Exoplanet Biosignatures

[ysabetwordsmith]

Exoplanet Biosignatures: Observational Prospects talks about opportunities and methods for discovering hints of life in far-flung places, though it seems largely limited to "life as we know it."

Eh, give 'em time, they'll branch out. Right now the Universe seems to be amusing itself by watching for astrophysicists to develop a new theory explaining exoplanets, and then throwing nerf bricks at their heads in the form of new exoplanets that don't fit the pattern. Exoplanets will continue to be thrown until all the LULZ have been had.

Science is like playing Mastermind with a super-intelligent opponent who has set up the opposite end of the board but refuses to say whether your guesses are right or wrong.

Comments

[kengr]

Well, it's kinda hard to search for "life as we don't know it" because we don't know what to search *for*.

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

*eyeroll*

Like the entire genre of science fiction doesn't exist or is somehow hard to find?

On top of that, some astrophysicists, xenobiologists, and other folks have speculated on what kind of non-Earthlike habitats might support life. In this solar system alone, I would suggest scouting Titan and Europa.

Extrapolating outward from what we know, however:

* Looking for bioliquids other than water is worthwhile, because liquid is convenient to life in many ways.

* Gas cloud creatures have been posited, and indeed, some local lifeforms spend part or all of their lifecycle drifting in the atmosphere. A bigger, richer atmosphere could be even better at supporting life, but it probably wouldn't look much like ours.

* Both of the above are much easier to detect than life which secludes itself within a solid crust, asteroid, etc. While that doesn't rule out its existence, we are unlikely to spot it, or possibly even signs of it, with extant technology.

* As a general rule, life likes certain things:
** diversity of features
** density of resources
** liminal zones between two disparate habitats
Any of these would be a more likely place to find lifeforms than areas of sparser opportunities, because convergent evolution will drive species toward places of greater opportunities.

Re: Well ...

[(Anonymous)]

With any sort of limited resources, it is easier to go for the biggest bang-for-your-buck option - in this case stuff we /know/ can suppourt life.

Now if we're going to build a fancy teleclscope, why not one (or several for different distances) designed to use the sunas a lens?

https://hubblesite.org/contents/articles/gravitational-lensing

>>Like the entire genre of science fiction doesn't exist or is somehow hard to find?<<

Most people's brains file the scifi and the science in different areas.

Or people tend to follow different schools of thought (science vs belief), i.e. Hermionie vs Luna in the Harry Potter books.

>>In this solar system alone, I would suggest scouting Titan and Europa.<<

I'll suggest Venus and the gas giants, but perhaps further down on the list.

>>Looking for bioliquids other than water..<<

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalassogen

http://www.xenology.info/Xeno/5.2.htm

Hmmm...would organisms neccesarily need to chemically interact with thalassogens? (As in, could an organism and thalassogen be chemically neutral to each other, like acid in a glass vial?)

>>Gas cloud creatures have been posited, and indeed, some local lifeforms spend part or all of their lifecycle drifting in the atmosphere. A bigger, richer atmosphere could be even better at supporting life, but it probably wouldn't look much like ours.<<

I imagine deep-atmo life on, say, Jupiter might resemble some Earthlike sea creatures. More likely a prehistoric blueprint than a vertibrate-fish, but anything that can float in water could similarly float in dense gasses. Jovian jellyfish (jellypuffs?) would be entirely plausible...

Also look at dandelion pods, and spiderlings with their silk parachutes.

>>...life which secludes itself within a solid crust...<<

Of course, /they/ wouldn't be looking for /us/ either.

I wonder...could there be a lifeform that lives in magma? 'How to return the dying magma whale to its habitat' would be an interesting story...

[kengr]

Also, what we find is rather dependent on what we're lookiong for.

an example John W Campbell gave back in the 60s was a Mars lander reporting a series of seismic events increasing in intensity, then a micrometeorite impact, a major jolt and then a series of decreasing seismic events.

What actually happened? A Martian walked up, spat at the probe, kicked it and then walked off. :-)