Animals
Pretty cool. What does this say about prospects for extraterrestrial life?
Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!
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Author
Rand Simberg: just a recovering aerospace engineer.
April 7th, 2010 at 8:36 am
Cool indeed. Nature will find a way.
April 7th, 2010 at 8:48 am
“I think Nature’s imagination is so much greater than man’s that she’s never going to let us relax.” – Richard Feynman
I think the prospects for exteraterrestrial bacteria and collonial organisms is great. Extraterrestrial intelligence? Not so much — my feeling is still that even among 400B suns and 100B galaxies we may be it right now.
If you cannot evolve intelligence and spread to the stars, you ultimately perish under your own sun. IIRC, ours is a 3rd generation star. How many times has life evolved only to be swallowed by a red giant a few billion years later? We can never know, and ultimately it doesn’t matter.
April 7th, 2010 at 8:55 am
My personal bet is: There’s a decent chance inside any ‘water belt’ that also has the high Fe/H ratio of our local area. We’re anomalously high in elements that are exclusively generated in supernovas, and although a lot of them are ‘trace elements’ when considered from a raw percentage-of-body standpoint, they’re the limiting reagents in various crucial processes.
This leads to potential resolution of the “inexplicable” issues with the Drake Equation: We do happen to be one of the first locally with the requisite conditions available.
April 7th, 2010 at 9:41 am
In Washington, there’s lots of life forms that live off other people’s oxygen. What do you call that – draculaerobic?
April 7th, 2010 at 10:33 am
What does this say about prospects for extraterrestrial life?
Anything that expands the boundaries of “life as we know it” increases the odds of life existing elsewhere.
April 7th, 2010 at 3:07 pm
I seem to remember reading a sf story where the aliens are stunned to find life on a world with so much poisonous oxygen. It seems all other intelligent life in the universe were not oxygen breathers.