Big news imminent re: Mars ??

Don't know why we don't just shoot a canister to mars containing seed/bacteria that are known to live in similar conditions on earth or that could possibly adapt.
It's be a right laugh seeing what happened, weird trees, strange snakes etc. Instant aliens!

I mean its ours right? There's no international law saying you can't is there?

Actually who does it belong to? The first to stick a flag in it? Who owns the moon for that matter? You can buy a piece of that - but how legal is it?
 
oh well....

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/across-the-universe/2012/nov/23/curiosity-rover-life-mars" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/acros ... -life-mars</a>
 
The Pope said:
Don't know why we don't just shoot a canister to mars containing seed/bacteria that are known to live in similar conditions on earth or that could possibly adapt.
It's be a right laugh seeing what happened, weird trees, strange snakes etc. Instant aliens!

I mean its ours right? There's no international law saying you can't is there?

Actually who does it belong to? The first to stick a flag in it? Who owns the moon for that matter? You can buy a piece of that - but how legal is it?
Click to expand...

Shall we have a whip-round and see if we can claim Mars in the name of Bluemoon Forum?
 
Damocles said:
Chris in London said:
From what I know of it the chances that there is NO other life in the Universe are really quite small. Whether there is any intelligent life, whether there is animal life, whether there are sentient beings is all another matter, but the idea that in this big universe the only place where life kicked off is Earth is quite a frightening one.
Click to expand...

I would say that it an entire stupid proposition.

Now, there are around 400 billion Suns in OUR galaxy alone. If you take a low average of 5 planets per star (and this is a low average, many of the observed stars have many more than this), this is 2 trillion planets in our Milky Way. Finding the number of galaxies is a tough one but taking the idea that the Universe is roughly the same in every direction, we can extrapolate due to our observed galaxies that there are around 500 billion galaxies.

Don't forget that these 500 billion galaxies are made of THE SAME ELEMENTS as our Solar System. We do not hold a privileged position in the Universe, the elements that form the Earth and are abundant here, are also abundant everywhere in the Universe. When thinking of the idea that space inflated, this makes sense.

So if we extrapolate our info from the Milky Way onto the other galaxies, we can assume another 2 trillion planets per galaxy. This extrapolation is not necessarily a great one. Some galaxies are very young and don't have many stars, some are very old and don't have many stars, but we're dealing with a set of 500 billion so you can forgive the outliers.

This states that there are 1 septillion, or 1000000000000000000000000 planets

It is a 1 in 1 septillion shot that this is the only planet that formed organic life. This is so big of a chance to be almost ridiculous. If you started at the exact moment of the Big Bang and started counting once per second, you wouldn't reach this number
Click to expand...

Wow, that's a lot of assumptions. The biggest seems to be that each planet revolving around one of 500 billion stars in 500 billion universes has a broadly equal chance of sustaining life.

I think we're up to 118 separate elements in the periodic table. The assumption that at the big bang there were no more than 118 elements and we got at least a small share of all of them is quite a big one. But there's no way of knowing whether our share of all the elements in the universe is compeltely atypical, slightly imbalanced or average in ever conceivable way, so let's park that one.

Then there is the issue of the conditions necessary to support the formation or sustenance of life. Does this require an atmosphere? Well, if it does, that rules out any lumps of rock in space which do not have an atmosphere of their own. (The number of planets of which we have any actual evidence of there being an atmosphere is quite small, as I understand it.)

What about temperature? Well, the temperature on any given planet will depend on a number of variables, the size of the sun and its distance from the planet in question being obvious ones, as well as the planet's own internal dynamics (eg geo-thermal issues) but of course it's the temperature of the atmosphere rather than the planet itself (a fine distinction perhaps but an important one) which is important. But being too hot or too cold will rule out a number of other possible candidates.

Each step along the way, you rule out a large number of planets. In our own solar system realistically it is unlikely that any organic life either is or has ever been present elsewhere than Earth and Mars. So if 7/9s of our own solar system (and let's not get into semantics about Pluto and everything beyond) is incapable of sustaining life or its creation, it isn't unreasonable to suspect that the same broad proportion applies to the other 5 planets (average) revolving around 500 billion stars in 500 billion other galaxies.

Even so, the chances that life occurred uniquely here still apprear pretty small - if you accept as gospel truth the various extrapolations which astronomers adopt to fill in some of the gaps in the current state of their knowledge.

However - and this was really the point of my last post (however stupid you might have considered its premise to be) IF the reality is that of all the places in the universe this is the only one where the right combination of things happened in the right way to create life, that would (IMO) be a rather awe inspiring fact.
 
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