Science News: Earth-sized planets 'number 17bn'

Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you:

No adverts like this in the forums anymore.
Times and dates in your local timezone.
Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance.
Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely.
Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net.

If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

**Monster Rain**

Getting snippy about someone making speculations in a thread discussing potential alien life seems needlessly combative.

**Frazzled**

Grey Templar wrote:

I would however stress that we aren't the most Warlike. Ants get that title.

Some ants eat wood. Pussies. We even whack each other just because we're bored.

EDIT: Ants are cool though. Except red ants. They should all die in a horrendous fire. When the Great Wienie comes His Greatness will give them all jock itch. tee hee.

**Grey Templar**

Hey, you ever seen ants fight over a piece of wood? Not pretty.

**Monster Rain**

Do ants have jocks to be smote with itching?

**Grey Templar**

Not really, all the worker and soldier ants are female. The males hatch, find a young queen, get lucky, and die.

**sebster**

Frazzled wrote:
Thats sweet but is as stupid as it is irrelevant. No one is living in fear of aliens (except some military planners I am sure).

So you're not living in fear, you're just spending your time listing possible things that could go wrong in a new experience.

Well yeah, that's totally different. Well done there.

**Grey Templar**

Better to assume the experience would not be a good one than to foolishy assume they would be friendly. So if they are friendly you have a nice surprise. But you also won't be caught with your pants down if they arn't friendly.

**Frazzled**

Grey Templar wrote:
Hey, you ever seen ants fight over a piece of wood? Not pretty.

I will freely admit they can be absolute badass. Plus their wasp ancestors are like the Hells Angels of the bug world.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

sebster wrote:
Frazzled wrote:
Thats sweet but is as stupid as it is irrelevant. No one is living in fear of aliens (except some military planners I am sure).

So you're not living in fear, you're just spending your time listing possible things that could go wrong in a new experience.

Well yeah, that's totally different. Well done there.

Just reciting some of the postulations of leading scientists and sci fi thinkers at various times. I think the book Shadows starts out evil with the potential impact of alien species

Spoiler:

Another nice book of a slightly more advanced race coming to earth is Footfall. Nothing like aliens hitting us with a meteor just to show us who's a badass.

**KalashnikovMarine**

Grey Templar wrote:
Not really, all the worker and soldier ants are female. The males hatch, find a young queen, get lucky, and die.

Sounds like marriage to me am I right fellas?

**Frazzled**

KalashnikovMarine wrote:
Grey Templar wrote:
Not really, all the worker and soldier ants are female. The males hatch, find a young queen, get lucky, and die.

Sounds like marriage to me am I right fellas?

Only if we're very very lucky.

**Medium of Death**

Married a young queen, eh?

Spoiler:

**flamingkillamajig**

Captain Roderick wrote:
I think the problem with us being visited or invaded by aliens boils down to energy levels. The sheer amount of energy required to get a ship to another inhabited star system prohibits there being a need to go there... If an alien has the technological capacity to go faster than light, what possible need have they to come to earth?

There's a great series of books by Stephen Baxter about the Fermi Paradox, well worth a read.

And Medium, for a society to develop interstellar travel implies a certain level of aggressiveness... If human's weren't fast breeding, competitive, large-brained omnivores, I doubt we'd have ever developed language, never mind quantum mechanics :-) From 1935 to 1945 we went from fabric-covered biplanes to ICBM's, jets and man-made objects in space. Competition is everything, and I think it'll be a long time before we have an adequate scientific theory as to how technological species develop that isn't shaped by our own hopes and biases, but competition seems to be key. Which is such a shame, NASA needs way more money, but it's sidelined since the cold war's over.

Eliminate competition? An already live-able environment?

I mean Earth might not be live-able for said alien species like it is for life developed on it. I think that's another problem is we don't know the extent to what life can or can not form in (like how oxygen is actually poisonous to some life on earth). For all we know life exists near black holes or inside of them. I'd doubt it but hey a gigantic black hole is at the center of each galaxy. There's a lot of weird things to be discovered. Life is another one of these weird things. I mean if i recall correctly there are some species of plant that are exactly the same DNA type or can all be traced to one singular plant (as in they all compose of one single tree and are just sub-parts of that tree). I actually think this is also the case with coral reefs. I could be very much wrong but life can be really weird. I mean nature is weird. All of you are weird!

**Captain Roderick**

flamingkillamajig wrote:

Eliminate competition? An already live-able environment?

I mean Earth might not be live-able for said alien species like it is for life developed on it. I think that's another problem is we don't know the extent to what life can or can not form in (like how oxygen is actually poisonous to some life on earth). For all we know life exists near black holes or inside of them. I'd doubt it but hey a gigantic black hole is at the center of each galaxy. There's a lot of weird things to be discovered. Life is another one of these weird things. I mean if i recall correctly there are some species of plant that are exactly the same DNA type or can all be traced to one singular plant (as in they all compose of one single tree and are just sub-parts of that tree). I actually think this is also the case with coral reefs. I could be very much wrong but life can be really weird. I mean nature is weird. All of you are weird!

There's another interesting article I read recently, some Astronomers are analyzing gas clouds to see if they contain amino acids, or the building blocks of life. So far they've found alcohol and an important ingredient in the taste of raspberries, so they're not there yet, but I'm 100% certain there is other life out there - it's just very far away, and very probably quite different to what we'd expect.

I'm not so sure if Earth would be all that live-able an environment for an alien as well. The very specific chemical makeup of our world is pretty damn unique, and as you said, some lifeforms on this planet are allergic to oxygen. We need a tiny bit of cyanide in our diet to survive - too much, and we die. An alien coming from another biosphere would be very hard-pushed to get much benefit from our soil, our life forms, our atmosphere - and that's before you even factor in War of the Worlds microbial-death. Our planet is run by microbes

**Grey Templar**

The bigger reason aliens might not survive on Earth is because the local bacteria might take a fancy to foreign food. The reverse is true for us too, if we found a planet with life on it the local bacteria(or whatever) might find us tasty.

**KalashnikovMarine**

Captain Roderick wrote:
flamingkillamajig wrote:

Eliminate competition? An already live-able environment?

I mean Earth might not be live-able for said alien species like it is for life developed on it. I think that's another problem is we don't know the extent to what life can or can not form in (like how oxygen is actually poisonous to some life on earth). For all we know life exists near black holes or inside of them. I'd doubt it but hey a gigantic black hole is at the center of each galaxy. There's a lot of weird things to be discovered. Life is another one of these weird things. I mean if i recall correctly there are some species of plant that are exactly the same DNA type or can all be traced to one singular plant (as in they all compose of one single tree and are just sub-parts of that tree). I actually think this is also the case with coral reefs. I could be very much wrong but life can be really weird. I mean nature is weird. All of you are weird!

There's another interesting article I read recently, some Astronomers are analyzing gas clouds to see if they contain amino acids, or the building blocks of life. So far they've found alcohol and an important ingredient in the taste of raspberries,

Scientists confirm: Gas clouds made of raspberry vodka!

**Hlaine Larkin mk2**

I though it was rum not vodka

**Ratbarf**

It really depends on what I was drinking the night before.

**Captain Roderick**

Hlaine Larkin mk2 wrote:
I though it was rum not vodka

The ingredient from raspberries is also found in rum. The Alcohol found out there is just pure alcohol, so neither rum nor vodka, but yes, it's a cloud containing a fair amount of some components of rum...

**Grey Templar**

So would it be out there to assume that in the future there will be space companies harvesting space liquor?

And then we'll have space pirates stealing the space liquor, creating a space bootleg industry.

**KalashnikovMarine**

See? How boring are we? We're all like "Mining the asteroid belt"

When we could be out harvesting space rum with a hint of raspberries.