SPACE

[WiteWulf]

Until recently, though, it was assumed that oxygen had to be present for life to exist and now we've found whacky bacteria around vents on the ocean floor with completely different chemistry to everything else on Earth.

[Darkflame]

I thought that at one time, but it turns out that the molecular bonding of carbon is much more flexible and dynamic than that of, say, silicon. Carbon's pretty common, anything else is going to be much less probable.

Maybe.
But then, maybe flexible molecular bonding itself isn't a necessity for life in some forms?

For instance, maybe somewhere theres sheets of rock with intricate pattens that self-replicate purely from weathering process's over thousands of years. The pattens in the rock could act as a computer, running slowly from the way the water soaks though it at different rates. By selectively depositing the water at different points, the "rock" could form a new sheet of rock along one side, slowly growing in complexity. Variations in weather provide the mutation ability, with selection being done by rocks that replicate better, and give more sterdy "offspring"

Or maybe somewhere theres a cave of crystals that reflect light from above, altering the temperature at different points of the cave. The temperature variations effect crystal growth and direction of new crystals. Caves, or sections of caves, best at encouraging crystal growth spread...reflecting the light further, requiring increasingly complex arrangements the further it gets from the lightsource. Other factors effect crystal growth also come into play. The crystals themselfs arnt a lifeform, but the on-mass arrangement of them in the cave system slowly becomes a crude inteligence as it gets better at spreading itself.


Ok, crazy ideas, for sure with probably hundreds of problems.
But I'm just trying to imagine the most "alien" possible life to us. I dont think we are in a position to make any sorts of assumptions yet.

[zip accident]

But I'm just trying to imagine the most "alien" possible life to us. I dont think we are in a position to make any sorts of assumptions yet.

Have you really looked at a cephalopod?





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_intelligence

What about these?



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp

Or, from the Doritos thread:



Just because it's carbon based, that doesn't make it anything like human.

It could be that intelligences are more alike than different, compared to relatively unintelligent life forms, by virtue of their shared ability.

[Darkflame]

hay hay! I certainly didnt infer carbon-based had to be human like.
I'm just saying it still might only be a small subset of whats possible, even if that smallsub is itself massively diverse.

(btw, AliensOfTheDeep3D is a superb documentary for more deep-sea crazyness)

It could be that intelligences are more alike than different, compared to relatively unintelligent life forms, by virtue of their shared ability.

Its hard to say.
I do think intelligence is a universal servival advantage, and I do think there will be common referance points (maths) for us to start on. If we know an inteligence is there, I think we could slowly learn to comminicate (as long as they operate at a speed close to our own). Might take decades, centurys, but we'd get there.

The problem is more with the language side of things. We might not even recognise it to know the intelligence is there.
Theres just so many possible ways communication could be done..even beyond the normal audio/visual.
(eg, A blind/death species might communicate completely by touch, or leaving displacements in sand for others of its kind to read. What would a computer be like for a species thats never had ears nor eyes? ).
Some form of electromagnetic waves is still, of course, the best bet for long-range communication as there isn't that many options there. But even the methods and encodings they use could be so alien to our way of thinking that we might not see the Paturn at all.

[Fil]

Did they find those space whales yet?

[Darkflame]

No, but we found the bowl of petunias.

[WiteWulf]

Oh no....not again

[zip accident]

hay hay! I certainly didnt infer carbon-based had to be human like.
I'm just saying it still might only be a small subset of whats possible, even if that smallsub is itself massively diverse.

When people go looking for the extraordinary, I tend to think it means they are bored with the ordinary. I'm just pointing out that the ordinary is worthy of a lot more attention. There are some fascinating things in the sea (and on the land but those seem more ordinary to me than sealife), and there may be some that are intelligent enough to hold a conversation with, if we knew how. Learning how might be hugely advantageous if we ever met ETs.

One thing is that the fauna of the earth is more alien than anything fictional in films or on TV, because those were all invented by humans for entertainment, and most of it is humans in suits, including the daleks, whereas animals were not invented by humans, nor in my view, by an intelligence at all.

[Darkflame]

*queue the SeaQuest music*

[axel000]

Another extrasolar planet pic



More observations needed to confirm its orbiting the targetted star and not some fluke object caught in the same area of the sky.

more

[axel000]

Zero G coffee cup

NASA astronaut Don Pettit loves his coffee. So it comes as no surprise that he found a way to drink coffee from a cup, instead of the traditional straw, on his day off Sunday aboard the International Space Station.

"We can suck our coffee from a bag, but to drink it from a cup is hard to do because you can't get the cup up to get the liquid out, and it's also easy to slosh," Pettit told Mission Control while sending a video of his new invention to Earth.

He used a piece of plastic ripped from his Flight Data File mission book and folded it into a teardrop-shape that's closed at one end. Surface tension inside the cup keeps the coffee from floating out and running amuck.

"The way this works is, the cross section of this cup looks like an airplane wing," he said. "The narrow angle here will wick the coffee up."

The result: space coffee in a zero-G cup.

[axel000]

Bloody hell, Jupiter found to have a solid core14 to 18 times the mass of Earth. So much for it being just a gas giant. Its a rocky world with a frigg'n ginormous atmosphere !

Burkhard Militzer, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues ran computer simulations to look at conditions inside Jupiter on the scale of individual hydrogen and helium atoms. Particularly, the researchers examined the properties of hydrogen-helium mixtures at the extreme pressures and temperatures that occur in Jupiter's interior.

With information gleaned from these simulations, the researchers developed another computer model. They found Jupiter's core is an Earth-like rock that's 14 to 18 times the mass of Earth, or about 5 percent of Jupiter's total mass. Previous studies suggested the core was only seven Earth masses or that Jupiter had no core at all.

Militzer's team found the planet's core is made up of layers of metals and rocks, along with methane ice, ammonia ice and water ice. Above this layer, they suspect an atmosphere of mostly hydrogen and helium. A metallic ball of iron and nickel, just like Earth's core, probably lies at the center of Jupiter's rocky core, they said.

[RedOktober]

As time goes on, more and more things I was taught at school are proved wrong.

[Darkflame]

Pluto is still a planet.
--
Interesting about Jupiter....I always pictured it myself as being solidish, but with no fixed boundary, just getting constantly more dense.

[zip accident]

Pluto is still a planet.

"Planet" is just a word, a name. Pluto is the same as it ever was, and changing it's label from this distance won't make an difference.