Newfound Planet a Top Contender to Host Life(news.yahoo.com) |
Newfound Planet a Top Contender to Host Life(news.yahoo.com) |
To be fair, it could simply mean an exoplanet, a planet outside of our solar system. I suppose "alien planet" is more intuitive than "exoplanet."
We've grown quite accustomed to the planets in our backyard, so I think the word alien is quite evocative here. I was born about 2 decades after the first moon landing, but the first confirmed exoplanets weren't discovered until my lifetime. That's pretty fricking amazing to me.
I consider it the most exciting graph I have ever seen.
For our solar system, only Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus would be massive enough to detect.
[1] http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-01-31-goldilocks-plan...
So saying that plants/animals wouldn't exist on a planet significantly hotter than ours is really strange to say - they'd have no -reason- to. Because the evolutionary tree on that planet would be completely different from ours, the organisms' forms and internal structures will be very different in many ways. The same things won't have happened in their evolutionary history.
And of course, life would be adapted to the planet itself. You might say, "Enzymes don't function at those temperatures." Well, the life on hotter planets will have evolved to use different enzymes that -do- work at those temperatures.
'Planet temperature' doesn't completely rule out the possibility of life. Venus for example is hot as hell on the surface but there is actually a band of the atmosphere which humans could hangout unprotected in, its breathable, the pressure is about what it is on Earth, etc. There have been some attempts to send a probe to hang out there and look for bacterial life but I don't think any have been funded.
The atmosphere is carbon dioxide with an aerosol of liquid sulfuric acid. (?)
Similarly, it might turn out that our understanding of electricity is wrong and it's really faeries playing tricks on us. But we have no evidence of faeries, so that is not a good explanation of electromagnetism.
Not true. In biochemsitry, some important compounds (eg, proteins) begin to de-nature at ~105 degrees F. So, temprature is a legitimate variable to consider, and the range between denatured protein and frozen water is not that big in Absolute scale. And (even) if you eliminate protein, you still have to deal with the properties of water (anothe ~+100ish F leway before it boils; as noted by other commenters).
You rightly note that there are examples of life (even on earth) which are in some unbelievably hostile environments (think: marianna trench) that are ungodly in temp, pressure, and ambient energy. But the absolute schema it seems more likely that these are evolved special cases of carbon-based life than the origin variants.
Som from Abslote zero to vulcanism (the possible ranges) narrowing down to 0 to 50c or 0 to 100c puts you in the right order of magnitude. At the scale of the cosmos, this seems to make some sense. Although, undeoubtedly imperfect.
+500ish F, if you're on a planet similar to Venus.
+1000ish F, if you allow supercritical water as a substitute.
This is consistent with what I was trying to say, may not have been so clear. But on a scale of -200c to +2000c being in a narrowband is water, correcting for temprature/pressure and state condsideration.
That being said, life detections in mariana trench are quite recent. Not likely to be detected by a simple probe of the type sent to mars, etc.[1] Highly specialized equipments. If I was looking for a needle in a haystack, it seems to make sense to find some haystacks first. And then rank-order the haystacks. Having a wider temp band means more haystacks, not neccessarily nore needles. Or easier to find the needles. If I had enough "protein" hospitable haystacks, I might look there first.
[1] The weight of a 1000 bar crush-proof engineering structure, and sophistication of communications and energy systems would be well beyond that curiosity, etc. Curiosity is of course not "simple" in its functionality, for what it does. But it's designed to spec for a unique mission.
Somewhat related, it's frustrating when I read about the history of computer science and am blown away that many of the best algorithms/languages we have today were developed 40-60 years ago. It's always nice to be reminded that there are unsolved problems and unlocked mysteries.