Fascinating facts

[Carl East]

I read on the Internet yesterday that 134 planets have been found in our little corner of the universe, known as the Milky way. They're all Jupiter size planets, (which apparently are the easiest ones to pinpoint, because of their size) that indicates that there are probably outer and inner planets just like our own system.

Of course it will vary from one system to the next, so just because we have nine in our system doesn't mean there are the same amount in all these other systems. There could be more or less, but the point is the chances now of finding an earth like planet is very high indeed.

It fascinates me that there could very well be an earth like planet in every single system within the Milky way. When I say system incidentally, I mean for every sun/star in the Milky way, there are a body of planets orbiting it which are collectively known as a solar system. What you've got to remember though is that there are literally millions of suns in our galaxy.

Another thing I find fascinating is the distances between these systems, sometimes I just can't get my head around the figures. It's mind boggling. I also learnt yesterday that Andromeda (our nearest galaxy) is heading on a collision course with the Milky way but won't go through us for a few million years yet. And did you know that when these events happen (and they happen all the time apparently) that no sun ever collides with another.

I could talk about space until the cows came home, but I'll leave it there for now. lol

Carl

 

[Guest]

For every grain of sand here on Earth, there are a million stars in the universe.

That's a mind boggling figure if ever I tried to think about one!

Yes, I think the chances of other life out there are pretty high.

We are probably being monitered by life forms on other planets in our own galaxy, they're just keeping quiet about it, cos we scare the shit out of 'em.

Haha!

Lou

 

[Carl East]

I forgot to say that if anyone has any fascinating facts please feel free to include them in this thread.

Thx

ps it doesn't have to be space related.

Carl

 

[amicus]

No facts, Carl East...but science programs I have seen recently about planets indicate just the opposite of what you say.

There have been no earth sized planets discovered and no Sol type solar systems that might embrace an 'earth' type planet.

All they have discovered thus far have been gas giants, close in to the star, that sweeps all the debris and smaller planets up.

The most recent theories I have read have been that our solar system may indeed be unique in the galaxy.

I know the law of averages, aka Carl Sagan, suggests that life is rampant, but the evidence is not there.

Another anomaly of sorts is that the orbits of the far off discovered planets do not match those of the planets in our solar system. They tend to be radically eliptical, swinging close into the star and then far out again.

I do not intend to be argumentative as I have been a science fiction fan all of my life and have always had an interest in astronomy and the make up of the universe.

But if I had to place a bet, it would be that life, sentient life, is extremely rare or perhaps even non existent outside our own solar system.

amicus...

 

[Weird Harold]

There have been no earth sized planets discovered and no Sol type solar systems that might embrace an 'earth' type planet.

Google News Sci/Tech search turned up several articles about "an earth-like planet" that was discovered just a couple of months ago.

It's still a much larger planet than Earth but it's NOT a jupiter-like gas giant either.

I'd be surprised if we had discovered any Earth-sized planets with our current technology -- frankly, I'm amazed that we have the technology to find gas giants at the distances involved.

 

[rgraham666]

For every grain of sand here on Earth, there are a million stars in the universe.

That's a mind boggling figure if ever I tried to think about one!

Yes, I think the chances of other life out there are pretty high.

We are probably being monitered by life forms on other planets in our own galaxy, they're just keeping quiet about it, cos we scare the shit out of 'em.

Haha!

Lou

"Do you know that human thought is considered an infectious disease in much of the galaxy? Makes you kind of proud, doesn't it?" K - Men in Black

"Space is big, really big. You may think it a long way to the shop to buy a pack of smokes, but that's peanuts compared to space." Douglas Adams in one of the Hitchhikers books, I forget which one.

Myself, I do believe other races are watching us, because we're a rich source of comedy. "Did you see what the humans were killing one another over last night? Now, that's funny!"

 

[Guest]

[random blathering]

conspiracy theory number one squillion and two:

we never landed on the moon. its all a hoax to hoard billions of dollars to line the pockets of the rediculously rich. the sky is nothing more than a black hole which we hold in awe and make up urban legends to soothe our feelings of inadequacy.


[/randome blatherin]

 

[Guest]

Yes, and the Earth IS flat, dammit!

 

[Guest]

Yes, and the Earth IS flat, dammit!

i mean, honestly, who really spoke with columbus?!
and they said he landed in america
pishaw on the lot of em!

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Our system is unique in at least one way, most systems are binary systems, that is, most have two stars. In our system it is supposed that Jupiter should have been Sol's binary companion, but did not quite reach the mass neccessary to ignite.

Another, alternate theory, suggests that Sol has a companion star sometimes dubbed Nemisis. This "dark" companion is theorized to travel in a very large swing orbit that brings it close enough to the Kupier belt (the debris at the edge of the system) about once every 26 million years to have it's gravity affect the debris field. The strongest evidence of this thus far is a fairly regular pattern of mass extinctions in the fossile record here on earth evey 26 million years or so. In each of these fossile "dead" zones there is a layer of interstellar irridium, which suggests earth gets pummeled with meteors. The theory goes that Sol's dark companion passes close enough to the debris field to have it's gravitational forces basically fire a "shotgun blast" of debries from the edge of the system that then travels in to the sun. Any planets in the way get blasted.

Theoretically, there should be life all over the place in the universe. The odds of ever encountering it are slim to none, since the distances involved are so great. Consider also that the red shift indicates the universe is still expanding rapidly. Each year, galaxy's where we might be able to find life, move beyond the range of even our radio waves to reach them. Effectively, finding life outide our own galaxy becomes increasingly unlikely with each passing year.

-Colly

 

[Guest]

i mean, honestly, who really spoke with columbus?!
and they said he landed in america
pishaw on the lot of em!

Twats!



Ok, back to serious mode. *bleep*

I've often wondered that IF there was life elsewhere (probable, but not a cert), if that life started as it did on Earth - with micro-organisms who flourished, because of the perfect conditions here on Earth to sustain life.

What if, on another planet, life started that way, but conditions were very, very slightly different. I wonder how the whole evolution process went there? Could giant ants dominate that world?

Ok, over-active imagination, but hey!

Lou

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Twats!



Ok, back to serious mode. *bleep*

I've often wondered that IF there was life elsewhere (probable, but not a cert), if that life started as it did on Earth - with micro-organisms who flourished, because of the perfect conditions here on Earth to sustain life.

What if, on another planet, life started that way, but conditions were very, very slightly different. I wonder how the whole evolution process went there? Could giant ants dominate that world?

Ok, over-active imagination, but hey!

Lou

One limitation of our research is centered on the idea that scientists look for conditions that would allow the development of carbon based life. We have no reason to belive all life must be carbon based, it's simply that we only vaguely understand the neccesary mechanisms for carbon based life. any other basis is beyond our ability to consider, until it is found and examined.

The most dominant life on this planet at one time was reptilian. Were it not for a fortuitous calamity of some kind that basically wiped out the dominace of this form of life, the little furballs some of them fed on would not have ever risen to dominance and allowed one of their kind to eventually become mankind. On another planet? Due to the varitety and heartyness I would think insect life probably dominates. Of course a planet of huge intelligent cockroaches is the stuff ofnightmares, so I don't think abou tit if I can help it

 

[R. Richard]

It is not possible for giant insects to exist. Insects do no have lungs. They absorb oxygen through their outer coverings. Due to the square cube law, a giant insect would die of oxygen starvation within minutes at best.

 

[Guest]

It is not possible for giant insects to exist. Insects do no have lungs. They absorb oxygen through their outer coverings. Due to the square cube law, a giant insect would die of oxygen starvation within minutes at best.

You just burst my bubble.


Interesting fact, though! Didn't reaslise that.


Colly, yes, I hadn't considered life forms that aren't carbon based. Opens up a whole new can of worms. Or not, as the case may be.

Lou

 

[china-doll]

I find it amusing that people insist that we are the only life anywhere in the galaxy, never mind the universe. From what I have read the current estimate of the number of stars in the Milky Way is somewhere between 200 and 400 BILLION stars. That's a big friggin' number folks.

What about planets? Now we start delving more into theory and assumptions. Many of the planets that have been found outside this solar system have never actually been seen. But astronomers have identified them by measuring their effects on their local sun(s) magnetic feilds and thru other means such as noting the wake they carve in dustclouds.

Carl mentioned in the begining of this thread that so far we have located 134 planets outside our Solar System. That is a truely amazing number when you consider the mind boggeling distances involved and how limited our reach really is.

Most people are simply not able to grasp the massive distances involved. Consider that the Voyager I space probe has travled about 14.2 billion kilometers, which is a staggering distance, but it has taken 27 years! It works out to about 62 thousand kilometers per hour. Now consider that the nearest star is Proxima Centauri at about 4.2 lightyears, or 40 trillion kilometers. So at it's current speed the Voyager I probe would take 80,000 years to make the journey. That's a long car ride between rest stops.

But I digress, back to the planets. If you assume that there are 200 billion stars in the galaxy, (which is on the low side of the current estimates) an even if you assume only 5% of those stars have planets that still leaves you with at least 10 billion planets. And this assumes that each star of that 5% has only 1 planet, which is probablly not true, many may have more.

So, out of 10 billion planets, we are standing on the only one that ever developed any kind of life? I find that a very unlikely senario. It is quite possible that there are thousands, probablly millions of other solar systems out there with life in them. Many may not have developed into what we would consider higher form of life yet and some may have developed into a much higher form of life than us. Who's to tell?

Will we ever meet any of these life forms? Unfortunatly, I find it unlikely given the distances involved. I truely hope that science will find a way to bridge the enormous distance in a reasonable time but I doubt I will see it in my lifetime.

 

[Guest]

We need to find some wormholes and start building stargates, methinks.

And we need to build a warp drive, pronto!

I'm not being facetious, btw.

Lou

 

[Colleen Thomas]

It is not possible for giant insects to exist. Insects do no have lungs. They absorb oxygen through their outer coverings. Due to the square cube law, a giant insect would die of oxygen starvation within minutes at best.

You are making an assumption based on terran insects. there is no reason to asume it holds ture for SPACE BUGS!

 

[dr_mabeuse]

One limitation of our research is centered on the idea that scientists look for conditions that would allow the development of carbon based life. We have no reason to belive all life must be carbon based, it's simply that we only vaguely understand the neccesary mechanisms for carbon based life. any other basis is beyond our ability to consider, until it is found and examined.

The best evidence suggests that any life form would have to be carbon based. Carbon is unique among the elements in that it can form all sorts of complicated structures because the C-C chemical bond is about as strong as the C-H and C-O bond. No other element has this property.

Sci-Fi writers have played around with the possibility of Silicon-based life, but the Si-Si bond strength is such that it would take tremendous temperatures for life processes to occur, and at that temperature all other Si bonds would be broken. The chemistry of Si is just not as rich and complex as Carbon chemistry, though perhaps somewhere there are conditions so bizarre that Si could be the element of choice for life, using hydrofluoric acid instead of water.

There could be things like giant intelligent crystals out there, kind of like elaborate semiconducting microchips. There could also be intelligence that just doesn't manifest itself: kind of like a planet of buddhas who just spend their time in self contemplation. We'd never notice them.

No doubt further exploration of space will cause us to rethink our ideas of just what life is, and what we mean by intelligence. For instance, are replicating crystals alive? Viruses are crystalline organisms that don't act like they're alive until they infect a host. Are viruses alive? Do one-celled organisms show intelligence when they flee the light and seek the darkness?

It's been pointed out that Jupiter is the perfect environement for producing biochemicals like amino acids and proteins, but Jupiter is lacking in liquid water which is essential to terrestrial life. But there've been a few sci-fi stories about elaborate living things floating in the clouds of jupiter. How would we ever recognize them as living? Just what do we mean by "life"?

---dr.M.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

The best evidence suggests that any life form would have to be carbon based. Carbon is unique among the elements in that it can form all sorts of complicated structures because the C-C chemical bond is about as strong as the C-H and C-O bond. No other element has this property.

Sci-Fi writers have played around with the possibility of Silicon-based life, but the Si-Si bond strength is such that it would take tremendous temperatures for life processes to occur, and at that temperature all other Si bonds would be broken. The chemistry of Si is just not as rich and complex as Carbon chemistry, though perhaps somewhere there are conditions so bizarre that Si could be the element of choice for life, using hydrofluoric acid instead of water.

There could be things like giant intelligent crystals out there, kind of like elaborate semiconducting microchips. There could also be intelligence that just doesn't manifest itself: kind of like a planet of buddhas who just spend their time in self contemplation. We'd never notice them.

No doubt further exploration of space will cause us to rethink our ideas of just what life is, and what we mean by intelligence. For instance, are replicating crystals alive? Viruses are crystalline organisms that don't act like they're alive until they infect a host. Are viruses alive? Do one-celled organisms show intelligence when they flee the light and seek the darkness?

It's been pointed out that Jupiter is the perfect environement for producing biochemicals like amino acids and proteins, but Jupiter is lacking in liquid water which is essential to terrestrial life. But there've been a few sci-fi stories about elaborate living things floating in the clouds of jupiter. How would we ever recognize them as living? Just what do we mean by "life"?

---dr.M.

I saw an article recently that theorized their might be life on venus, again floating in the clouds wehre some water vapor exists. Neato comments doc, thanks

 

[SummerMorning]

We are alone.

The universe is an illusion.

I am alone.

Everything is an illusion.

 

[Guest]

There could also be intelligence that just doesn't manifest itself: kind of like a planet of buddhas who just spend their time in self contemplation. We'd never notice them.

What a beautifully imaginative thought, Mab.

Perdita

 

[Quiet_Cool]

Colly, yes, I hadn't considered life forms that aren't carbon based. Opens up a whole new can of worms. Or not, as the case may be.

Lou

Um... Giant worms?

Google News Sci/Tech search turned up several articles about "an earth-like planet" that was discovered just a couple of months ago.

It's still a much larger planet than Earth but it's NOT a jupiter-like gas giant either.

Yeah, I read about this, unless there was more than one. But remember that even this planet wasn't one they thought held life, but simply one they thought might at one time during it's development. Again, it might be a different planet I read about, so... I'll have to venture back to NASA's website and check up on things.

In my viewpoint, life would most liekly be harder to find than we think. Are we the only planet in the Universe with life? Sounds hard to believe, but it is possible. Very possible actually, if you consider it. You have to wonder exactly how many different conditions have to line up in order for life to stand a chance. Of those billions of planets china-doll referred to, how many are too close or too far away from thier sun to suppost life, how many are the gas giants we've been discussing? It all adds up to many, many possibilities, but nothing we can really grasp onto for any real hope.

I would hope that life is out there, and as a writer, I like the idea that there are aliens out there watching us (and yes, I'm one of those people who've sworn those lights in the sky can't all be planes--some of them just move too damn fast) some with positive intents, some not. It's just more fun that way.

Q_C

 

[Carl East]

But if I had to place a bet, it would be that life, sentient life, is extremely rare or perhaps even non existent outside our own solar system.

amicus...

I truly wish I could take you up on this bet, because I've never known a more likely outcome. However, even if there was as little as one planet per galaxy with sentient life (unlikely as that is in my opinion) that still means there are thousands of earth like planets out there.

Personally speaking, I find this a great time to be living simply because of all the new discoveries that are being made. One area of discussion we haven't touched on here yet, is what other life forms might look like.

I can see them being humanoid (at least to some degree) because creating and building needs both a brain and appendages with which to fulfil those creations. There could very well be telepaths out there as well, as I believe we ourselves will evolve into telepaths over the next 500,000 years.

In the end it's all just speculation, but it drives the imagination like nothing else I know.

Carl

 

[dr_mabeuse]

SETI's been going on for at least ten years or so, and so far nothing's been found. I have no idea of how much of the star field they've been able to look at and analyze so far, but I would imagine it's not insignificant. That should indicate that intelligent life isn't as common as the optimists have suggested.

The Drake equation is an expression of the possibility of finding intelligent life in the universe by the means SETI uses. It multiplies the number of stars in the galaxy by the fraction of stars that have planets, by the fraction of planets that are in the "life zone" (the temperature zone in which liquid water could exist), by the fraction of those on which life may have developed, the fraction of those which might have produced intelligence, etc. etc. A lot of these factors are sheer guesswork, but at the end you still have a pretty significant number of candidates for intelligent civilizations.

Recently, however, a new factor has shown up in the Drake Equation: the period of time when an intelligent technological civilization might be broadcasting electromagnetic waves into space. Broadcasting isn't a very efficient way of sending signals. On earth now we're going more to cable for both TV and radio. It could be that the window of time in which civilizations broadcast signals into space just isn't very big.

In any case, the results of SETI so far don't seem very encouraging.

---dr.M.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

SETI's been going on for at least ten years or so, and so far nothing's been found. I have no idea of how much of the star field they've been able to look at and analyze so far, but I would imagine it's not insignificant. That should indicate that intelligent life isn't as common as the optimists have suggested.

The Drake equation is an expression of the possibility of finding intelligent life in the universe by the means SETI uses. It multiplies the number of stars in the galaxy by the fraction of stars that have planets, by the fraction of planets that are in the "life zone" (the temperature zone in which liquid water could exist), by the fraction of those on which life may have developed, the fraction of those which might have produced intelligence, etc. etc. A lot of these factors are sheer guesswork, but at the end you still have a pretty significant number of candidates for intelligent civilizations.

Recently, however, a new factor has shown up in the Drake Equation: the period of time when an intelligent technological civilization might be broadcasting electromagnetic waves into space. Broadcasting isn't a very efficient way of sending signals. On earth now we're going more to cable for both TV and radio. It could be that the window of time in which civilizations broadcast signals into space just isn't very big.

In any case, the results of SETI so far don't seem very encouraging.

---dr.M.

i always thoughtSETI was looking for a needle in a hay stack. Not because life is not out there, but simply because the means they have avialable is looking at such a narrow band of time.

This planet has been around for about four and a half billion years. We've been broadcasting for what portion of that? A little over 100 years? Radio waves travel pretty close to the speed of light I believe, that means our transmissions at best could be 100 or so light years out. If another intelligent race had their own seti project, and if they were pointed at us and if there was no significant interference between us and them, they would still have to be within a couple hundred light years at max to find us.

It's a great idea, but I feel with those limiting factors, it isn't going to give a very prepresenative view of the possiblity of intelligent life out there.