Are We Alone In The Universe?

[Donward]

I'm sure there's a lot more we don't know than we do know. Even in our solar system.

[Toxn]

Wasn't necessarily talking about the surface though, although life in a 90atm 900F atmosphere isn't impossible, just exotic by requirement. I'm fairly positive that sulfur can be used in lieu of oxygen for metabolic purposes for instance.

It feels odd to assume our solar system is perfectly average when it appears the norm graviates toward Red Dwarfs and tidally locked planets being bathed in high levels of radiation. What value of average are we trying to get here, because I'd say out system is rather placid and hospitable and on the high end of habitability. Venus, Mars, Ganymede, Europa, Callisto, Titan, and Enceladus are all highly colonizable and our asteriod belt is an easily accessible resource rich area. Places like Neptune and Uranus are fuel rich, and Jupiter and Saturns cloud tops allow for floating mining colonies. The outer solar system is abundant with water and fuel sources, and I'd go further and say our system is extremely wet.

Further exoplanets studies will probably prove me wrong but we keep slashing NASA budget because reasons, because "a billion dollars" sounds scary when you don't put into the context of the US budget and it makes it easy to sound like one is tough on wasteful spending.

Again, the sample set we have is skewed by what we can detect. It's interesting for me that in my lifetime the available data went from 'no exoplanets detected' to 'big and orbiting suicidally close to a star' to 'large rocky planets are common'.

This suggests a trend.

In any case, it is always a good idea from a statistical standpoint to assume that you are average.

[SuperComrade]

Trying to detect Earth-sized planets has been a huge challenge that has only fairly recently become viable

[LoooSeR]

Is there any serious researh on how alien life forms can exist/evolve in different enviroments? Some time ago i heard a short piece of a theorie about sophisticated lifeforms in very low temperatures.

[Toxn]

Lots of hypotheses, very little experiment. Abiogenesis research covers some of the same ground though.

[FaustianQ]

Is there any serious researh on how alien life forms can exist/evolve in different enviroments? Some time ago i heard a short piece of a theorie about sophisticated lifeforms in very low temperatures.

 

It's almost all hypothetical. Besides carbon, silicon and boron/boron-nitrogen based life has been explored, while using a variety of solvents like ammonia, hydrogen flouride, and methane. The reoccuring theme though is that carbon based life outcompetes other forms in water rich enviroments across a wide range of temperatures, and there is really only edge cases for things like silane life at extremely low temperatures in an ammonia/methane enviroment [silane life cannot interact with carbon life, everything that sustains carbon life would cause a silane lifeform to burst into flames]. Titan is a really fertile ground for silane lifeforms, but it's possible carbon based life still outperforms it even in such an enviroment.

 

Finding not only life but silane lifeforms on Titan would be huge though and would honestly be compelling evidence life of some kind will persist somewhere no matter how extreme and that the process of abiogensis to biogensis is a standard planetary process.

[Priory_of_Sion]

Liquid water on Mars, ok.