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capri0mniIn May of last year (<-- By frogs and fishes! That is fun/weird to type), Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo published a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America on a census of all life on Earth, by surveying and estimating how much carbon is where, on the planet, by weight.
Vox.com published a stunning visual chart of what this all means, )here.
That's cool, and wondrous, and exciting (and sobering), and all...
But then-- in December, The Deep Carbon Observatory published its own report on a survey of carbon deep within the Earth's crust -- and came to the conclusion that all the bacterial biomass carbon from that earlier report? Is only 30% of the total bacteria on Earth.... And there are bacteria surviving so close to the Earth's core that ambient temperatures are above 100 C -- but water is still liquid, there, because the pressure is so high.
Okay, so 70-80% of stars in our galaxy are M dwarf stars, which are rather violent when young, and this video (closed captioned) explains why that might end up making the planets ultimately uninhabitable.
But M dwarf stars are extremely long-lived, and once their violent youth is past, they become very stable (I'll put a video about the life cycle of stars at the end of this post).
And if the majority of microbial life actually starts out deep beneath the surface of planets, then (my inner plot bunnies are whispering) perhaps it could survive its home star's violence, and gradually migrate to the surface once it's calmed down ... And, as I always like to remind myself, life has a way to change a planet to make it more comfortable to life.
Or maybe they won't migrate to the surface, but they still might form comparatively complex life. Here's a neat video from Kurzgesagt (also closed captioned) that explores the possibility of subsurface life that exists on planets that don't even have any stars:
(The main thing that annoys me about Kurzgesagt videos, is that they keep judging quality of life and intelligence by current, human normativity: use of metal-based technology, fire, etc.. Also, they assume that advancement as a civilization must depend on expanding our territory, and colonizing other worlds, and also in getting as close to individual immortality as possible. ... none of which are things I agree should be taken as givens)
Anyway, here's that video on the life cycle of low-mass stars, and there's a suggestion how the Earth, itself, might become a rogue planet, 6 billion years or so, from now, when our Sun burns through its hydrogen and loses mass -- which decreases the gravity that holds planets in their orbits (also closed captioned):
(For what it's worth: I'm not really all disturbed by the thought of humanity going extinct, or even of my own personal death, as long as neither comes prematurely, due to foolish decisions -- like denying climate change -- or causes avoidable pain to others)
Vox.com published a stunning visual chart of what this all means, )here.
That's cool, and wondrous, and exciting (and sobering), and all...
But then-- in December, The Deep Carbon Observatory published its own report on a survey of carbon deep within the Earth's crust -- and came to the conclusion that all the bacterial biomass carbon from that earlier report? Is only 30% of the total bacteria on Earth.... And there are bacteria surviving so close to the Earth's core that ambient temperatures are above 100 C -- but water is still liquid, there, because the pressure is so high.
Okay, so 70-80% of stars in our galaxy are M dwarf stars, which are rather violent when young, and this video (closed captioned) explains why that might end up making the planets ultimately uninhabitable.
But M dwarf stars are extremely long-lived, and once their violent youth is past, they become very stable (I'll put a video about the life cycle of stars at the end of this post).
And if the majority of microbial life actually starts out deep beneath the surface of planets, then (my inner plot bunnies are whispering) perhaps it could survive its home star's violence, and gradually migrate to the surface once it's calmed down ... And, as I always like to remind myself, life has a way to change a planet to make it more comfortable to life.
Or maybe they won't migrate to the surface, but they still might form comparatively complex life. Here's a neat video from Kurzgesagt (also closed captioned) that explores the possibility of subsurface life that exists on planets that don't even have any stars:
(The main thing that annoys me about Kurzgesagt videos, is that they keep judging quality of life and intelligence by current, human normativity: use of metal-based technology, fire, etc.. Also, they assume that advancement as a civilization must depend on expanding our territory, and colonizing other worlds, and also in getting as close to individual immortality as possible. ... none of which are things I agree should be taken as givens)
Anyway, here's that video on the life cycle of low-mass stars, and there's a suggestion how the Earth, itself, might become a rogue planet, 6 billion years or so, from now, when our Sun burns through its hydrogen and loses mass -- which decreases the gravity that holds planets in their orbits (also closed captioned):
(For what it's worth: I'm not really all disturbed by the thought of humanity going extinct, or even of my own personal death, as long as neither comes prematurely, due to foolish decisions -- like denying climate change -- or causes avoidable pain to others)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-04 10:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-04 11:40 pm (UTC)I didn't remember much of the specifics of the episode as I wrote the poem, but the image of the glowing rock creature, and the stark brightness of the lasers in the dark stuck in the back of my mind. It was while watching that episode, as I was sticking my fingers in my ears, that Dad said: "You know, the monsters aren't real..." and I answered: "But I hate their guns."
(One reason I became an instant, and ardent, Doctor Who as soon as I saw my first episode -- might have been "Robot"?
*yum*
Date: 2019-01-05 06:19 am (UTC)Really great comments regarding the human normativity: like your brain.
Re: *yum*
Date: 2019-01-05 12:19 pm (UTC)Of course, now it's got me wondering: the latest lander up on Mars right now isn't looking for life, because the scientists who planned, designed, and built the thing, weren't expecting to find any -- all the studies done on the planet's surface have turned up nothing....
But now, it's drilling deep into the planet's crust. So now I'm wondering:
Will we be disturbing an alien biosphere, after all? And:
Since we have no instruments to detect life with this lander, how will we ever know if we do? :-/
*deep thoughts*
Date: 2019-01-06 02:29 am (UTC)I mean we know there's bacterium on some asteroids and meteorites right? Some folks theorize that the original singe-cell life on Earth, was seeded here through NEOs bombarding us with space stuff.
I think this is not far fetched at all.
Re: *deep thoughts*
Date: 2019-01-06 01:37 pm (UTC)Actually... no. We don't know that.
What has been confirmed is that molecules of organic compounds have been detected in deep space (one source, but I can't find a date attached, but it's from a few years ago: https://www.iflscience.com/space/center-our-galaxy-smells-raspberries-and-tastes-rum/). And the second half of this video reports on a lab experiment where a type of sugar that forms DNA was made in conditions simulating interstellar space: https://youtu.be/D96bv-c23yE
But, as exciting as these things are, they're as far from "life" as a vein of marble, still in the Earth, is from a mansion with a marble facade.
However, in this video from PBS Space Time, the host makes a very strong argument, based on the second law of thermodynamics (also known as Entropy), that life is an inevitable consequence of the Big Bang: https://youtu.be/GcfLZSL7YGw (The main part of the video is in the first 11 minutes; the last two minutes are devoted to discussion of a previous video).
Anyway, because of all this, my personal conjecture is that the building blocks of life arise spontaneously throughout the universe, and the trend toward life is literally universal, but actual life only takes hold and thrives in certain (perhaps relatively rare) nodes.
To continue my mansion analogy from above: you can collect the building material for the mansion from everywhere: quarries, forests, copper mines, etc., but in order to build the mansion, you need to pick the right building site that will support it (can't build it in a swamp, for example, or on the side of a cliff, or the bottom of the ocean)... Ya know?
But the idea that Earth is the only planet with life, or the only planet with "intelligent" life (even by the narrow definition of 'intelligence' used by the people behind the Kurzgesagt channel) is as laughable to me as the idea that the Earth is flat.
Re: *deep thoughts*
Date: 2019-01-08 01:22 am (UTC)Re: *deep thoughts*
Date: 2019-01-08 08:58 pm (UTC)And since life can exist inside rock, there might be microbes living inside asteroids and interstellar space rocks -- like if life were already starting to evolve on a planet and it gets smashed up and hurled into space by some catastrophe...
We just don't know that that's ever happened, yet.