Panspermia
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Was reading about the Silurian hypothesis from NASA researchers, which talks about how hard it could be to detect a previous technological society in the geological record. (Harder than I’d assumed.) [1]
Given that — and climate change being top-of-mind — I was thinking about Venus and wondering: how certain/uncertain are scientists that Venus’s greenhouse effect wasn’t caused by a technologically advanced society, a very long time ago?
From my understanding, it’s so hot there that anything we’ve sent has burned up rather quickly. If it’s indeed very difficult to detect a previous civilization in the geological record on earth, what does that say about Venus?
The thing that gave me a particular "oh" moment was reading the study that correlated Earth's geologic events (mass extinctions, impacts, etc) timed to our Sun transiting through the spiral arms of our galaxy. Fun read: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1309.4838.pdf
If we bio-engineered some plants to create pockets of lighter gas they could float in the air. Energy generation would be easy because of the thermal differential to the surface.
The biggest problem for being outside longterm (years) is the lack of a ionosphere of similar strength to Earth, but I think that could be tackled. The psychological impact of long days could also be partially mitigated by having the bioengineered pods use sails or engines to follow dusk and go in and out of it, simulating an earth day. But similar gravity and tons of potential compared to shitty Mars.
Those plants would also need to be able live in an atmosphere that contains seven times more sulfuric acid than water vapors. It's not easy to sustain protein life outside of Earth.
Still a nicer place than Mars, I agree.
(Edit: sounds like there’s been recent research suggesting there was a decent window of time where life might have had a chance to appear on Venus: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hellish-venus-mig...)
The idea is mentioned in Kim Stanley Robinson's "2312", where simple organisms exist in Enceladus's ocean, and some people inject them for fun (with neutral or mildly beneficial effects).
It transpires that when encoded into quaternary, and thence to base pairs, the joke "What lies at the bottom of the sea, shivering? A nervous wreck!" encodes a viral sequence for a novel but entirely deadly pneumatic disease.
When one of the rockets misfires and detonates in a Bernard Matthews turkey farm, all human life on this planet is quickly extinguished.
100 million years later, a crashed alien spacecraft is discovered by the inhabitants of Gliese 15s, triggering a cultural revolution involving terrible puns and mildly amusing logical inconsistencies.
* The universe at the moment is on average large, cold and quite hostile to life.
* At some point in the past all the energy in the universe was concentrated roughly at one point
* So, in between, the universe was a soup of energy that would have been, on average, warm, comfortable and conducive to life.
It dovetails with this because it is a plausible "why would life have evolved somewhere else but not here" counterargument. I wouldn't buy it though, it seems likely to me that earth's life is a local phenomenon.
> Between about 10 and 17 million years the universe's average temperature was suitable for liquid water (273 – 373K) and there has been speculation whether rocky planets or indeed life could have arisen briefly, since statistically a tiny part of the universe could have had different conditions from the rest, and gained warmth from the universe as a whole.
But there's another possibility: perhaps panspermia is easy in the dense star cluster the Solar System formed in, which packed 1000 or more stars into a cubic parsec. In that case, if life originated early, it could then spread to all the other star systems in that cluster. This would amplify the statistical weight of "early" OoL. Most planets on which life gains a foothold would be those in which OoL happened to occur in this birth nursery, and then spread.
This concept has interesting implications for SETI and science fiction. Life might be extraordinarily rare or absent elsewhere in the universe, but there may still be thousands of other systems in our galaxy that were seeded along with ours. They'd be spread out now around a ~180 degree arc around the center of the galaxy.
Also isn’t a theory a hypothesis that has already been tested and supported with evidence?
the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.
a particular system of faith and worship.
a pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance.
And you get a warm, wet rock.
Statistics, probability theory and physics don't work like that. You can't arrive at the conclusion by stating a premise and wishful thinking.
Side note, I think you could make stronger points by not distracting with that kind of off-putting sarcasm.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-physics-the...
Funny how we go from “we are the only ones here” to “lifs is everywhere” and Drake’s equation is a giant fudge:
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/384:_The_Drake_Eq...
So atheists are sure that creationism is silly but then postulate Multiverse Theory + Anthropic Principle and Life is Inevitable?
Let’s ALL be humble and say that, at this point, we have absolutely no idea how life began, and these are all speculative and unproven theories.
I hope you're happy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geon_%28physics%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe