[RightWhale]

Here goes NASA again. The search for life has been the closest they have come to a mission the last few years. Now one of their hirelings has turned out to be a heterodox, and that's what they get for talking to physicists. "Rare Earth" by Ward and Brownlee is worth the read.

[newwahoo]

Interesting article. I guess I'd fall into the "rare earth" group. But even if advanced life is a billion-to-one shot there are billions of stars. I can't believe our confluence of factors couldn't have come together in at least one other place. And it would only enhance my wonder at the power of the universe's "higher authority" were this to be the case.

At any rate, my hat is off to NASA. As far as government agencies go I think its one of the better ones. No one in their right mind would mess with a country that can put men on the moon and land robots on Mars.

[denydenydeny]

Implications?

[PatrickHenry]

Bump

[garyhope]

What's happened to the bookmark function? I wanted to bookmark this article. Not enough server disk space?

[Cincinatus]

The search for life has been the closest they have come to a mission the last few years.

And is partly responsible for the fact that they have made themselves so perilously close to institutional extinction. A "search for ET life" is a mission, all right. the only problem is, it's a mission with a low probability for success.

The book Rare Earth actually claims that bacterial ET life is probably quite common -- Ward and Brownlee claim that advanced, intelligent life is rare (let alone technologically advanced life), mostly because the planetological factors responsible for the creation and evolution of the Earth appear to be unlikely (not impossible) to be reproduced elsewhere.

NASA's mission should be to explore the universe with people and machines. Period. Leave the "search for life" stuff to the Saganite Planetary Society and other California flake groups.

[Celtjew Libertarian]

Bump in lieu of bookmark.

[RadioAstronomer]

Interesting. I had a Physics prof. who told us we would never find any extra solar planets either. LOL!! SETI is really the only currently viable means of finding another tool making species and those searches are all privately funded.

[balrog666]

We think this is normal and there should be planets all around the universe like Earth.

Why should it have to be like Earth? Aren't we looking for "life" on Mars and the moons of Jupiter?

[Mr. K]

but what about bob lazaar and the spaceships he saw while working at areaa 51

*ducking under my desk for flame protection*

[Joe Brower]

There is also the theory that life advances to the point where it gains the technological means of eradicating itself, and, lacking the moral compunction not to do so, makes itself extinct.

Humankind is currently balanced at that point in it's history. Stay tuned.

[RJL]

Why are they amazed that we are adapted to live on the Earth and not adapted to live somewhere else?

Life developing on a planet with different characteristics will adapt to that planets conditions.

[VadeRetro]

I think there's more life than the Rare Earthers have it but not so much that the aliens are zipping around on Earth participating in political conspiracies and abducting idiots. So call me a Medium-Rare Earther.

[Aquinasfan]

Jupiter has protected Earth from too many cataclysmic asteroid collisions, he explained -- but on the other hand, a neighbor much larger that Jupiter would not allow formation of an Earth-like planet in the first place. Similarly, our moon is just the right size to help stabilize Earth's spin axis and, as a consequence, the Earth's climate. With a bigger moon or no moon at all, a planet similar to Earth in other respects might not sustain life.

Looks like more evidence for the "anthropic principle."

[Brett66]

So if the odds are only one-in-a-billion, that gives us about 400 civilizations in our galaxy. Most likely these 400 civilizations would be farther than 1000 light years away so we won't find them by SETI efforts. The only way is to build huge interferometers and scan millions of star systems. it will be dumb luck if we stumbled on another Earth. I think we need to focus our efforts to establishing bases and colonies on the moon, this is like trying to win the pick-six.

[jimt]

With some like 10^20 stars in the observable universe, it just seems awfully strange to think we're the only one in the entire creation supporting intelligent life.

Ten to the twentieth is a mighty big number.

[Dave Wright]

One of the scientific essays in the book "The Creation Hypothesis" examined the likelyhood of life developing in the universe based on random probability. Since the metabolic processes which define life can only function within a fairly limited range of environmental values the author identified 31 factors (gravity, average temperature, solar mass, etc) which would need to be within a particular range to have any chance of producing a "living" system. The analysis based on our current estimates of the number of stars and galaxies in the universe determined that less than one in 30 trillion planets could produce life by random processes alone. Since there are estimated to be about 3 trillion planets in the universe this means that it is virtually impossible for life to have developed anywhere. Which is another way of saying that the fact that life clearly exists here (not to mention intelligent life) can only be a miracle.

[Psycho_Bunny]

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

[FreeReign]

Jupiter has protected Earth from too many cataclysmic asteroid collisions

What? Jupiter would have to be huge to do accomplish this in any significant manner. Instead, Jupiter is really quite small compared to -- what is not Jupiter.