of us?
Get it going fast enough and it would look somewhat like a gamma ray burst, to those directly ahead of it, and be invisible from most directions. But there's probably not enough energy in a star to get it up to that sort of speed, at least with any sort of "stellar engine" anyone has yet imagined.
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And if the only problem remaining to you in life is boredom?
You probably just take a several-billion-year nap.
But there's probably not enough energy in a star to get it up to that sort of speed, at least with any sort of "stellar engine" anyone has yet imagined.
The energy will have to come from elsewhere, then.
Well, not really (Score:2)
"Gamma ray bursts would wipe out any live more complex than microbes".... ...that is, unless life evolved to use radiation as an energy source.
In other words, a couple of astrophysicists speculate to a degree that's only slightly and unquantifiably less than sheer "wild ass guessing", news at 11.
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The problem with all of these "how much life is in the Universe" answers is that we're trying to extrapolate from a single datapoint (our Solar System). The unknowns outweigh the knowns by a significant margin. In other words, it's mostly a lot of wild ass guesses.
I blame the Inhibitors and their devices (Score:4, Funny)
If only there hadn't been a Dawn War.
Light takes a long time to get here (Score:3)
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In some sense it doesn't actually matter. If light traveled a billion years to get here, then any life that's happening "now" (for a sane definition of now) won't be observable by us for another billion years.
I suppose being able to observe the life is important for us but I assumed these guys concluded life was impossible in these galaxies. Just because we can't now or ever observe life there doesn't mean it isn't there.
First 5 billion (Score:2)
Things are even bleaker in other galaxies, the researchers report. Compared with the Milky Way, most galaxies are small and low in metallicity. As a result, 90% of them should have too many long gamma ray bursts to sustain life, they argue. What’s more, for about 5 billion years after the big bang, all galaxies were like that, so long gamma ray bursts would have made life impossible anywhere.
Wouldn't that also imply that for the first 5 billion years planets in general would be low in metal? So you would have very few planets without iron cores and similer density as Earth. There would be a different chemical mix in most of the universe.
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Well for the first few hundred million years there's zero metal. Anything* other than hydrogen and helium are only made during a sun exploding. And the quickest dying, hottest stars last hundreds of millions of years. In general, as time goes on, more suns explode making more and more exotic elements like... you know.... carbon and gold.
*HEY, I'm getting some of that wrong. Turns out elements up to boron could be made by cosmic rays. And gold can only be made in a super-nova. Huh.
This wikipedia page about t [wikipedia.org]
My take is tech makes radios sound like noise. (Score:5, Insightful)
I also subscribe to the "great filter" theory. About 25 years after the radio was invented, we were busy gassing each other in trenches, followed closely by a global pandemic, then mass genocide, then teetering on the edge of nuclear war. That's not a very wide window for aliens to notice our presence, if they rely on artificial radio waves to detect intelligent life.
My take is that technological improvements make radio sound like noise after a few decades. Early radios systems are very simple things which have signals (CW, AM, FM, ...) that are very distinct from electrical and thermal noise. Their signals were both drastically different from, and drastically stronger than, the background, enabling simple detectors to separate a signal's information from all that chaff.
Modern radios (such as spread spectrum systems, especially OFDM) squeeze nearly the Shannon Limit out of precious bandwidth (and also be frugal with transmit power) by using nearly all of it to carry information. This makes them virtually indistinguishable from a celestial object with a little extra heat (buried among things like stars, which have a LOT of heat).
It was only about 120 years from when Hertz and Tesla started making easily detectable radio waves to the Analog Television Shutdown, a significant milepost in the decommissioning of easily detectable radio signatures. I expect that, within anther few decades, the Earth will be emitting very little that might be recognizable as a radio signature of intelligent life, unless we expend a bunch of energy sending such a signature deliberately.
So my solution to the mystery expressed in the Drake Equation is that L (the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space) is short, not due to the falls of civilizations, but to economic incentives to use the aether only in ways that are no longer noticeable at a distance.
Previously thought... (Score:2)
So, to recap, 90% of galaxies have big explosions that could wipe out life as we k
Total Bull (Score:2)
No.
If we didn't have a Van Allen belt, some bright scientist would say no life could survive on earth, because of the radiation.
Life as we know it evolved to deal with earth. It evolved to live with at atmosphere, with a van allen belt protecting it, with limited meteors strikes (because Jupiter protected us), with our sun
It's only 10% (Score:2)
It should be 100%, but the Anti-Spiral race keeps killing all other sentient races.
oh dear (Score:2)
Um, can't life just evolve under water? (Score:3)
...the gamma rays would set off a chain of chemical reactions that would destroy the ozone layer in a planet's atmosphere. With that protective gas gone, deadly ultraviolet radiation from a planet’s sun would rain down for months or years
Yeah, because it's impossible that complex life could be protected by a different (better!) kind of UV shield like... water. From my understanding, it's not exactly rare in the universe.
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How likely is complex life to evolve under those circumstances? Besides, I got the idea that only microbes with their extremely high radiation resistance would survive even in the deep ocean, as enough would penetrate to kill even things like ocean vent crabs.
I am dubious (Score:5, Interesting)
I am dubious that gamma ray bursts are invariably a sentence of doom. The actual mechanism is due to the destruction of the ozone layer due to nitrogen molecules formed in the upper atmosphere; these molecules would "eat" the ozone for maybe 4 - 5 years after a GRB event, but would not (in that sort of lifetime) go from one hemisphere to another. Questions I would have include
- How many civilizations might form on bodies with very thick atmospheres, far from their Suns? (Venus does not need a ozone layer to keep the UV out, and might be very habitable a few AU out.)
- How many planets might have very long rotation periods (years), so that the night hemisphere never is subjected to the daytime UV?
- Are there rotation axis directions and orbital precession constants for planets that would keep GRB radiation mostly in one hemisphere, leaving the other to develop?
- How many planets might have other special circumstances that protect their ozone (such as a lack of N2 in their atmosphere, or an ozone generating biology in their stratosphere, etc.)
I am sure that there are others, but even these I think show that, while GRB might be bad for habitability, they need not be fatal. Note, too, that if I was running a Kardashev Type III civilization, one of my action items would be to find any possible GRB progenitors and disarm them. So, in a KIII galaxy, GRB would likely no longer be a problem; maybe that would be a good way to determine the number of KIII galaxies in the universe.
Re:I am dubious (Score:4, Interesting)
I can not answer about the deadliness of GRBs, but I think you will find those answers in Phil Plaits book "Death from the Skies!".
- How many civilizations might form on bodies with very thick atmospheres, far from their Suns? (Venus does not need a ozone layer to keep the UV out, and might be very habitable a few AU out.)
Yes, insulation is a good idea. But the planet will always radiate as a black body and loose energy, which has to be re-supplied by the suns radiation. The radiation drops with the square of the distance, so rather quickly. These considerations (make-up and size of planets) go into calculations for the habitable zone [wikipedia.org].
I can also imagine that a GRB comes with considerable photon pressure and might strip the entire atmosphere off a planet, or heat it to a point where it dissipates into space.
- How many planets might have very long rotation periods (years), so that the night hemisphere never is subjected to the daytime UV?
I think the rotation of planets around their own axis (spin) is not known outside the solar system. Generally, the spin is generated from formation of planets in the rotating protostellar disk, but interactions and changing orbits may modify the spin (Venus, Uranus).
- Are there rotation axis directions and orbital precession constants for planets that would keep GRB radiation mostly in one hemisphere, leaving the other to develop?
If you do not have the problem of heating and evaporation of the atmosphere I mentioned above, then yes, that is probably possible. For example if the GRB goes off from the direction of the spin axis ("below/above the solar system"). This may safe you from one GRB, but since GRBs come randomly from all directions it is not failsafe across many billion years.
- How many planets might have other special circumstances that protect their ozone (such as a lack of N2 in their atmosphere, or an ozone generating biology in their stratosphere, etc.)
Not sure. I think it is possible to come up with such scenarios as you stated, but it has to be shown that they are frequent occurrences to be relevant for changing the survival rate of complex life.
Our galaxy is one of those 10% (Score:4, Insightful)
So at least we only have to start looking locally...
It's life Jim, but not as we know it... (Score:2)
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Looking Down the Barrel (Score:2)
Even 10% is a big number (Score:2)
Of the estimated 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, only one in 10 can support complex life like that on Earth
10 percent of 100 billion is still 10 billion galaxies. That's a lot of real estate. Even if you apply all the other characteristics that give rocky planets in the habitable zone of their star billions of years to evolve life. There are features like having a Jupiter in a circular orbit instead of an elliptical orbit or a moon that creates tide pools. That's a lot of habitable plane
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Carl Sagan talked about it. Look at a planet like Titan. It's got oceans of hydrocarbons. It's far enough from the sun and cold enough to have not developed life, but we can't rule it out. There is simply so many organic molecules there that any life that did exist would be overwhelmed with food.
But more importantly, in both cosmos version they discuss this very point, even if life is a 1 in a billion or 1 in a trillion chance there are still going to be literally billions of life bearing planets out there
What Exactly is "Life" Anyway (Score:2)
Aren't GRBs tightly focused? (Score:2)
If I remember, GRBs are focused so most of their energy exits out the rotational poles. If you assume galaxies formed from a cloud of matter spiraling down and clumping together, then the stars and planets in a galaxy will tend to have the same ang
Which kind is the Milky Way? (Score:2)
Drake equation... (Score:2)
But I wonder, has anyone made a serious attempt at coming up with real numbers for the various variables to see what the final number was? Every attempt I've seen thus far at solving the equation either uses very loose figures or doesn't enumerate the variables at all.
What I'd like to see is someone take the most rigorous numbers we can come up with, narrowing the estimated ranges as best as we ca
Ours? (Score:2)
So, there are a lot more Republicans out there... (Score:2)
Well, yes, back THEN.... (Score:2)
We're pretty sure that most large galaxies have a supermassive black hole in the center. We know that some very-VERY-far away astronomical objects are very active in radio and X-ray output; we call these "quasi-stellar radio objects" or "quasars".
Is it not at least remotely possible that these facts are related? My physics degree is 30 years old and I have only sort-of kept up with the news, but it seems at least possible that those gamma ray bursts and quasars are symptoms of the formation or expansion
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Sounds kinda like what happens when a star goes nova and explodes. In fact, it looks like Explosion is listed as a synonym of Detonation.
What exactly is your problem here?
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The problem is it can be unclear what is meant, or if something is being implied, when people start throwing in synonyms for no real reason. We're not all experts in the field, so when a summary throws in two terms - especially one which, in common usage, often implies a deliberate act (a detonation being the initiation of an explosion) - it's not unexpected that some people might find it confusing - even if all it does is raise suspicion that there might be some extra meaning for the differentiation that's
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