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Started By
Message
re: The Webb Search for Extraterrestrial Life Has Begun
Posted on 7/27/22 at 9:54 am to Kentucker
Posted on 7/27/22 at 9:54 am to Kentucker
quote:
TRAPPIST-1
So it is twice the age of our system at 7.6 billion years.
If the planets are even livable, civilizations could have come, gone, come, gone and come again.
Humans on our planet have been around for 6 million years and causing pollution for a few 100 years.
40 Light years away, so we are checking out these planets like in the 1980s our time
2
Posted on 7/27/22 at 9:56 am to Aubie Spr96
quote:
Assuming they find something or someone out there, WTF are they gonna do about it then?
Might be motivation to dump money into research of how to actually reach the system in a reasonable amount of time. Not gonna lie, I’d consider volunteering to explore a new planet. Give me a ship full of survival tools, food, couple vehicles, fuel and weapons and I’ll get my arse off this gay earth and go colonize on a new frontier
Posted on 7/27/22 at 9:59 am to Kentucker
I'm with Steve Hawking on this whole thing. We should immediately cease and desist all efforts to search or contact extraterrestrial life. I don't feel like getting vaporized.
Posted on 7/27/22 at 10:01 am to DarthRebel
quote:
Humans on our planet have been around for 6 million years and causing pollution for a few 100 years.
Not to go into a total tangent, but I guess it depends on your definition of "humans". The chromosome fuse happened around 6 million years ago (split off from other primates), but I think Homo Sapiens is only like 300,000 ish years old right?
Posted on 7/27/22 at 10:02 am to Meauxjeaux
quote:
AKA size doesn't matter.
It does in the context of red dwarfs like Trappist-1. It’s thought that most of them regularly blast their exoplanets with high doses of radiation, blowing away atmospheres and sterilizing their surfaces.
Also, because the exoplanets are so close to their suns, it’s thought that most, if not all of them will be tidally locked to their stars. When a planet is tidally locked, it rotates only once as it orbits its sun, keeping one side facing the star. Venus, for example, is tidally locked with our sun.
Trappist-1 will teach us a lot about dwarf systems. With seven earth-sized exoplanets, it appears to be the ideal system to study first.
Posted on 7/27/22 at 10:05 am to TigerFanatic99
quote:
The egotism of humanity insists that life elsewhere would produce the same markers as life here, so if we see them then it must mean life is there. We dismiss planets with other gasses because as a species we cannot entertain the idea that aliens may have biological processes so different from us that they produce totally different gasses, or maybe they do not resperate at all.
This isn't remotely true, most everyone, certainly scientists, understand all this but we can only assign something as a sign of life if we understand that life and its metabolism like the carbon-based lifeforms on earth.
For all we know there are planets with carbon based life forms that live as symbiotes within one of the symbiote's bodies and only take in energy as light, heat or even radiation and give off no metabolic waste. There are closed terrariums that have been sealed for decades with the only interaction being light entering through the glass.
Posted on 7/27/22 at 10:11 am to ccomeaux
quote:
wouldn't an advanced race of aliens be past the point of having industrial pollutants in their atmosphere ? surely
That would be my guess, too, but recall that Trappist-1 is only 39.46 light years away. On the scale of our galaxy, that’s next door.
So, if a truly advanced race lived there, we can conjecture that they would have had an interest in our very life-rich planet.
Their system is 7.6 billion years old, much older than our 4.54 billion years. They’ve had time to become a machine species that can explore the Universe and maybe we’ll see some of the markers they’ve left. Exciting times.
Posted on 7/27/22 at 10:14 am to Kentucker
quote:
It does in the context of red dwarfs like Trappist-1. It’s thought that most of them regularly blast their exoplanets with high doses of radiation, blowing away atmospheres and sterilizing their surfaces.
What I came in here to say. We basically already know these planets have no chance of hosting life because they’re orbiting a red dwarf.
Posted on 7/27/22 at 10:20 am to Upperdecker
quote:
This is only relevant to carbon based life forms. Life on other planets could have propagated in other ways potentially with different atmospheric gases
That’s unlikely. Carbon is the “whore of the periodic table.” It will pair with lots of other elements, specifically with those associated with life such as oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur and hydrogen.
Silicon is the only other element that approaches the “mating skills” of carbon. However, it has a major problem with oxygen.
Geochemistry can advance to biochemistry with carbon, but with no other element that we know of.
Posted on 7/27/22 at 10:21 am to dawgfan24348
I would be praying to St Tom Cruise and all.
Posted on 7/27/22 at 10:25 am to DarthRebel
quote:
If the planets are even livable, civilizations could have come, gone, come, gone and come again.
I think that once a civilization advances to machine life that it is unlikely to die off. Rather, I think it will leave its solar system and explore the Universe.
We are on the threshold of creating machine life. We could be the very first civilization to evolve to this point.
Posted on 7/27/22 at 10:28 am to JackieTreehorn
quote:
I'm with Steve Hawking on this whole thing. We should immediately cease and desist all efforts to search or contact extraterrestrial life
I strongly disagree with that viewpoint. To me, the evolution of our species demands that we seek out life elsewhere to learn from it.
Posted on 7/27/22 at 10:33 am to Kentucker
quote:
Life begins when geochemistry becomes so complex that it is labeled biochemistry. At that point, it effects a metabolism that allows the process of life to be continuous. During metabolism, waste products are given off. Some of them are gaseous and rise into the atmosphere. On earth, for example, early single-cell life produced massive amounts of waste oxygen that rose into the atmosphere and would have been easily detectable by aliens.
Also the amount of factors that must be present for sustainable life are incredible. The way the earth works to remain habitable is incredible. From continental shift, volcanism, gravity, the atmosphere, water cycle. If any one thing for any reason stopped working, it would slowly become inhabitable. That’s what happened to Mars and why it dried up. Some water was lost into space but much of it just soaked into the rocks. You could recover it by super heating the rocks. It soaks into earths rocks as well. The problem is for mars volcanism ended long ago for whatever reason while on earth our shifting crust pushes rocks into the mantle where they melt, and eject back to surface with the water as well through a volcano. Our planet is a balanced cycle while others even in our own system may once have been habitable closer to the time they formed but didn’t possess the delicate balance to remain that way.
Even these planets in the Trappist system are so far away we are seeing images of their light emitted millions or billions of years ago. They could in reality look like Mars or Venus today if they don’t possess the delicate balance of all things needed to maintain it habitable environment indefinitely. And we wouldn’t really know until we figure a way to travel across space at crazy speeds to get there and back within a persons lifetime or some type of super telescope that can actually see it how it appears today rather than how it appeared billions of years ago
Posted on 7/27/22 at 10:36 am to hubertcumberdale
quote:
Lmfao why do they even release these? Just say your team is analyzing the data
Glad to see they are using an Atari 2600 to process images.
Posted on 7/27/22 at 10:37 am to Fun Bunch
quote:
Not to go into a total tangent, but I guess it depends on your definition of "humans". The chromosome fuse happened around 6 million years ago (split off from other primates), but I think Homo Sapiens is only like 300,000 ish years old right?
It’s Homo sapiens sapiens that is about 300,000 years old. Neanderthals were Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and Denisovans were Homo sapiens denisova. There were other subspecies of Homo sapiens but these are the most notable.
Within Homo sapiens sapiens, full consciousness apparently “turned on” about 60,000 years ago. This involved the full use of symbolism, reasoning and planning, among other skills.
Posted on 7/27/22 at 10:47 am to Chucktown_Badger
quote:
We basically already know these planets have no chance of hosting life because they’re orbiting a red dwarf.
It’s a reasonable conclusion based upon the knowledge we’ve accumulated so far. However, with Webb we’ll be able to determine much, much more about the relationships between dwarf stars and their exoplanets.
The scientific method is infallible because it involves observations and is always open to additional knowledge.
Because the Trappist-1 system has seven earth-sized exoplanets, most questions about dwarf star systems may be answered or refuted from Webb observations regarding the potential for life in them.
Posted on 7/27/22 at 10:50 am to Willie Stroker
quote:
Glad to see they are using an Atari 2600 to process images.
Well they only have 68 GB of storage, so you may not be far off.
Posted on 7/27/22 at 10:51 am to Kentucker
quote:
think that once a civilization advances to machine life that it is unlikely to die off. Rather, I think it will leave its solar system and explore the Universe. We are on the threshold of creating machine life. We could be the very first civilization to evolve to this point.
An interesting thought. Could you perfect human cloning and robotics to a point where you send a machine programmed to find habitable planets in far away galaxies and clone humans using preserved dna material upon reaching those planets? And care for those humans as parents? It would take millions of years but it could be a way.
Either that or figure out a way to travel at light speed with a ship that is self sustaining I.e can generate oxygen and grow crops. You could then reach some nearby solar systems in a few hundred years if you had volunteers willing to get on a ship and have a few generations live on just the ship their whole lives.
Nothing is very feasible unless we figure out first traveling at light speed. Beyond that we have to hope for a major breakthrough in our understanding of physics and disprove Einsteins theory that anything faster than light speed is not attainable.
Posted on 7/27/22 at 10:54 am to deltaland
quote:
Even these planets in the Trappist system are so far away we are seeing images of their light emitted millions or billions of years ago.
Trappist-1 is only 39.46 light years away. That means the light we’re seeing from that system left there in 1983 and arrived today, not millions or billions of years ago.
I hope this changes your perspective.
Posted on 7/27/22 at 11:04 am to deltaland
quote:
Either that or figure out a way to travel at light speed with a ship that is self sustaining I.e can generate oxygen and grow crops. You could then reach some nearby solar systems in a few hundred years if you had volunteers willing to get on a ship and have a few generations live on just the ship their whole lives.
Watch the movie Voyagers (2021) when you get a chance.
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