|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#1
|
|||
|
|||
NASA Received An SOS Call From Another Galaxy
On Thursday, July 31, 2014 6:50:45 PM UTC-7, John wrote:
On Thu, 31 Jul 2014 17:51:24 -0700 (PDT), Brad Guth wrote: On Friday, July 25, 2014 1:53:47 PM UTC-7, John wrote: If our planet for whatever good/bad reason lost its star, As it will, soon. In about five milliard years or so. there'd still be a bit of open water, That is nonsensical. Without Sol, Earth's surface would plummet to the temperature of open vacuum, roughly three Kelvin, plus a few micro-Kelvin from the core. Rock is a damned good insulator. Miles of it would effectively cut the hot core off from the surface. With no Sol, the air would go solid, with the odd puddles of helium scattered about. Helium, it seems, never freezes. and the geothermal core that's mostly fission driven would continue for billions of years. Well, mostly fission-driven with a great contribution from the infalling rock that made the planet. The residual heat from all those milliards of impacts would have kept the core fluid to this day even without the contribution from radioactives. A km underground and there'd be no indications that we no longer had a sun. I've read an SF story or two based on this. It's a limited existence with no real point. Chances are no subterranean survivors would bother trying to dig their way up through the permafrost so that world would essentially be dead as far as the rest of the cosmos is concerned. They might be having fun but they would be on a slow road to extinction. Sort of like humans on Earth are after having killed the Dream of Stars. Whatever created complex life on Earth should be fairly commonplace throughout this galaxy and our universe of a trillion other galaxies. "Should"? Perhaps. "Could", also perhaps. But there is no certainty of either. There are scientists who think that because Earth's hot smoky pipes have abundant life clustered around them Europa's "should" and "could", too. This is idiotic, magical, peasant thinking. It is entirely backwards. It is the mewlings of a child, scared of the dark and wanting her hamster not to be dead. Earth's life around volcanic vents in the deep ocean *came* *from* *the* *sunlit* *shallows*. The life on Earth was born in warm, shallow seas lit by sunlight, powered by lightning and cooked by radioactivity. There is absolutely no justification at all for supposing that life can evolve anywhere but in warm, shallow *SUNLIT* seas. None. It *may* be possible. It may be common. It may have happened in the ocean of Europa, deep within Enceladus and even in the "hot" springs of Triton and lakes on Io and deep in the clouds of Jupiter but ... as of now we only *KNOW* life evolves in shallow, warm, sunlit seas on large worlds with lightning and radioactivity. It is entire possible that *only* such worlds can have life. That life can be pushed down to the black smokers but can never begin there. The universe is cruel and cold and lethal it may take extraordinary conditions to make life. We don't know. Sheer vastness is not knowledge. Sheer vastness is not necessarily any guide to anything. Just knowing there are may icy moons does not make any of them life-bearing. Even if there are quintillions of them in ever so many galaxies. We know *nothing* of life elsewhere in this cosmos. If we don't fund hundreds of probes to Europa, Io, Enceladus and Triton we may *never* know. As we're not currently even planning to fund *any* this looks very likely. However, even if every world in the Solar System apart from one (guess which?) turns out to be completely sterile and always has been, that is absolutely no guide to the possibility of life elsewhere. Even if we send out falling city-farms to the other star systems and explore their worlds for a million years or more, we will *still* not be able to say for definite that life can't happen somewhere we have yet to look. But the more we find sterility and silence the more *likely* it is that the Earth is unique. At present, it is. At present, so far as our knowledge stretches, Earth is the only world with life. If it dies here without spreading to the stars it dies everywhere in the cosmos forever. We have zero evidence to suppose this to be wrong. Sure, Europa *should* have life. Io *could* have life. Jupiter's clouds *would* have life were it possible and easy and ineluctable but these may be fantasies. All we *KNOW* is that life is here, on Earth and it is in danger. We should be doing stuff to make it less at risk. Like taking the galaxies for our home. If humans die on this rock no one will remember our songs. J. A few hundred meters or possibly a km and most assuredly deeper below the surface, makes no difference whatsoever if our planet has a sun. |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
NASA's Best Photos: You Make the Call | [email protected] | UK Astronomy | 0 | July 24th 08 11:12 PM |
New Scientist SPACE - Orphaned quasar seeks galaxy to call home | Nick | UK Astronomy | 0 | October 5th 05 10:45 AM |
Celestron 80ED received and examined | Doug Peterson | Amateur Astronomy | 3 | December 1st 04 10:20 AM |
Almost 27 years since the WOW! signal was received | Victor | SETI | 0 | September 2nd 04 11:54 AM |
I received an alien song | Lester T. Linpord | SETI | 2 | February 11th 04 07:28 PM |