http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2045835,00.html?hpt=T2
The ‘new’ wrinkle in the search for exoplanets is that, far from pooh-poohing supergiant planets as ‘no likely life’, discoveries in our own solar system, including our own planet, have them adding the footnote: of course life could exist on the moon of a superplanet.
The discovery of extremophiles at volcanic vents, in geysers, even living within rocks in the most extreme deserts, and deep within the earth, makes it likely that microbial life outweighs all larger life on this planet by considerable and that even our deep rocks are alive, meaning no matter what has happened to this planet, life has tended to re-emerge with a vengeance.
Could life exist elsewhere? Do woodchucks chuck wood?
Oh yes! I spotted this news first on Science Daily this afternoon and then again here in the excellent, New York Times science section. In fact, I’m just about to e-mail it to my astronomy students. The semester started this past Monday and, as I went over the syllabus, I said a reason I love teaching the class is because new discoveries occur all the time. One of the students said he was fascinated by the possibility of extra-terrestrial life and I went into a bit on exo-planets being so common other life has got to be out there someplace, in my opinion (alas, not yet based on solid evidence).
I’m about to e-mail my students an electronic copy of, probably the Times article rather than the Science Daily and, in an engaging way, say “see, I told you so! Isn’t astronomy an amazing topic!!!”
(I should be just wrapping up teaching my first, Linguistics class of the semester right this minute, but it is nasty winter weather again in Boston and the college cancelled evening classes. Snow all day yesterday, switching to freezing rain for most of today and this evening the temperature plummeted — as predicted — and we are back to snow. That all translates as ice everywhere!)
Hi Raesean —
Ummmm….are you a skating female astronomy prof at Wellesley? I suspect you are not the skating female astronomy prof I know at Wellesley but I HAVE to ask.
(If is really is you, Wendy — you have hidden in plain sight here!)
No, alas, I’m not Wendy of Wellesley. Sorry ’bout that. I teach in the evenings at Cambridge College in… duh,,, Cambridge and work by day at Boston’s anti-poverty agency doing policy and community organizing. The astronomy is a sideline to my normal academic subjects of anthropology and archaeology (and Ancient Art History). I seem to have developed a fixation on the letter “A”. Still waiting to take up Biology. Wendy sounds like a fun person, though.
Wendy is an astronomy prof at Wellesley, and met Carolyn & Jane through me — and skating. I was going to be somewhat shocked if you were Wendy, because we are in periodic contact & she had never mentioned she was on WWAS.
This is a HORRIBLE pic of Wendy –but I think you will appreciate her academic robes:
http://www.wellesley.edu/Astronomy/wbauer.html
A few years ago she took two of us into the observatory at Wellesley. It was TOTAL FUN.
Ooh, what great academic robes!!! And she looks like a lot of fun too. If I am ever out at Wellesley, I’ll try to look her up. I have never sprung for buying Harvard’s crimson gown because renting it some 15 years ago for graduation cost a good $200+ dollars and to buy it then was something like $400+. And, the little paper tag that came with the rental gown said “not responsible if colors run when wet”! Who wants to spend that much money for something that isn’t even color-fast? But I regret not being able to parade around at will in mediaeval, fuchsia (’cause that’s what the crimson color really is) gown.
saw this on space daily, fascinating, isn’t it – life – but sophisticated life?
watched a very good doc yesterday about why the moon is critical to the stability of our planet and lots of other things, which left one wondering whether a large enough moon IS critical to the development of life past bacteria, as the presenter was intimating ….
On the other hand—look how life on our own planet defied all the rules we’d made up to say what conditions were mandatory. We’re blinded by our own success. I once wrote a silly little program in Basic that took gradations of characteristics, ie, how fed (from hunter to vegetarian to photosynthetic bacteria in the skin, 10 choices), how many limbs, 1-10; how locomoted (different than how many limbs); how many brain segments; how big; how approachable; how phototropic, ranging down to photophobic; etc, for a long list of characteristics that life has—and the result was extremely liberating for the imagination. A creature with three brain segments, five appendages, four of them locomotive, and a thick coating of algaes in life, producing the sugars that feed it, that mates only by crossing the reproductive trail of another of its kind, which is how it gets different DNA into its offspring…
If you do your initial imagining without preconception of what life has to do, you get to play scientist and explain the survival of what the computer/planet actually gives you.
Love the exoplanet hunt. I can remember being told by a high school teacher in the early 70s that Star Trek and Science Fiction were so much garbage, that our solar system was probably the only once in existence.
Vindication!
Er one, not once.
amazing how all the limitations that scientists think up, get broken down, and all the imaginings of science fiction writers gradually come into existence, one by one …..
“There are more strange things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Systems and planets and moons, oh my! I love seeing the future coming true.
Speaking of woodchucks…….did the groundhog see his shadow anywhere yesterday? I find it hard to believe spring is just around the corner. ‘Half your wood and half your hay you should have left on Candlemas Day.’
I don’t think any of the usual suspects in eastern North American saw a shadow yesterday. The radio guy said the woodchucks are only right 39% of the time anyway. As far as I’m concerned, six weeks (March 21) is an early spring anyway. Trees around Toronto (Canada) don’t start leafing out until mid-April at the earliest.
Here they’re saying early spring!
Lies — all lies (at least according to my brother in OH).
At least in my neck of southern New England (Boston-area),: the woodchuck was snoozing solidly under 3-4 feet of snow! No way he even budged in an attempt to see his shadow.
One of my favorite IPad apps is the Exoplanet one. Yes, I’m an unrepentant geek.