New Forum: Exobiology

[fafalone]

This forum is to discuss the existence and nature of life outside of Earth, including Mars, Europa, asteroids, and beyond; including statistical probability, methods of searching for life, and the potential impact on the scientific community of discovering new forms of life.

Please refrain from conspiracy theories concerning UFOs, these will be moved to the pseudoscience forum.

[KHinfcube22]

Dang...and I had a good one...Oh well...the best way to find life outside earth would have to be...ummmm...hmmmm...ome short of scanning wave that is shpereical that the bigger it gets, the stronger it gets...But that would be nearly impossible...obtaining light speed would probably be the next best idea...or faster than light...oh well...They find us...we shoot them out of existence...thats whats going to happen...Enders Game all over again...

[Dave]

I think they've got a few good ideas atm, searching places like Titan for signs of life because of the heavy atmosphere. I think Europa's definately worth a good look as well.

 

Some manned missions will be done eventually, I'm sure.

[fafalone]

Sayonara³ said in post #3 :

Even at light speed it takes a whole generation to reach our nearest neighbour. Humanity will not get around to visiting all candidate systems within the lifetime of our species - it's a more effective use of our time to work on communication rather than travel.

 

That's assuming the lifetime of our species is short; but give us a couple billion more years I'm sure we'll find a way... and that statement is also ruling out interference from another species who had a few billion years head start on us.

[Sayonara]

That's all true, but there are complications.

 

For instance with a hundred billion star systems in this galaxy, even if we started now and worked for a billion years we'd have to reach 100 systems a year to check them all out. That's a massive fleet of ships using technology and resources we won't have for a long, long time. Depressing, isn't it?

 

My statement is not really ruling out other sentient races finding us first, but it does imply that they will face similar engineering and logistical problems. The suggestion is of course, that the more advanced races there are, the better the chances of two of them meeting face-to-face.

[Sayonara]

Even at light speed it takes a whole generation to reach our nearest neighbour. Humanity will not get around to visiting all candidate systems within the lifetime of our species - it's a more effective use of our time to work on communication rather than travel.

[Sayonara]

Can I just point out that exobiology is actually a valid branch of science; in fact NASA and ESA spend considerable monies on exobiology.

 

Unfortunately exobiological predictions do require a lot of knowledge from various fields (atronomy, geology, organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, genetics, ecology, energetics.... it goes on) but there is plenty of material available on the web.

 

This is not the "random speculation" forum. We have one of those, located here: http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?forumid=59

[Dov]

Extraterrestrial Life?

 

The preoccupation of some humans with possibilities of off-Earth life and their efforts in search of extraterrestrial life are, in our present state of comprehension of the nature of life, futile and pitiful, as long as humans seek only extended-human-culture-like signals. Even our own base life elements, our genes, have no use and no need of cultural toolings for their needs and purpose, which are solely and neatly to survive and proliferate. Their proteinaceous toolings and chemical communications are for them superior to our toolings for our needs and purpose. Human-culture-like traits are just a chance diversion in the course of Earth life evolution, and they are superfluous for our genes for their proliferation purpose, being much less effective for their energy exploitation and chemical transformations and construction processes.

 

Likewise other life forms might have occurred somewhere and evolved and developed in other modes with other types of toolings and communications that render them replicable. Present human-culture-like traits may turn out to be less efficient also for the survival-replication of other life forms that may exist.

 

In order to conduct an effective search for non-Earth life it is required first to comprehend the basic nature of life that may be common to all possible forms of life. And since Life must evolve from Life, and in view of the characteristics of Life and Death, Life in general is most probably a "bubble of energy system", a system initiated and maintained by "energy" in a direction to reverse the universal thermodynamic drive to a state of ever dissipating order and energy.

[Molotov]

Even at light speed it takes a whole generation to reach our nearest neighbour. Humanity will not get around to visiting all candidate systems within the lifetime of our species - it's a more effective use of our time to work on communication rather than travel.

 

If im not mistaken at light speed we could reach the closest star in roughly 4 years.

[Sayonara]

When I say "reach our nearest neighbour" I don't mean to say that it is 20 years away - I'm considering it from the point of view of an entire mission, conducted as an exploratory affair (the assumption is that this is a pathfinder mission, not that we have fleets of "press a button" starships).

 

Planning, construction, launch, acceleration, deceleration, mapping planetoids in the target system, refabricating and deploying (perhaps even calibrating) whatever remote facilities or probes are required, mission fulfillment (which may involve manned observation systems), refuelling (if applicable), re-launch, acceleration, deceleration.

 

Acceleration and deceleration alone are likely to double the period of travel each way, so it's going to be around 16 years just for the trip there and back.

[LucidDreamer]

I think the best use of our time and energy right now is to continue sending out probes to other locations in our solar system. These non-manned missions are relatively inexpensive and give us a wealth of data about things outside our planet. I think the manned missions while being super-cool are dangerous, expensive, and provide a poor benefit/cost ratio.

 

Similarly the seti program is probably futile as well. It’s like searching for a particular piece of hay in a giant space-sized haystack. I don't know the exact numbers of this, but I have heard the chances of intercepting these waves are astronomically small.

 

Assuming that we won't create some kind of wormhole or a light-speed hyper-drive device enabling us to beat the speed of light, sending out star-trek like missions to explore and search for life is impractical. However, I do think that we have a good chance of finding intelligent life eventually. Some day we might posses the technology to transport ourselves at near light-speed. That coupled with bio-friendly spacecraft, genetic engineering, and cryogenics could allow us to colonize other planets. Man's civilization will form an ever-increasing web across the galaxy and the universe. Eventually we will bump into a neighboring alien civilization if we don't destroy ourselves first. After all that’s a long time off.