Looking for Life? Researchers Identify 24 Exoplanets Even More Habitable Than Earth (gizmodo.com.au) 62
"Astrobiologists have identified 24 exoplanets that aren't just potentially habitable, they're potentially superhabitable, exhibiting an array of conditions more suitable to life than what's seen on Earth..." reports Gizmodo:
For exoplanets to be superhabitable, they should be older, larger, heavier, warmer, and wetter compared to Earth, and ideally located around stars with longer lifespans than our own. So yeah, not only is Earth inferior, so too is our Sun, according to the new research...
As the new study points out, planets marginally older than Earth have a greater chance of being more habitable. When planets get old, "exhaustion of internally generated heat may result in eventual cooling, with consequences for global temperatures and atmospheric composition," write the authors. Earth is 4.5 billion years old, but planets between the ages of 5 billion and 8 billion years are likely to be more habitable, simply from a probabilistic standpoint...
To be clear, many of the criteria, such as atmospheric oxygen, plate tectonics, geomagnetism, and natural satellites, are currently beyond our ability to detect. What's more, only two of these planets, Kepler 1126 b and Kepler-69c, are scientifically validated planets, the remainder being on the list of unconfirmed Kepler Objects of Interest. Consequently, some of these "exoplanets" might not even be planets at all...
There are other limitations to consider as well. The authors are naturally biased towards Earth-like conditions, given that our planet provides the only known example of habitability. Life may proliferate under conditions not yet understood, and it's important to keep that in mind... We also don't know about the potential knock-off effects of these conditions. They sound good on paper, but the reality could be vastly different, as these environmental characteristics could collectively result in conditions wholly unsuitable for life.
"What's useful here is the criteria for planets that may not look exactly like Earth, but could be even more awesome locations for life," writes CNET.
"This could help us direct the resources of next-generation space telescopes like NASA's much-delayed James Webb."
As the new study points out, planets marginally older than Earth have a greater chance of being more habitable. When planets get old, "exhaustion of internally generated heat may result in eventual cooling, with consequences for global temperatures and atmospheric composition," write the authors. Earth is 4.5 billion years old, but planets between the ages of 5 billion and 8 billion years are likely to be more habitable, simply from a probabilistic standpoint...
To be clear, many of the criteria, such as atmospheric oxygen, plate tectonics, geomagnetism, and natural satellites, are currently beyond our ability to detect. What's more, only two of these planets, Kepler 1126 b and Kepler-69c, are scientifically validated planets, the remainder being on the list of unconfirmed Kepler Objects of Interest. Consequently, some of these "exoplanets" might not even be planets at all...
There are other limitations to consider as well. The authors are naturally biased towards Earth-like conditions, given that our planet provides the only known example of habitability. Life may proliferate under conditions not yet understood, and it's important to keep that in mind... We also don't know about the potential knock-off effects of these conditions. They sound good on paper, but the reality could be vastly different, as these environmental characteristics could collectively result in conditions wholly unsuitable for life.
"What's useful here is the criteria for planets that may not look exactly like Earth, but could be even more awesome locations for life," writes CNET.
"This could help us direct the resources of next-generation space telescopes like NASA's much-delayed James Webb."
Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course they're more suitable to life than Earth. They're not infected by humans.
Re: Of course (Score:1)
And *YOU* are so fucking edgy by saying "And YOU are so fucking edgy by saying "You're so fucking edgy" instead of arguments" instead of arguments, because you can't let a moron stand as an examole of moronity to laugh at, because you think other people are so dumb they will side with him.
You're THE coolest snob in the room now. Let's all pray to ye, me god! Such splendid. Much wise. WOWwowwow.
Re: Of course (Score:1)
And ***Y*O*U*** are so fucking edgy by saying "And *YOU* are so fucking edgy by saying "And YOU are so fucking edgy by saying "You're so fucking edgy" instead of arguments" instead of arguments" instead of arguments, becaHELP! I CAN'T STOP!+++AT&FE1Q0V1X4&C1&D2...Welcome to SnoBBS. Choose your mode:
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Re: Of course (Score:2)
It's not trolling! It's meant to be funny! Laugh! :)
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FWIW, I think jcr is right: if the AC he's replying to really believes humans are an infection, then it's up to him to do s.t. about it--and starting with himself would prove his sincerity.
And for the record, I can't understand why the AC was voted "insightful". Every time there's an article that refers to possible life on other worlds, or to humans traveling to other worlds (Mars, say), people post things that are essentially the same as what the AC said. There's nothing new or insightful about that kind
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FWIW, I think jcr is right: if the AC he's replying to really believes humans are an infection, then it's up to him to do s.t. about it--and starting with himself would prove his sincerity.
And for the record, I can't understand why the AC was voted "insightful". Every time there's an article that refers to possible life on other worlds, or to humans traveling to other worlds (Mars, say), people post things that are essentially the same as what the AC said. There's nothing new or insightful about that kind of comment, it's been done hundreds of times before.
Logically - If he (note: assuming gender) truly believes it, he wouldn't (and shouldn't) start with himself. He should aim to solve the problem to as much of an extent as is possible. So likely should be looking to trigger a global nuclear winter or similar.
And discounting someone's input just because "it's not new or insightful" is stupid.
Is the input true? Is it free (or largely free of bias)? Is it relevant to the thread? These are far better questions
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"Of course they're more suitable to life than Earth. They're not infected by humans."
not infected by humans yet.
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"Of course they're more suitable to life than Earth. "
I doubt it. Maybe more suitable than New Jersey.
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To many unknowns. The main argument seems to be that there has been more time for evolution to throw its dice. We have no idea how often life appears, though I think a lot. We have no idea how often advanced life, as in multi-cellular, happens, likely not so often, And then there is everything that had to come together for technological life, things like hands, good vision, a means of communicating lots of knowledge and perhaps most important, a social structure that encourages story telling so new generati
We'll get right on that... (Score:3)
Sadly, all these exoplanets are farther away than 100 light-years
So, all we need to do is build a spaceship that travels at the speed of light, and we'll be there in just over a hundred years.
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100 years Earth time. Because of relativity, if you were actually traveling at the speed of light, the trip would take no time at all in your reference frame.
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I don't think we can send a blast of photons or neutrinos that self-assemble back into a living being, so how about "slightly less than lightspeed" to get somewhere in a jiffy of subjective time. Of course, with the most efficient propulsion we know of (matter/antimatter or portable black hole's accretion disk), that means shoving 95% or more the weight of your craft out the back as exhaust , how to stop left as exercise for student, maybe a few laps through gas giant atmosphere or sun's photosphere....
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Even 5-12% lightspeed seems really hard, there's only so much energy to harvest from fusion and especially fission, plus really the numbers need to be halved if you want to stop when you arrive.
Even if we could build a spaceship that could get to Alpha Centauri in 40 years, building a closed ecosystem that functions that long seems very hard, not to mention the mechanical and electrical parts that need to function for that long.
But who knows what the future might bring.
"Superplanets... planets optional"? (Score:4, Insightful)
So they only have good confirmation that two of these "superplanets" really are planets. But if the others are planets, they are probabalistically more habitable than Earth! Unless there is something about them we don't know, like having super-oxidizing or super-reducing atmospheres. Or having no atmosphere at all.
Science by press release is a scourge.
Not only that (Score:2)
They're also guilty of extrapolating based on a dataset with exactly one data point in it.
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Well finding a planet with an oxygen rich atmosphere would be a good start, and we're becoming capable of measuring oxygen levels in a planet a 100 light years away. Besides, are they talking about inhabitable by humans or another technological civilization?
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They're warmer than Earth, so presumably any life on those planets doesn't die off in the winter. Of course, we could try adjusting Earth's climate to make it warmer...
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Yeah, I was scratching my head trying to figure out the point of this article. "We've discovered planets more habitable than Earth! Okay, maybe not really planets, since we've only been able to confirm one of them so far. And maybe not habitable because we have no way to really ascertain the conditions there. But if these are planets, and if they're actually habitable, they might be even more habitable than Earth!" Well la-dee-fucking-da. Did anyone actually expect
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Ah, but my dear tutor Pangloss, and his master Gottfried Wilhem von Leibniz, disagree with you on this point. We not only live in the best existing world, this world of ours is the best of all possible worlds.
Not learning from geocentrism (Score:3, Interesting)
I often like to think of myself as being humbled by the demise of the geocentrist view; the Earth is not the center of the Universe, the Sun is not the center of the Universe, humans are a relatively recent addition to a much older life history on this planet, etc.
But somehow this caught me off-guard. Perhaps after all the Earth and its set of conditions are not unlikely. Perhaps it is in fact MORE unlikely for life to have begun on Earth at all than at a far more hospitable place elsewhere in the Universe. And quite nearby in the Universe, since methods for finding exoplanets do not work at very large distances yet.
Perhaps the last stand to explain Fermi's paradox is that very intelligent life does not *need* to develop in order to survive on clement worlds, and that it takes far too long for it to develop to survive long enough on harsher worlds.
But, learning from the above, I should not take that for granted either. Very intelligent life may be a few simple mutations away for many lifeforms. Very being quite a relative term as well in our case.
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Perhaps the last stand to explain Fermi's paradox is that very intelligent life does not *need* to develop in order to survive on clement worlds, and that it takes far too long for it to develop to survive long enough on harsher worlds.
It didn't need to develop here either, but it did. For sufficiently small values of "intelligent", of course. We're barely intelligent enough to form civilization, and we may not be intelligent enough to keep it. On the whole we're pretty stupid. Even the very smartest of us do dumb things all the time.
Indeed (Score:2)
> We're barely intelligent enough to form civilization, and we may not be intelligent enough to keep it. On the whole we're pretty stupid. Even the very smartest of us do dumb things all the time.
Quite. I've been called very smart; some of my posts here show that I can be dumb at times.
When we collectively choose our best and brightest to go work for the good of us all, we end up with Washington DC. Those are the ones we choose as the better among us, not the crackheads. We seem to be a pretty stupid spe
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I've been called very smart; some of my posts here show that I can be dumb at times.
Several of my friends say I'm the smartest person they know. The guy I'm working for is *way* smarter than I am. He's the smartest person I've ever known personally. Just a couple of days ago he made an inexplicable and very expensive blunder. It's almost baffling that we've managed to make it this far as a species. :-)
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> The guy I'm working for is *way* smarter than I am. He's the smartest person I've ever known
I enjoy working with you too. Now let's get back to work.
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What you are talking about is panspermia [northwestern.edu]. It has its adherents, including Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA. But what I don't get about it is that it just moves the question of "how life started" somewhere else. Alright, so how did life start there then? Same dilemma.
As for intelligent life, I would say that it is very rare, based on the evidence we have on earth. See, life started as soon as the bombardment era stopped. Very quickly, relatively speaking 500 million years, we had unicellular life. Then it
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All panspermia does is make a rare event, life starting, mean that life is more common.
For example, life may have only started once in our Solar System, perhaps on Venus, then through panspermia, it could have colonized Earth, Mars, Europa, Titan etc, with the Earth being the one location where it really caught on and made the next step to multi-cellular.
The point of the article seems just to be that these planets have more time for the dice rolls of evolution to produce advanced life, which makes sense as
Misread Title (Score:2)
I first read the title as "Looking for a life".
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I first read the title as "Looking for a life".
It's "Looking for life", but during the 100 light-years trip it's actually "Finding death".
to life ... as we know it. (Score:3)
That always has to be added.
We're thinking inside a box whose outside we cannot even imagine because we never saw anything but the inside.
I wonder how many alien species don't consider us life. I mean I barely do! ;)
Nevermind... (Score:2)
You can mod me as redundant.
But the article too. :)
Wetter = better ? Up to a point (Score:2)
For starters if you have no land above water life is unlikely to evolve any kind of complex civilisation simply because in a 3D enviroment you don't need infrastructure. Dolphins might be smart but they're never so much as used a tool.
Secondly water is a greenhouse gas - too much in the atmosphere with a hot sun could be a recipe for disaster. Look at venus.
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Something like 80% of Earths history, the Earth has been hotter then now. At that the hothouse Earth seems to the normal state. The only reason that global warming is a big deal for us is that we evolved during a cold period and that is what we're adapted for.
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Actually dolphins have been observed using tools, sponges, shells and bubbles as tools when hunting, and a wide variety of things as toys. They don't have the ability to manipulate materials to create more complex things, though. If cephalopods lived beyond spawning we might have competition though, as octopi use tools and are extremely inquisitive and intelligent.
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Cephalopods are also missing a way to pass on knowledge. Every octopus is born alone and has to start with only instinctive knowledge.
Story telling is one of our big advantages, starting with stories about the lion at the watering hole, through to stories about how to light a fire or chip a rock in a useful way to now, where Musk is building on all the stories on how to build a spaceship.
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They can communicate, mostly by using incredibly complex variations in their chromatophores, and IIRC can pass on knowledge such as predators and food location. They just don't live long enough to make it worthwhile to develop any but the most rudimentary technology.
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I was thinking more of parent(s) passing on knowledge, though I guess that could evolve.
Wonderful news... now, how do we get there? (Score:2)
Great, there's the potential for exoplanets to be *better* than earth - just the potential mind, we don't know for sure.
Ok, let's take a gamble and send out a reconnaissance team.
That team would be robots of course.
"Hey there, robots, your mission is to report back in about - well, it depends - let's just say, some millions of years. We'll just be here waiting on Earth to hear back from y'all!"
This is what I really don't understand about reports like this. Sure, we all love space, we all love science - wond
Cycles. (Score:2)
What these "habitable" planets don't have (for certain) is the cycles that we have on earth. There are waves on the ocean at 1-10 seconds, tides at 12h, days at 24h/1d. months at 30 days and years at 365 days and solar cycles at 11 years. All these conspire to make conditions favorable, (growth, many individuals) and unfavorable (many die, the best individuals survive).
This is essential for evolution. If those cycles hadn't happened we'd still be in a soup of single cell organisms. It is a misconception tha
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No, you make a statement about "favorable" based on a sample size of 1. Get rid of your bias, earthling. Other conditions might be even "more favorable"
Warmer and Wetter is Better? (Score:2)
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If "warmer, and wetter compared to Earth" is superhabitable, should we stop worrying about global climate change?
Well, the earth isn't capable of "worrying",
and life would almost certainly be better off without us.
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What we worry about is the optimal conditions for us, not life in general.
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These planets are not necessarily "superhabitable" for humans. Just like the places on Earth with the most life/biodiversity aren't usually the greatest places for people to live.
Anyway, it's the change and the speed of that change that's the problem with our screwing up the atmosphere. Nothing that lives on Earth right now evolved in the environment that we're creating. Our era will look like just another mass extinction event in the fossil record, if some intelligent being comes by and looks through the d
Energy Gradient and information (Score:2)
I suspect materials to store information will be found everywhere. An older planet without plate tectonics and a redder sun might not provide a sufficient energy gradient though. So I'm a little suspicious of their more suitable for life claims.
Complete bullshit (Score:1)
I can't believe what passes for science these days. In their push to be woke and SJW friendly they apparently don't teach basic statistics.
There is currently one known habitable planet, we're standing on it.
Thus any conclusions we may make about habitable planets are based on a sample size of one.
We have a series of common-sense hypotheses about what makes a planet habitable, but we only have one data point. These so-called scientists ignore the very real possibility that NONE of these guesses have anythi
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They're curious scientists exploring ideas, nothing more at this time. I don't know where you get woke or SJW from.
Atmospheric oxygen? (Score:3)
The summary seems to suggest that atmospheric oxygen is a requirement for life. This is completely wrong. Atmospheric oxygen is evidence of life. I very much doubt that any inorganic chemical process would produce significant molecular oxygen. Life can exist without oxygen. This is what life on earth was like for hundreds of millions of years, until photosynthesis evolved. There are still microbes around today that cannot grow in the presence of oxygen, or which tolerate oxygen, but do not use it in their metabolism.
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It does seem to be a requirement for advanced life as much more energy is available using oxygen. There's a good chance that simple life is common, but without a good energy source, it stays simple.
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It does seem to be a requirement for advanced life as much more energy is available using oxygen. There's a good chance that simple life is common, but without a good energy source, it stays simple.
That is true. What I was trying to say is that merely detecting atmospheric oxygen on an exoplanet would be sufficient evidence for life. Presuming that it becomes possible to study the chemical composition of exoplanets, then it is a good deal easier to detect molecular oxygen than, say, complex organic chemicals. Also, there is evidence that non-living chemistry can generate complex chemicals normally associated with life.
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Ok, I'm in agreement.
"Warmer and more humid"? (Score:2)
What are we working on here with more global warming?
Beam us up, Scotty, there is *no* intelligent life here....