Chance of Life Elsewhere

[HP]

btw I would say there probably isn't complex life elsewhere in the Universe [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

and I'm more or less an atheist. I will make a new post some time maybe about why I think so

[Piers]

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The implications are that the Earth's weather patterns would be relatively chaotic. While you might see primitive life forms evolve on the planet, more advanced forms would never get a chance. Environmental conditions would change too rapidly causing too frequent mass extinctions.

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The thing about intelligence is that it makes the organism much more adaptive, and able to survive extreme changes in environmental conditions. A steady environment gives little evolutionary advantage to intelligence.

Maybe the reason intelligent life took so long to evolve on Earth is that the climate was too steady and there was not enough mass extinction.

[HP]

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The thing about intelligence is that it makes the organism much more adaptive, and able to survive extreme changes in environmental conditions. A steady environment gives little evolutionary advantage to intelligence.

Maybe the reason intelligent life took so long to evolve on Earth is that the climate was too steady and there was not enough mass extinction.

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So you think we were just really lucky to get a moon?

[Piers]

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So you think we were just really lucky to get a moon?

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Something different would have happened if there was not a moon. Its possible to make guesses as to what that might be. However I know that I would not exist without a moon, so I am glad there is one.

[MidGe]

If there can be life here, it is very likely that there is life elsewhere. Don't fall for the "life is sooo special" paradigm. It is merely theist trying to advance their agenda's view of characterizing life as somehow special or unique. Ego! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[kerowo]

We are just recently able to find planets in other systems so we don't have a lot of practical data on how common moons are, so thinking that the only way to get a moon is the way the Earth did doesn't make any sense.

The universe is too big for there to be a lot of things that happen only one time. In the end I think there is too much hand waving in the equations for where you stand on this not to come down to your belief system. At this point in time there isn't enough data for someone to make an argument that is going to change my mind on this. Still fun to argue about though...

[T50_Omaha8]

Umm, for some reason I don't buy that planetary moons are exceptionally rare. There are around 150 of them in our own solar system, with around a dozen being 'moonlike' in terms of a comparable size to our own.

[PairTheBoard]

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Umm, for some reason I don't buy that planetary moons are exceptionally rare. There are around 150 of them in our own solar system, with around a dozen being 'moonlike' in terms of a comparable size to our own.

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I think our Moon is unique in our solar system as far as it's relative size to the planet it orbits. I believe that's what gives it its stabalizing power on our axis of rotation. I believe the process of gravity acting on Saturn-like Rings formed around a planet during its phase of formation accounts for the other moons in our system, according to simulations. But the large Moon/Earth size ratio cannot be accounted for by that theory. That's my understanding of the current thinking anyway. I don't think it should be discounted because it is inconvenient for prior notions of how common a phenonmenon we might have thought it was.

PairTheBoard

[FortunaMaximus]

Giant impact hypothesis.

Hartmann and Davis, '75. Abstract / PDF can be found here:

Link to abstract on ScienceDirect.

Bang two rocks together, life arises. Man bangs two rocks together, grilled mammoth for dinner.