5d ago

Scientists find strongest evidence yet of life on an alien planet

www.reuters.com

reuters.com

In a potential landmark discovery, scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope have obtained what they call the strongest signs yet of possible life beyond our solar system, detecting in an alien planet's atmosphere the chemical fingerprints of gases that on Earth are produced only by biological processes.

23 comments

This suggests the planet may be teeming with microbial life, the researchers said. They stressed, however, that they are not announcing the discovery of actual living organisms but rather a possible biosignature - an indicator of a biological process - and that the findings should be viewed cautiously, with more observations needed.
Researchers that have had the media blow their findings out of proportion and take their words out of context one too many times.
This is exciting enough on it's own without the "help" of overzealous reporters making click-bait headlines and misleading people.

According to my shitty calculation I did on an even shittier online calculator, the surface gravity should be somewhere around 12,4m/s2. That's not that bad. Perfect for some saiyajin training if you ask me.
- That means they'd be even worse off than us in any attempts to go spacefaring, right?
  
  Well a rocket only system is right out.
  But... There's certainly still potential for a hybrid system. You can get real high up with balloons, once above the thickest atmosphere rockets work a lot better.
  Also, depending on the atmosphere, aircraft could be very effective, you might be able to accelerate to great speeds on jet engines, and then have a second stage based on chemical rockets.
  But for the most part, yeah, getting to space on a planet that massive would be an absolute pain in the ass. No simple task.
  
  At that gravitational acceleration level, chemical rockets would be incapable of escaping the gravity well. They might have to create an Orion Drive just to get off the planet.
  
  Pretty much, yeah.
- For reference, Earth gravity is 9.8m/s². This is about 1.27 gees.

I read this BBC article about it
Obviously if this turns out to be life that would be interesting, but it could turn out to be nothing.
If it turns out to be some moss or bacteria or other basic life, that would be pretty cool. If it's humanoid aliens then maybe we're screwed.
- Even if it's not aliens and it is indeed DMS and DMDS finding the non-biological process that produced them would be neat too
  
  Yes, win-win scenario
- The system is at 124 light years from ours, we should be fine.
  
  That's like 20 days at warp 9, they could be here this year!
- This is the second, and more promising, time chemicals associated with life have been detected in the planet's atmosphere by Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
  I thought I'd remembered reading about this before. Sounds like just a couple more years, and they'll be sure this gas is there, which is huge, but not totally conclusive.
  Personally, I'd bet it's life. A big rocky planet with an ocean of phytoplankton sounds like our best bet for finding it. The scientists in the article are trying really hard not to be excited
- Finding bacterial would be super cool, we could learn a whole lot from that! But if we do find complex alien life, multicellular life or something like animals, well that's a really, incredibly bad sign.
  That suggests that complex life is common in the universe. And if complex life is common, intelligent life should be common. And if intelligent life should be common, but isn't (because where are they all?), that says bad things about the success and survival rates of intelligent species.

So .. we're not special .. whodathunkit?
- It's almost statistically impossible that we're the only life in the universe. It's estimated that there are hundreds of millions to possibly even billions of habitable planets in the Milky Way alone. The thought that we're the only planet with complex life, sentient organisms, let alone sapient organisms is just basic human egocentrism.
  
  I'm in full throated agreement with your assessment.