The elemental building blocks are universal; their abundance is not.
Extraterrestrial life
Rob Sheldon: That “sterile exoplanet ocean” paper is bunk!
The amazing thing about life, is that it is always so very adaptable. Who knew that bugs can live at 140C, or with metabolism so slow it takes centuries to replicate?
Exoplanets: Those water worlds would have sterile oceans too…
Researchers: An all-ocean planet would be sterile due to lack of nutrients leached from land.
Recent finding: The “water world” exoplanets are not habitable ocean planets
So, it turns out, even if there IS lots of water in a solar system, that doesn’t add up to habitability either. Talk about Rare Earth and Privileged Planet.
Researchers: Most life-friendly planets orbiting young stars would quickly lose atmosphere
From their results: More likely is that many of the planets orbiting M-dwarf stars to have very thin or possible no atmospheres. In both cases, life forming in such systems appears less likely than previously believed.
Researcher: Why finding extraterrestrial life “now seems inevitable,” maybe soon
He ends with, “The ancient question ‘Are we alone?’ has graduated from being a philosophical musing to a testable hypothesis. We should be prepared for an answer.” It’s worth asking another question: What if, after decades of research, no answer comes? What would that change?
Faint hopes easily revived! “Life may be evolving” on closest exoplanet
The fundamental problem is still the same: It is very difficult to extrapolate from a sample of one instance of life. Suppose we had information on tens of thousands of exoplanets, thousands of which had life. Making the reasonable assumption that a pattern develops within this data, we could then give fairly reliable odds on a given planet having life if its relevant data are known. But we don’t have any of this. It’s all a dreamscape.
Forbes’ cosmology commentator: Maybe we ARE alone
He goes through the usual potted history of life on Earth, omitting (they always do) to notice that the human mind is a quite different sort of development than, say, sexual reproduction or flight. It’s the mind that prompts us to even ask questions about ET, yet no one has any idea what consciousness even is.
Rocks on super-Earths may flow too close to the surface for life
Wherever you thought you were on that planet, you would soon be somewhere else. But it’s not really anywhere, is it? Advice: Stay home on solid Earth.
Still no space aliens? That’s because they are keeping us in a zoo!
Some say it’s time to consider the zoo hypothesis: “They can see us but we can’t see them. The idea revisits a theory proposed in 1973 by radio astronomer John Ball: Ball went further, proposing that we may live in a metaphorical zoo — a kind of cosmic Eden. The aliens of the galaxy have […]
What? Oumuamua was just a comet? After all the ET hype?
Yeah. Sure. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that it was orthodox science media (Scientific American, we are looking at you… ) who were marketing the space alien thing, not some crackpot in a tinfoil hat. And yet the same people have the nerve to sponsor reams of stuff on why “people” believe in pseudoscience.
OOL researcher Paul Davies: They used to make fun of me for saying Earth, Mars swapped microbes…
If we discover life on Mars and it turns out to be a lot like life on Earth, as Davies suggests, will that be experienced as an achievement or a disappointment? It certainly won’t prove anything like what some have hoped. Heck, it won’t even prove that We Are NOT Alone…
Why we don’t find space alien trash
We invent explanations for not seeing the trash, quite apart from the fact that we have never seen the aliens. There, you stupid peasant, that’s real science thinking for you.
“Very few” exoplanets have strong magnetic fields like Earth’s
This means that the search for extraterrestrial life should focus on planets with strong magnetic fields. Meanwhile, why is it that a thousand coincidences pointing in the same direction never seem to add up to a pattern, just something to explain away?
Should we look for patterns of life, not chemical signatures, on Mars?
Was it Hugh Ross who said that if we find fossilized life on Mars, chances are, it’ll have come from Earth? That’s at least possible if life started very early when the planets were not as firm. But how frustrating for those looking for genuine non-Earth life…