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NASA Received An SOS Call From Another Galaxy



 
 
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Old August 15th 14, 01:24 AM posted to sci.astro.seti
Brad Guth[_3_]
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Default 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.
 




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