Posted on 03/03/2014 5:30:33 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Venus is ridiculously hot, and that mitigates against any kind of life form as we’d recognize it. Extremophiles might, possibly, live in the extreme upper atmosphere, but they’d have to be introductions, iow, not native to Venus.
Actually I was thinking about moons orbiting large gas giants. I know some of the large gas giants found orbit neatly within their star’s habitable zones.
If you’re interested in possible flying creatures in gas giant atmospheres, you should read “Saturn Rukh” by Robert L Forward. He was an actual physicist and a conservative so his books presented a lot of good science in a fiction format.
There is also the possibility of micro organism life forms, in regards some of moons of the larger outer planet's in our own system, such as Saturn and Jupiter.
Kepler looked at one tiny postage stamp of sky and only looked for transiting planets. Pretty amazing what it found. I was playing with the NASA Eyes on exoplanets program today and noticed that a large number of the planets found were multiple planets.
And not a one of them has a decent cup of coffee. Sure, a couple of them have a decent chicken fried steak, but good coffee? Nope. They kept offering me Tang, but I told them I wanted coffee. And yeah, a little cream and sugar, too. How hard is that? Build big space battle carriers, but can’t come up with a good cup a Joe. Pathetic.
A sidebar (the Moon is about 1/100th the mass of Earth)
Your Weight on the Moon
http://www.vat19.com/brain-candy/your-weight-on-the-moon.cfm
another (Mars is about 1/8th the mass of Earth)
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_would_a_200-pound_person_weigh_on_the_planet_Mars
There was a time I wouldn’t ever turn down Tang.
It’s astounding how much more is known than, say, 15 years ago, and yet detractors of this kind of research keep implying the existence of precognition regarding what we will and won’t find, or developments in propulsion. :’)
Based on the rate of increase in the number of known exoplanets, fifteen years from now they will number in the many thousands, and discernable size will drop by another factor of ten (at least).
Did you ever mix Tang with Ovaltine? I called it Tangaltine. Or maybe it was Ovalang. I gave it to my little Sister to drink. She named her cat after me. She calls him “Asshole”. He does kind of resemble me.
Our technology is advancing at an incredible rate and its just not possible to say what will be possible a few decades from now.
It seems that every time we’ve decided a planet can’t be somewhere, planets are found there.
I prefer the term “domestic shorthair”. ;’)
In 5000 years humans went from making stone tools and using them for everything, to building a scanning/tunnelling electron microscope capable of moving individual atoms. I haven’t even apprenticed in flint-knapping yet...
If the larger planets shown have an earth similar gravity, it would be due to a lower density and would probably preclude having a fractionated and molten or partially molten core to generate a significant magnetic field (a dynamo-core).
That magnetic field comes in handy for keeping the solar wind from hinking up the atmosphere and making life tougher on the surface.
While I don’t think it’s a barrier to life, it would be a lot more difficult to get established there and would probably lead to indigenous species that were quite a bit tougher than earth based life.
Higher gravity would probably mean they have the dynamo-core, so radiation would be limited to good levels at the surface, and then there could be some interesting critters in that environment too. Either super lithe/lightweight or super dense in muscle with maybe a harder material evolved for bone formation.
Funny...none are blue
Gee, with Obama around our planet is barely habitable anymore.
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