The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I've always dreamed about other planets with life, as most certainly so do you.  Star Control is the very example of that.  Well, today, I saw this video:
http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/new-planet-might-support-life/6auz984?from=imbot_us_default

I want to you know what you think.  I personally am very excited and hope this information doesn't turn out to be wrong or miscalculated!  I hope to get more information of this planet Gliese 581 dash G I think.

There is that Drake equation predicting just that, and even if the new-found planet does bare life, communicating is still impossible, so other than just curio there is no real use for the info...

Cool, but let's go to Europa first.

By the way, for those with a telescope that live in the northern hemisphere, Gliese 581 is an 11th magnitude star or so, so it is possible to see it on a clear night. In fact, I looked at it a few weeks ago. Tough to see but cool anyway. It's in the southwest sky in Libra.

The Gliese system is a red dwarf star that is much cooler than our star. So the new planet has an orbit closer to it's star  than mercury does  in our system to be within the goldilocks zone. The planet is thought to be tidally locked so that one side is permanent day and the other side permanent night. This means life as we know it probably only lives in a narrow band at the day/night terminator if it indeed exists there at all. Keep in mind that Mars and Venus are thought to be inside our star's habitable zone and so far no signs of life on either of those planets. Evidence that liquid water requires some pretty special conditions.

Now if this planet has a large moon, that could shake things up a bit.

The atmospheres on Mars and Venus do certainly contribute to their lack of liquid water. Earth wouldn't have it either if its atmosphere trapped most of the sun's rays or they all radiated back into space due to near lack of an atmosphere.

Also, this depends on your definition of "life". Microorganisms, however small and disappointing, already exist on Mars.

Link please?

I'm pretty sure we haven't found indigenous life on Mars yet...hopefully I'm wrong though. If we did find microorganisms on other worlds I would be far from disappointed.

This is a pretty cool story though that further shows that microbial life can survive in many harsh environments

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1998/ast01sep98_1/

(Bacteria survived inside one of the Apollo mission cameras that was left on the moon for ~3 years).

Although I'm unaware of any offical findings of microbes on Mars, I think they're most likely thriving there somwhere. I have little doubt that microbes are living on other planets here in our solar system or on planets in other solar sytems. I think life is abundant and  that's just the nature of the universe .

A big deal is made of how insignificant humans are and what a microscopic amount of time we humans have been around, however, life here on Earth is thought to have been around shortly after the formation of the Earth nearly six billion years ago. If the universe is indeed 13 to 14 billion years old, that's a significant amount of time for the existance of life. In fact it may have been around since the beginning of the universe.

 

That's not the Drake Equation you're thinking of.

heard something about that in the radio.
http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/viking_life_010728-1.html

oops I said 6 billion, actually less than 5 billion but the point still stands.

I recently watched this PBS Nova video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toRIkRa1fYU

If the claims in the video are true it throws a completely new wrinkle of complexity into biology.