Alien Life May Exist on Large Planet 30T Miles from Earth: Researchers | Hacker News Reader

Alien Life May Exist on Large Planet 30T Miles from Earth: Researchers

ntd.com

15 pointsremg1912 comments

5.1 light years, if you want comprehensible units. That's pretty close as far as stars go.

Edit: It's also wrong; the actual distance is about 5.9 light years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_Star

To put this in context, Voyager 1 has traveled around 0.0019871 light years so far.

Blogspam of https://www.theepochtimes.com/alien-life-may-exist-on-large-... ?

Anyway, they didn't find any proof of life there. They only found liquid water, that is a good sign, but the title is almost a linkbait.

Except, they haven't found proof of water:

"But if there is water on the planet, geothermal heating could provide conditions for life in an otherwise inhospitable environment, the researchers add."

It's further noted later in the article that the environment would likely be that of Europa.

Supposition is that if liquid water exists, there could potentially be life.

Thanks. I missed the "second" if.

Anyway, It would not be surprising that they confirm that there is water there. IANAA, but water may be confirmed in the next 10-20 years. Water is everywhere, and someone has measured the atmosphere composition of other planet using the change of the spectrum just before/after partial occlusions of the star by the planet.

Life is difficult to confirm and it would be a much greater news. [I expect that there is (bacterial like) life in these kind of planets, but until confirmation it's just an speculation.]

Which in turn is a Falun Gong funded rewrite of a press release from actual scientists at Villanova. https://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/media/pressreleases/201...

Clickbait title. This is a completely unsupported speculative hypothesis with no new data.

I would cite the original Villanova U press release (https://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/media/pressreleases/201...) rather than either NTD or The Epoch Times, as both of the latter are not entirely reliable sources.

What does water on another have to do with life there? Yes, the form of matter self-animation and replication that evolved on earth requires water, but won't similar evolution on another planet have different dependencies based on the environment of that place?

Water is the one unifying factor among all currently known forms of life. Even extremophiles on Earth still require liquid water.

Water is awesome in that is a universal solvent. It's plausible life could form around a different universal solvent, but to date, we don't have any evidence of it happening.

Life that is recognizable to us definitely needs some sort of solvent to even begin to exist. We know water can support life. We don't know that there are any other solvents that can. We also know of a bunch of places that don't have liquid water, like the moon, that don't appear to host life. Probably there isn't life on objects that look like the moon or Mercury.

Water is also really common (if not usually liquid), so you might expect that a good fraction of all the life in the universe would use water. Why worry about looking for exotic life in galactic nebulas (or whatever) when we aren't even sure how to detect it. Working out a way to detect watery life is way easier, and if there's a nearbyish exoplanet with a rocky Earthesque planet with water then we absolutely should look there first.

Metallicity is low, but, hey, it's a rocky planet at a relatively safe distance. There is a reasonable chance there is still something covering the surface that resembles an atmosphere.

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