• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

A New Theory On Life In Our Region

Dryson

Commodore
Commodore
ʻOumuamua' - ʻOumuamua is a small object, estimated to be about 230 by 35 meters (800 ft × 100 ft) in size. It has a dark red color, similar to objects in the outer Solar System. ʻOumuamua showed no signs of a comet tail despite its close approach to the Sun, but has since undergone non-gravitational acceleration consistent with comet outgassing. It has significant elongation and rotation rate, so it is thought to be metal-rich with a relatively high density. ʻOumuamua is tumbling, rather than smoothly rotating, and is moving so fast relative to the Sun that there is no chance it originated in the Solar System. It also means that ʻOumuamua cannot be captured into a solar orbit, so it will eventually leave the Solar System and resume traveling through interstellar space. ʻOumuamua's system of origin and the amount of time it has spent traveling amongst the stars are unknown.

Since Oumuamua is a comet that is not able to be caught in a solar orbit because it is moving so fast fast relative to the sun, could the object that impacted Earth and is thought to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs along with it origins not being known be part of a train of exo-solar objects from another region of the galaxy be responsible for extinguishing life on Mars and changing the environment on Earth forever?

I came to this theory after watching this History Channel documentary on the First Apocalypse.
To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

In the video the size of the asteroid that impacted Earth is thought to have been larger than Mt. Everest. An object that large could possibly generate its own gravity field or at least cause widespread impact events as it crashed through the rings around Saturn or Jupiter causing other meteors and asteroids to pummel the planets in the habitable zone.

As the Dino Killer traveled from its point of origin could it have had smaller bits of debris that impacted planets as far out as Gliese 317 that caused extinction level events which could be the reason why we haven't discovered any life within 50 ly of Earth yet?

Could Oumuamua be a comet that was dislodged from the Oort Cloud and was effected in such a manner that the impact from the Dino Killer asteroid sent it on an end over end tumble in the direction of Earth? But more importantly, does Oumuamua pave the way for an extinction event theory where a large swarm of asteroids as big as Mount Everest traveled through the Sol system region and caused extinction level events as far out as 50 ly?

Could Earth have been lucky and avoided larger asteroids that killed off life completely on the planets that have been discovered thus far? Since Earth, Mars and some of the planets orbiting the gas giants of Jupiter and Saturn have been discovered with having water on them I am convinced that a lot of water would have formed on planets within 50 ly of Earth...if....if those suns that have planets in orbit around them are relatively the same age as our own Sun.
 
Oumuamua isn't a comet but an asteroid, large chunk of rock and rich in nickel/iron, asteroids don't vent since they have nothing to vent...
 
Doing just a little bit of research helps....

Oumuamua isn't a comet but an asteroid, large chunk of rock and rich in nickel/iron, asteroids don't vent since they have nothing to vent...

Observatories including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found that the interstellar object named ‘Oumuamua gained an extra boost of speed, which likely comes from comet-like jets of gas.

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
 
No one has found life in a 50ly radius as no one has the capability to seriously look for it, yet.
If you mean SETI efforts in the immediate area, that's different. But in terms of light, no, and the nearby stars are still being searched for exoplanets. Right now the capability to do complex spectography of small rocky worlds outside our solar system does not exist. It would perhaps be even more difficult to discovery such possibly signs of life chemistry on large moons around gas giants and super-Jupiters, which is unfortunate as that may be the prime place to look.

We'll just have to get out there and visit one of these centuries.
 
At the speed of light the energy from our own sun would only take 50 years to reach a planet such as Gliese 317 that is 50 ly away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_317

In one billion years energy from our sun would have come into contact with a planet at 50 ly from us 20,000,000 times. If the same volume of life building elements that are present on Earth are present out to 50 ly then there is a good chance that life does exist or at one time existed but might be in a rebuilding phase as a result of a major asteroid impact event that took place such as the Dino Killer roid.
 
Life may well have come here from across interstellar space, but it had to start somewhere. Nothing suggests it didn’t start here.

Oumuamua is fascinating, it fires the imagination, but its also just a rock. How awesome would it be to hold a rock forged from minerals born of the ashes of a long dead alien sun. Would it feel any different in our hands to a terrestrial rock, or local meteor? Probably not, but the imagination is fired nonetheless.
 
What's interesting about Life on Earth is that it all originates with exactly one kind. One thing became ... everything. Whatever that microbe was or could be called. And if only Earth-like planets can support that one kind of Life, then it stands to reason that all planets with Life are going to be very similar and familiar. Could 60's STAR TREK, in particular, have gotten it right, all along? I am beginning to wonder ...
 
What's interesting about Life on Earth is that it all originates with exactly one kind. One thing became ... everything. Whatever that microbe was or could be called. And if only Earth-like planets can support that one kind of Life, then it stands to reason that all planets with Life are going to be very similar and familiar. Could 60's STAR TREK, in particular, have gotten it right, all along? I am beginning to wonder ...

I don’t know about that. There are branches of the tree of life were cut short, but could have flourished under different circumstances to the detriment of the species we see today. So even if the basic biochemistry developed the same, compatibly even, the dominant forms could be very different.
 
What's interesting about Life on Earth is that it all originates with exactly one kind. One thing became ... everything. Whatever that microbe was or could be called. And if only Earth-like planets can support that one kind of Life, then it stands to reason that all planets with Life are going to be very similar and familiar. Could 60's STAR TREK, in particular, have gotten it right, all along? I am beginning to wonder ...

Most baryonic matter in the universe is plasma. If some kind of replicating pattern of plasma formations could exist and therefore exhibit some of our definitions of life, then life in stars may outnumber carbon based life so much that it would be a tiny outlier. That's just me musing. But back to life as we know it..

I think if we find life on one of Saturn's or Jupiter's moons, or that long-shot chance we find evidence it once existed/still exists on Mars, then we have to consider a broader case for panspermia or that life processes are just likely to happen when the right chemicals and conditions exist. Life might be everywhere. Intelligent life I think though, or at least at our level, is probably much rarer. It took billions of years to form on our world and it may be fleeting thing.

There are far more brown-dwarfs than yellow starts, and it appears they also have planetary systems in many cases, with a much closer Goldilocks zone, but also more prone to their stars perturbations, which means life if it developed and thrived, must evolve very differently from the way we did. Life in the galactic core, likewise, if it exists must be extremely hardy to radiation or else buried under kilometers of ice on water-worlds.
 
Don't we need to define what we mean by "life"?

NASA's definition is "A self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution". While that definition seems quite broad at first glance, it specifies a chemical system, and so it excludes plasma, photonic and other more exotic systems that might be capable of Darwinian evolution. What about forms of life that exploit Lamarckian inheritance somehow or that were artificially created by other organisms or that require constant external input to sustain their existence?

Is there a better definition available for life? It's a tricky question...

https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/life's_working_definition.html
 
I don’t know about that. There are branches of the tree of life were cut short, but could have flourished under different circumstances to the detriment of the species we see today. So even if the basic biochemistry developed the same, compatibly even, the dominant forms could be very different.
Most baryonic matter in the universe is plasma. If some kind of replicating pattern of plasma formations could exist and therefore exhibit some of our definitions of life, then life in stars may outnumber carbon based life so much that it would be a tiny outlier. That's just me musing. But back to life as we know it..

I think if we find life on one of Saturn's or Jupiter's moons, or that long-shot chance we find evidence it once existed/still exists on Mars, then we have to consider a broader case for panspermia or that life processes are just likely to happen when the right chemicals and conditions exist. Life might be everywhere. Intelligent life I think though, or at least at our level, is probably much rarer. It took billions of years to form on our world and it may be fleeting thing.

There are far more brown-dwarfs than yellow starts, and it appears they also have planetary systems in many cases, with a much closer Goldilocks zone, but also more prone to their stars perturbations, which means life if it developed and thrived, must evolve very differently from the way we did. Life in the galactic core, likewise, if it exists must be extremely hardy to radiation or else buried under kilometers of ice on water-worlds.
Nat Geo has this to say about how Life began ...
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/100513-science-evolution-darwin-single-ancestor/
 
^That article states nothing about how life on Earth began - only that it's more probable that there was a single ancestor rather than multiple separate ancestors of all modern cells - that doesn't mean it was the first cell.
 
Very well ... hopefully, this hour-long Cosmology Programme will do the trick:

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
 
Very well ... hopefully, this hour-long Cosmology Programme will do the trick:

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

I'm taking about life existing within a 50 ly range of the Earth and whether or not the Dino Killer asteroid that traveled its course to Earth potentially had companions such as the O U Ate One Too (Oumuamua comet) that traveled with it as swarm where the swarm could then have caused other extinction level events on planets within 50 ly from Earth.

If life is contained in rocks then any planet with water, oxygen and carbon on it along with the other elements that are commonly found in life on Earth, life will exist on that planet in some form.

I will get back to this later but one area that everyone can look into is the following:

1. What type of super nova was our Sun created from?
2. How far away from the center of the super nova that created our sun is our located?
2. When was our Sun created?
3. When were the other suns within 50 ly created?
4. How do the other suns compare to our sun in elemental output?
 
Since Oumuamua is a comet that is not able to be caught in a solar orbit because it is moving so fast fast relative to the sun, could the object that impacted Earth and is thought to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs along with it origins not being known be part of a train of exo-solar objects from another region of the galaxy be responsible for extinguishing life on Mars and changing the environment on Earth forever?

Such a "theory" is unnecessarily complicated and relies upon a high-order set of coincidences. Occam's Razor says no.
 
The scientic method requires that a theory provide empirically testable predictions that are falsifiable by experiment. Nothing is ever provably true as in mathematics.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top