This article is very interesting as it proposes the possibility of life on planets that are not orbiting around stars:<\/p>\n
Is Our Solar System Missing a Giant Planet? It suggests that an Earth-sized object could get thrown out of the solar system, yet still have the capacity to have liquid water because of a thick blanket of hydrogen acting as an insulator.\u00a0 If this idea has any merit, then it would seem that any object capable of retaining a thick hydrogen blanket could also harbor life, including the putative 5th giant planet the article talks about (I have read about lots of ideas that suggest life in gas giant’s upper atmosphere).<\/p>\n I remember reading long ago a SciFi book by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson called “The Reefs of Space” (part of the “Starchild Trilogy”) that extended Fred Hoyle’s stead state hypothesis (http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Steady_State_theory<\/a>) that posits an universe that is infinite in age as well as space. If you assume the universe is infinite in age as well as extent, then any event that has a non-zero probability not only has happened somewhere, but has happened an infinite number of times. Thus, the authors produced the idea of reefs in space that live off the hydrogen purported to pop into existence in between stars and fused that hydrogen to produce energy and raw materials for life. The stories had other interesting things going on, but I always remember the reefs in space with a lot of fondness. I have often thought that even in a non-infinite universe there is still room for some pretty low probability events to happen with rather pedestrian occurrence (to me, life is not just probable, but inevitable when water, minerals and a heat gradient are present; intelligence is, to me, a bit less likely, but still probable enough it happens all the time), so the idea of reefs in space still seem like a winner to me. Once some life form evolves in space and develops some way to maneuver, feed and reproduce, it has so much area to work with that it seems given the life of the universe I would feel surprised if there wasn’t life between the stars. It might be difficult to recognize, but then again it might not be.<\/p>\n I imagine if you had a very powerful telescope that looked toward a patch of sky that is dense with background stars, perhaps you would be able to see the stars being eclipsed in such a way that shows movement beyond plain orbital mechanics.\u00a0 I wonder how powerful such a telescope would have to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This article is very interesting as it proposes the possibility of life on planets that are not orbiting around stars: Is Our Solar System Missing a Giant Planet? http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/health\/article\/0,8599,2099347,00.html It suggests that an Earth-sized object could get thrown out of the solar system, yet still have the capacity to have liquid water because of a … Continue reading “Life as we don’t know it”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":218,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions\/218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nhttp:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/health\/article\/0,8599,2099347,00.html<\/a><\/p>\n