Habitable planet found around Gliese 581, 20 light years away
- Thread starter gturner
- Start date
But are those wet plains gonna be open for drilling, or are they gonna be protected?
Life as we know it anyways. Lifeforms adapt to the environment and evolve. Whether anything is alive there is obviously impossible to tell at this stage but the possiblity it can evolve into a multicellular or equivalent organism can't be discounted either. Though I do agree it's pretty much going to be something like slime or sludge if it is. If it had anything intelligent enough to be worth communicating with we'd see artificial satellites or something by now.It's a pretty big "might" on the planet's ability to sustain any meaningful life beyond bacteria and hardy life like that (bacteria and other microbial life has been found in some very harsh Earth environments) but any meaningful animal life or even intelligent life? Seems unlikely given the very small "habitable" area a tidally locked planet like this is going to have on its surface. Not impossible, granted, it's possible life could adapt in such harsh conditions to evolve into something meaningful but, in the end, it's not going to be a great vacation spot or any place we need to strip-mine for unobtanium or anything.
Absolutely. It probably won't be too many years before we can determine if it has water, oxygen....I love how the headline reads "near Earth." Twenty years away at light speed, a hundred thousand years at the best speed we've got.
The article is accurate, though; the news is also on the Bad Astronomy Blog at Discover, and other places. It's great news. The planet would not be a comfortable place for Humans; it's tidally locked, three times as massive as Earth, has very uncomfortable temperature extremes, and is probably very geologically active and meteorologically violent-- But it could very well be a good spot to find life. All we need now is a spectral analysis....
Still, it's cool knowing that we live in a time where there are astronomers actively looking for and successfully finding planets outside our solar system. We're living the beginning of epic things to come.
The spice must flow!
"Oh, oh, oh, I hope we meet a Cleric along the way. None of us knows how to heal."
Either that or they're graboids and they attempt to eat us.
I've no idea, which is why I asked!
What you (and RJ upthread) suggest seems to make sense to me though. If anyone who knows for certain would weigh in, that'd be cool too.
So desert on 1 side...near frozen on the other..a BIG middle zone for life is probable..
I think a spectral analysis to see what kind of atmosphere it has..can tell us if life is already there (free Oxygen would indicate a large plant population at least..combusted hydrocarbons could indicate an intelligent life form that uses technology similar to ours)..as for satellites,there's no way those could be detected at the distance involved..regarding radio signals and the like..we have only had radio for about 100 years or so...intelligence can exist without radio waves being generated....just read history.....
most likely, there's not much chance for complex life forms there..but it's possible..
I think a spectral analysis to see what kind of atmosphere it has..can tell us if life is already there (free Oxygen would indicate a large plant population at least..combusted hydrocarbons could indicate an intelligent life form that uses technology similar to ours)..as for satellites,there's no way those could be detected at the distance involved..regarding radio signals and the like..we have only had radio for about 100 years or so...intelligence can exist without radio waves being generated....just read history...
..most likely, there's not much chance for complex life forms there..but it's possible..
