Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: B@tfinkV on January 28, 2008, 01:31:31 AM
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are we the first planet in our solar system that became sustainable for life or are we infact the last? Classic human arrogance makes it seem that we are the first and only life in our solar system, i think mars at least had life on it at some point, much evidence of meteor strikes and such like. more likely to me that life on mars was wiped out. could be that all the planets, even the gas giants, are in more mature stages of life than our earth. what are the facts here?
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I don't think theres any life more advanced then us in our solar system, now in the universe you'd just have to be arrogant to think were it, but I do think there is high hopes for life on the moon of Jupiter Europa, it's a moon covered in ice with what we believe is a liquid ocean, the only other liquid water in our solar system, and as we know here on Earth, where theres water theres life.
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Life as we know it or any lifeform? Big difference there.
Limiting it to our Solar System also narrows it down quite a bit. Expand that to Galaxy or Universe and I'll amend my answer.
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not so much is there life now, but was there ever any life in our system? all it would take is one big chunk of speeding rock to hit earth and you have another mars.
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Well if you expand it it any lifeform in our solar system then I'd have to say yes. Not all life is human form nor carbon based.
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i've always thought we may have once lived on mars. The Universe has always been expanding since the big bang and there must have been a time when mars may have been a more suitable climate.
Maybe we will jump onto Venus when Earth becomes un-inhabitable.
give it some time.
:noid
I'll go hide my rock again.
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Originally posted by Bruv119
Maybe we will jump onto Venus when Earth becomes un-inhabitable.
give it some time.
I hope you have one heck of an air conditioner.
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Originally posted by B@tfinkV
are we the first planet in our solar system that became sustainable for life or are we infact the last? Classic human arrogance makes it seem that we are the first and only life in our solar system, i think mars at least had life on it at some point, much evidence of meteor strikes and such like. more likely to me that life on mars was wiped out. could be that all the planets, even the gas giants, are in more mature stages of life than our earth. what are the facts here?
Lots of intresting "formations" on Mars.
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The way I see it is our Sun is a star, and there are millions of other stars out there. So, there is a very good chance that there are more planets out there that have life forms of some sort on them, may they be more or less advanced than us!
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Batfink what does arrogance have to do with anything? And do you want facts, or speculation?
The fact is we know we don't know enough to say with certainty that there is or isn't any life out there, whether similar to ours or not. IOW there aren't enough data points to do much more than speculate.
e.g. There have been clouds of dust or crystals out in the rings around Saturn that acted like living organisms' heredity.
There's this sound byte floating on the net (I think I only had a copy of it on my HDD that crashed recently) of a sound NASA picked up, I forgot where, which sounds like something Sci-Fi movies use when they want to depict some alien radio transmission.. It's not fake and neither has NASA denied they found it as it is (sounding "alien") nor have they given any info about it.
Right here on Earth, people mostly can't prove or disprove that computer "intelligence" does or doesn't satisfy the criteria for sentience and/or life...
Statisticaly, either we're unique in the whole universe, which must be one of the smallest odds you can make with respects to anything in the cosmos.. Or we aren't, and somewhere out there are at least a few other forms of life. The odds are that there's a ton of em - IIRC even with one in a billion odds for life as we've got it here, there's still a billion planets out there where it's happened. But that's already speculation.
And all this is (even the assertion that just our point of view, and even our own creation (AI) will probably have a point of view we couldn't have come up with ourselves. Nevermind what the "point of view" of an alien somewhere out there would be. Anything we posit will be true only in the universe as we imagine it. That's a matter of metaphysics.
As far as we know, we could be anything from brains in space (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/science/15brain.html) or dreaming all this like in the Matrix, or AI-like simulations on some guy's science project, or artifacts in three of the universes 6 or 10 or 20 dimensions... or, as far as we know, the acceleration of the universe's expansion is in fact time turning into space (i.e. the universe shifting into 4 space dimensions and 0 time dimension) which would explain why the space seems to be expanding as it has and is... There's so many competing explanations for it all that at this point betting on any of them seems as good as playing the lottery.
Now personaly, I don't think Mars had life. IIRC Mars dried off too soon for life, as we've had it here, to evolve as far as it has here. In other words it might have happened, but not beyond the goo stage, I think.
Mars wouldn't even have had to have been particularily hospitable, considering the current track record of extremophiles:
* up to 113°C
* down to -18°C (metabolizing), far less in dormant state
* down to pH 0
* up to pH 11
* without Sun
* up to 1.5 Megarads
* in salty waters up to salt saturation
* in Chernobyl nuclear reactor
* up to 1000 bars
* close to vacuum
Not too long ago there was a report that some rock off from Mars that had landed here carried some stuff which IIRC was part of the chemical pathway for genesis.
But then again equaly significant chemicals have been found in rocks floating in outer space, as well as being produced by stars, and (I think) similar compounds have also been seen out there in the freezing voids, so once again there's not just one plausible explanation.
Another thing that most people probably don't know about is the almost omnipresence of water in the solar system. Pretty much every body in our system has it:
Mercury (3.5% of its trace atmosphere), Venus (atmospheric), Earth (everywhere), Mars (poles & subsurface), Jupiter (atmospheric), Saturn (atmospheric), Uranus (atmospheric), Neptune (atmospheric), Pluto (thick ice mantel), Ceres (60+ km deep surface)... Probably about as common in the rest of the smaller moons and objects. It just isn't in liquid form (for sure) anywhere else than here on Earth and a few other places.. That's the Goldilocks zone which one of Gliese 581's planets was supposed to be in.
(http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2149/2225089487_28ff5d25a6_o.jpg) (http://www.flickr.com/photos/12420910@N07/2225089487/)
Copyright Joel Poncy (http://uplink.space.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=sciastro&Number=730618&page=&view=&sb=&o=&vc=1).
But back on topic, a general rule of thumb is that we aren't special, nor is our planet, or the time or conditions we live in; we're somewhere near the middle of the bell distribution curve in terms of most things. Being the first or last in the whole universe to have life would be a pretty unlikely thing by all accounts.
edit- I think if our solar system is what's needed for life, we're nearer the beginning than the end of the goldilocks time window - there's more time left for suns like ours to live than there has been yet.
Originally posted by Slash27
Lots of intresting "formations" on Mars.
E.G. ?
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There is a theory floating around that mars once had life. Also that it was alot more like our earth.
Basically the theory goes that it was hit by a small moon or planetoid. By looking at the southern hemishere of mars you can see that indeed it was hit by a extremly large object. Its 2 mishapen moons that are in very odd orbits lend credence to this.
That being said there still isnt enough tactile information yet to be sure.
As for the "structures" on mars ie, the face, the pyramids, the hexagon shaped structures....until we land there and see them close-up we cant be sure.
on a side note, ppl are soo into the structures on mars that they dont read about the possible structures on the moon.
Here is a link with some interesting scientific stuff on BUT, take it with a grain of salt.
http://www.enterprisemission.com/
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Until proven otherwise, planet earth is the only planet in the entire universe that has life.
Might as well face it, your a genuine one in a hundred million billion trillion freak of nature.
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great stuff to read here, thanks guys. yes moot i do mean speculation but facts are even better.
S!
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Originally posted by Bruv119
Maybe we will jump onto Venus when Earth becomes un-inhabitable.
Venus is covered with an opaque layer of highly reflective clouds of sulfuric acid, preventing its surface from being seen from space in visible light; this was a subject of great speculation until some of its secrets were revealed by planetary science in the twentieth century. Venus has the densest atmosphere of all the terrestrial planets, consisting mostly of carbon dioxide, as it has no carbon cycle to lock carbon back into rocks and surface features, nor organic life to absorb it in biomass. It has become so hot that the earth-like oceans the young Venus is believed to have possessed have totally evaporated, leaving a dusty dry desertscape with many slab-like rocks. The evaporated water vapor has dissociated and hydrogen has escaped into interplanetary space. The atmospheric pressure at the planet's surface is 92 times that of the Earth, the great majority of it carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
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i'll stay right here thanks.
:D
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92 times AP? wow thats like being very deep underwater without being there. you could almost swim in the air of venus? if you didnt get crushed to dust instantly..
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If earth we to become inhabitable [at least due to time] the sun would probably be so big, due to it becoming a Red Giant, Mercury and Venus would have been swallowed. Earth would be a crusty Mercury-like planet, and we may be living on Mars :D
But I'm sure this won't be in the near future
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Originally posted by bnasty
If earth we to become inhabitable [at least due to time] the sun would probably be so big, due to it becoming a Red Giant, Mercury and Venus would have been swallowed. Earth would be a crusty Mercury-like planet, and we may be living on Mars :D
But I'm sure this won't be in the near future
Yeah thats about 4 billion years from now, I highly doubt were still gonna be around for that one, we'll go extinct long before that.
Like moot said I don't think life on Mars got much passed the goo stage, it just wasn't habitable for very long. What happen to Mars is unknown but something caused it's core it cool which means it lost it's magnetic field and its atmosphere was stripped away by cosmic rays.
Now when you think about it, it would be very very long odds that were it in the universe, there are more stars in the universe then grains of sand on all the beach's of Earth, thats alot of chances for another Earth to have happen, and if we do ever find some kind of life in our solar system that will show life is common, not rare, to have happen more then once in a single solar system.