Except for the icecaps on the moon/mars and various other orbital bodies where "life" may not be now, as thought of commonly, but may have residual traces going by earth's own surprises.Yeah, those things are interesting...Nothing to do with astronomy though!
This blows my mind.
JWST and ELT both have or will have the capability to detect planetary atmospheric spectrums and they work in different wavelengths, so we will have the possibility to analyze planetary atmospheres in good enough detail that strong biospheric signals (like earth' 21% oxygen) can be identified. We just have to be lucky that we look in the right direction.
Interesting. I usually watch the SEA channel, which makes pretty good videos.
Surely at very large distances individual stars and their accompanying planets would be too faint to observe.
I guess that oxygen in an atmosphere, especially at such levels would have to have been created by things like photosynthesis and not during the formation of a planet.
Yes indeed. Although the JWST seems to be providing incredible amounts of information by using its Infrared capability detecting faint colours.
Pluto will be fuming at this. Downgraded to dwarf and then Jumbo’s come along
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https://www.universetoday.com/163533/could-modified-gravity-be-the-answer-to-planet-9/
https://www.independent.co.uk/space/planet-9-nine-solar-system-gravity-b2425533.html
interesting post. thanks.
Love that channel.
Loved that. Thanks for sharing it. I always thought the panspermia idea was more likely than the spontaneous evolution of life here, and this gives it greater plausibility.
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They are still hypothetical apparently, much like gravitons, tachyons, and several others.
Wormholes, etc.
It's between this and the Longest continually numbered posts in a row record attempt thread.
The big bang is thought to be from a white hole, an infinitely dense singularity travelling outwards. I'm not sure we'll ever know really about the first seconds (Plancktime) of the universe, theoretical physics it shall remain.
Yes and no. So much of what we observe and deduce from the universe comes from observations (mostly of light) and strong inference. As has been mentioned there are certain things that are strongly indicative of life. If we found a planet in a goldilocks zone with water vapour and high levels of oxygen (a highly reactive gas that, as far as we know can only exist in high proportions when continually generated by life) in the atmosphere we can start to infer the most likely source. We might never know for sure without more direct observations, but we'd get into the territory where a massive section of the community would dedicate itself to disproving that its life (e.g. similarly to when phosphene was detected on Venus). If those efforts start to flounder we can start to get excited.
Very interesting.
We will probably never now if Earth was seeded by Panspermia or if live from Earth seeded other planets in the solar system, but we would be able to prove relation, even at the most basic level. A strong indicator would be as similar genetic code. All live on Earth is using RNA (and DNA in more evolved lifeforms) using guanine, uracil (RNA only), adenine, cytosine and thymine (DNA only) and if we find live anywhere else in the universe that uses the same structure it would be an indicator for actual relation - there are a lot of organic molecules that form a chain structure beyond ribose and lot more nucleic acids beyond those five. So even a pretty similar lifeform could probably evolve but using a completely different genetic code (and then likely be unrelated)
Thank you so much for taking your time to respond in such an interesting way. That is fascinating and I will read it a few more times to fully understand it.
I'll happily add another thought to this: All life on earth is related to each other and can be traced back to a "large universal common ancestor" (LUCA). Science isn't very sure about how that looked, but it probably existed during the "RNA era" (so DNA evolved only to be used after this). Even further down in history there extremely likely has been a first universal common ancestor (FUCA) - all other descendants of which except LUCA died out, but though unlikely it is also possible that no branch deriving from FUCA died out, in which case FUCA and LUCA would be the same. If we would find other life in the solar system we could derive if it branched somewhere between FUCA and LUCA from our tree of life, in which case we wouldn't know if FUCA existed on Earth or if it originated on another body of the solar system (or even beyond) and only the LUCA branch of live arrived on Earth.
Right now we don't. If we don't find life anywhere else it becomes less likely as a possibility, but also less likely we could ever rule it in or out. In truth its hard to prove a negative. We could find 1000 other life forms that are completely different to the point we can be sure we aren't related to those, but that doesn't rule out there isn't a relative out there.
Again my friend. I really do appreciate your inputs which I read with great interest. You are a very clever man.
Thank you for this. I absolutely love reading this type of thing.
Thank you, but I'm just interested in this stuff
Do you have a scientific background.Thank you, but I'm just interested in this stuff
