Well,you used the word evidence and said that you are convinced so share with me what evidence has you convinced.
thoughts on aliens?
- Thread starter livebearerfreak
- Start date
Krich: here's how I see it. The chance of life occuring on a planet is incredibly slim, yet the chance of us being alone is also incredibly slim. How so? It's because of the sheer amount of planets out there. It's.....staggering......how many planets and star systems there are out there. Like, the number is so huge that is probably impossible to calculate. Even if only 1 in 2 million planets could host life, that's enough for hundreds and hundreds of planets with life on them.
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Yeah I get all of that but when someone uses words like convinced,and evidence then I take it that presentable facts must exist.
That's a pretty tall order, I've been reading on this subject for pretty much my entire life and I've been pretty heavily influenced by stuff I've learned in college. To answer this in depth would be to write a post comparable in size to my ATF sticky. I don't possess the level of conviction right now to tackle that type of writing.
However, a couple examples of what leads me to believe life exists elsewhere is as follows:
- The abundance of liquid water in our solar system. Proven on Enceladus and Europa and hypothesized based on the same factors on Titan, Ganymede, Callisto, Triton and several TNOs. Water is the most efficient known natural solvent which would allow life to form.
- The methanogenic environment on Titan. In a methanogenic environment, to include those here on Earth, the methanogenic organisms present metabolize hydrogen. Titan has a significant portion of its atmosphere comprised of hydrogen, enough that it is not 'trace amounts'. This hydrogen completely disappears at the surface of the moon. The implication of this is the possibility of either life or a completely unknown to science catalyst.
Granted, neither of those prove life is present in the Solar System, but twenty years ago all of those systems were thought to be completely lifeless. Now we have significant evidence to support the possibility of life elsewhere, and Titan itself has already been confirmed as a prebiotic environment, going as far as to be called an 'early Earth analog'. I included those examples to illustrate how the recent expansion of technology has opened up avenues of exploration that were not even imagined when I was in grade school. Where will another fifteen years land us? Fifty years? There are a couple of missions to the outer moons in the planning phase right now to go and see if life is there. We might see answers in our life.
With all of the potentially habitable exoplanets and exomoons discovered so far, all of which rate significantly higher on the Earth Similarity Index than does the moons of the outer planets, I find it likely that at least some of these planets would have what we recognize as life.
Heck, even Alpha Centauri, the star system that is closest to the Earth at just 4.3 light years yonder, had a planet discovered in the system in October 2012. This is one of the most observed star systems of the 20th century, and the technology didn't exist to find the Earth sized planet in orbit of Alpha Centauri B until seven months ago. What will we find in fifteen years? Fifty?
I'm going to submit this post before it threatens to turn into a book now. It is only a matter of time until we find a transiting Earth analog that allows us to spectroscopically analyze the atmosphere. The spectroscopic signatures of life would be unmistakeable.
EDIT- to add sources to stuff that I think of as obvious but which other members might not know about.
If sufficiently intelligent aliens were there to be caught on tape during space flights it was just to insure that we didn't do anything too stupid.
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