ydoaPs Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 "There is no way that life on a gas giant could be similar to us" is pure speculation too. It is based on no proof.
JaKiri Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 "There is no way that life on a gas giant could be similar to us" is pure speculation too. It is based on no proof. We're designed to live on a hard surface, and interact with solid objects. Pretty much everything, from skellington to handies, are 'designed' (as it were) with this in mind. How you expect hands (for example) to work in a big cloud of gas and nothing else is beyond me.
ydoaPs Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 the core of jupiter is supposed to be liquid H (because of pressure, not temp). maybe it would have started as a fin, then turned into a wing. and that wing got a claw to aid in feeding. or we could skip the flight all togather and go from fin to claw
admiral_ju00 Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 That's an interesting proposition. As J'Donna said, considering how many factors are involved in this game, anything is possible.
JaKiri Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 the core of jupiter is supposed to be liquid H (because of pressure, not temp). maybe it would have started as a fin, then turned into a wing. and that wing got a claw to aid in feeding. or we could skip the flight all togather and go from fin to claw You're just going by 'it's a liquid!' here, rather than forgetting the immense crushing oh my god my spirit pressure.
ydoaPs Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 who said they it has to be at similar pressure to us or life in the ocean? as i said b4, life has proven to be in every extreme.
Sayonara Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 my bio book and common sense. they would need thumbs to build a ship. and cephalization for a brain as we know it. The OP didn't say anything about ships, or meeting aliens. You lot really need to read the MANY other threads on this in the exobiology forum. (Thread moved because it has more to do with Evolution than Astronomy.)
JaKiri Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 who said they it has to be at similar pressure to us or life in the ocean?as i said b4' date=' life has proven to be in every extreme.[/quote'] The 'extremes' on earth are rather mild compared to the extremes of the rest of the universe in every way. We can postulate that it's possible that life can exist anywhere, but it's really quite within the realms of possibility that there are some places that life simply can't be.
ydoaPs Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 who is to say where? wat makes you qualified to say tha life can't exist in a gas giant? even if we did look and didn't find anything, it wouldn't prove that life can't exist there.
JaKiri Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 who is to say where? wat makes you qualified to say tha life can't exist in a gas giant?even if we did look and didn't find anything' date=' it wouldn't prove that life can't exist there.[/quote'] No it doesn't. However, all instances of life we've come across have shown no evidence of having the capability of existing in such an environment, so for now it's better to assume that they can't. Note: This isn't a statement of fact, this is an assumption based on evidence.
ydoaPs Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 thats like if all you see are birds, you assume life can't exist underwater
Sayonara Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 An analogous situation: You're trying to find your car keys. You don't remember where you left them, but it's reasonable to assume that they are somewhere in the house, seeing as you had them when you got back from work the night before. Going down the road to look in the fish pond at number 78 is a big waste of your time.
ydoaPs Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 thats not quite analogous, but I'll admit it's close. still, ruling out something because you've never seen anything like it before is stupid. say an alien race is looking for life and comes to our system. Every terrestrial planet it has seen has had no life. so it passes Earth and goes to Jupiter. That is what JaKiri we should do exept we haven't even looked for life.
Sayonara Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 thats not quite analogous' date=' but I'll admit it's close. still, ruling out something because you've never seen anything like it before is stupid. say an alien race is looking for life and comes to our system. Every terrestrial planet it has seen has had no life. so it passes Earth and goes to Jupiter. That is what JaKiri we should do exept we haven't even looked for life.[/quote'] Yeah, it's a crude approximation but it's more to illustrate the efficiency of the method rather than the potential for unexpected rewards. We could just fire off a million probes every which way, but we'd never see a return on the investment. Targetting our efforts in places we know that we have a good chance of success is much more likely to garner a success per mission launched. In the case of your aliens, you are simplifying the situation slightly. Perhaps every terrestrial planet they have seen had no life, but if they are aware that life can flourish under the conditions that commonly exist on terrestrial planets they would still be looking. I don't think JaKiri intended to suggest that the only chance for success is to look for Earth-like planets, or that doing so would guarantee success. On a slightly related note, an alien probe landing in the deep desert, or the arctic, might well not send back any evidence of life on Earth. Whether or not the builders considered this planet worthy of further investigation would depend on whether or not they had previously observed life that flourished under the reported conditions.
ydoaPs Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 you just illustrated my point. even if we don't find anything it wouldn't mean its not there. it doesnt even have to be on a planet or moon; it could be on an asteroid or comet.
J'Dona Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 That's an interesting proposition. As J'Donna said, considering how many factors are involved in this game, anything is possible.Whoa, please don't interpret that as me saying life in the liquid hydrogen mantle of a gas giant is possible. Boiling hot and high pressure... those conditions might be comparable to a mild version of the surface of the Sun. It might be possible for life - microbial life - to exist in the very upper layers of atmosphere in a gas giant, but only if the gas giant is very nicely and very improbably suited for it and only if it arrived later via an asteroid or comet (highly unlikely). As far as I know there's no life that can make a living off of raw hydrogen gas, or (if they're lucky) some inert helium every now and then. If there was any oxygen, the chances are it would react with any hydrogen gas to form water which promptly falls down into the mantle. Some gas giants have things like sodium in their atmosphere (the first planet to be "explored" was one passing in front of its star and they detected sodium in it, by infrared spectroscopy I believe), but that still doesn't help life very much. And even if there were the amino acids etc. needed to start off life, they would be too heavy and would fall down into the mantle. Non-carbon-based proteins (e.g. silicon-based) either just can't work peroid or are completely out of the question as they would be too heavy. I think the conclusion we can draw from this, since all planets seem to be either rocky, gas giants or ice (way too cold for life), that any complex life could really only form on rocky planets. In that case, the Earth seems a reasonable point to draw examples from, and there's no life on Earth that could survive on a gas giant so we can say for now that it cant with some certainty.
Sayonara Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 you just illustrated my point. even if we don't find anything it wouldn't mean its not there. it doesnt even have to be on a planet or moon; it could be on an asteroid or comet. We're not talking about whether or not life is 'there'. We're talking about where we should bother looking.
admiral_ju00 Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 Whoa, please don't interpret that as me saying life in the liquid hydrogen mantle of a gas giant is possible..... I was trying to place that into an 'out of context' perspective, so no, you're safe there. I brought up the notion in #7, and you did something I felt lazy to do so myself in # 13, you elaborated on #7.
ydoaPs Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 y look for life that is like us?if we want to learn about life don't you think we should look for other kinds? u said all amino acids and wat would fall to the mantle. plenty of energy to get life started and all the material in the right place. and you don't seem to understand that there are microbes lava and permafrost. and other such extremes. there is a multicellular organism that can even live through a nuclear blast.
Sayonara Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 y look for life that is like us?if we want to learn about life don't you think we should look for other kinds? I've already answered this. It's a simple matter of economics. You don't funnel billions of dollars of tax-payers money into looking for something that might not even exist at random locations when you have a much better chance of finding something that you already know does exist, in locations you know it has a chance of developing.
J'Dona Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 Yes, but without light or oxygen it's not going to get very far. It's all very well having a single protein strand but a single celled organism couldn't even respirate in that environment. I don't know which one you're talking about in lava and permafrost, but I'm sure those ones must be dormant in some way as biochemical reactions can't occur in those conditions, as far as I konw. Either way, it's not the same as a gas giant. The original questions were whether extraterrestrial life would be more intelligent than us and whether it would look like humans, which simply isn't possible on a gas giant.
ydoaPs Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 forget about money for now. lets use an analogy: how much are you gonna learn from 2+x=5 after u did it a few billion times?
YT2095 Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 topic.secondly if there are aliens would they look like humans? it`s not impossible, afterall, it`s happened once. although I`de consider it VERY unlikely that we`de ever find out one way or another, that really WOULD be stretching the boundaries of possibility!
ydoaPs Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 how do you know it isn't possible if you haven't looked. there are OLD programs on the Science Channel that were talking about the life in lava, so take it up with them.
Sayonara Posted July 8, 2004 Posted July 8, 2004 forget about money for now. No can do. If we don't consider the cost of the search for life, the discussion has no bearing on reality. Like it or not we do have to factor these things in. lets use an analogy: how much are you gonna learn from 2+x=5 after u did it a few billion times? That's an appalling analogy. Even if we found life off Earth that was so similar to us as to be virtually indistinguishable, it would answer many fundamental questions that have been debated for centuries. It would also raise new questions and challenges. It would still change the face of our society forever.
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