Re: Earth from deep space
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and finding oceans on extrasolar planets means identifying potentially habitable worlds.
This is something that has always bothered me...
What about the bacteria on those planets? Do we just exterminate all life on the surface first or what?
Re: Earth from deep space
How confident are we that there would even be bacteria on other planets? Just how rare is life, anyway?
And what if that life was based on a completely incompatible biology? What if, for instance, the proteins were utterly different? As in, indigestible by creatures from our chemical background? Would the two biospheres co-exist, or annihilate? Any terrestrial experiments tried to address any of these questions?
Re: Earth from deep space
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Originally Posted by
Reverend Joe
This is something that has always bothered me...
What about the bacteria on those planets? Do we just exterminate all life on the surface first or what?
Do you mean if we should inhabit them? Habitable in this context means that life as we know it could theoretically exist there.
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Originally Posted by
Lemur
How confident are we that there would even be bacteria on other planets? Just how rare is life, anyway?
Basically, we got little short of no clue as of how normal life is. It could be an exceptional cosmological jackpot and that the Earth is the only place with life in the entire universe; it could be rare but yet be found here and there in the galaxy; it could be extremely normal and exist several places even in the solar system (on places such as Mars, Europa, Ganymedes, Titan, Enceladus...the list goes on) and in almost every solar system; we simply do not know. Perhaps it could even reside life in some of the craters in the polar regions on the Moon, which are speculated to contain water ice where there is permanent shadowing (not that I've seen any serious speculation on the life part).
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And what if that life was based on a completely incompatible biology? What if, for instance, the proteins were utterly different? As in, indigestible by creatures from our chemical background? Would the two biospheres co-exist, or annihilate? Any terrestrial experiments tried to address any of these questions?
That would surely depend a lot.
Re: Earth from deep space
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Perhaps it could even reside life in some of the craters in the polar regions on the Moon, which are speculated to contain water ice where there is permanent shadowing (not that I've seen any serious speculation on the life part).
Wouldn't the lack of an atmosphere make life as we know it impossible?
Re: Earth from deep space
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Originally Posted by
Hax
Wouldn't the lack of an atmosphere make life as we know it impossible?
Well if it resides below the ice, it could have a local micro scale atmosphere; but as I said I haven't seen any serious speculation on this, so I should probably not have mentioned it...~;)
Re : Earth from deep space
This thread seems a good place:
The first pictures of planets outside our Solar System have been taken. Exoplanets! :balloon2:
Re: Earth from deep space
It is amazing the progress that has taken place in the study of exoplanets in our lifetimes.
I remember when I was first developing an interest in the fields of physics and astronomy some 15 years ago or so, exoplanets were an entirely theoretical concept; no one had yet found evidence they existed. Now they seem to be being found all over the place.