Monday, January 25, 2016

Quickies: Where The Aliens Are / Aren’t

     Extrasolar planets seem to be pretty common; at least, something over 2000 have already been detected and mention of new ones occurs fairly frequently. The theory runs that planets are the only suitable wombs for life – i.e., that life will not develop in interplanetary or interstellar space – so as planets have been found, so has the hope that one will eventually appear that has brought forth life.

     There are several assumptions buried in there that seldom get taken out for a close look, but let that pass for the moment. Note that the warmistas can’t bear to let even this sort of speculation lie fallow:

     Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly, said astrobiologists from the Australian National University (ANU).

     In research aiming to understand how life might develop, scientists realized new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets.

     “The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens,” said Aditya Chopra from ANU.

     “Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive.”

     “Most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable.”

     About four billion years ago, Earth, Venus, and Mars may have all been habitable. However, a billion years or so after formation, Venus turned into a hothouse and Mars froze into an icebox.

     Early microbial life on Venus and Mars, if there was any, failed to stabilize the rapidly changing environment, said Charley Lineweaver from ANU.

     “Life on Earth probably played a leading role in stabilizing the planet’s climate,” he said.

     Don’t bother trying to wrap your mind around the concept of “astrobiologists” before any actual extraterrestrial life has been detected. As if that weren’t bad enough, comes then the notion that fragile “early life,” rather than adapting to variations in planetary climate, is required to control it!

     The brilliant Joanne Nova explodes this nonsense with a single graph:

     The Brilliant Gaiian Bottleneck theory reckons that intelligent life has to get smart fast enough to control the climate and stabilize things before they get killed off by climate change.
     In studying how life might develop on other planets, the scientists realized that early critters likely had a hard time quickly evolving to their heating or cooling planets and did not survive. So essentially the reason we haven’t found any aliens yet is that quite simply while the percentage of life-sustaining environments could be high enough, they’re not around long enough for them to evolve from the pools of primordial life. — PopHerald.com

     Because humans need a stable climate to evolve in, right. Like this?

     Facts are such stubborn things. As Nova concludes, most pointedly:

     Seriously – a journal published this wild speculation based on no data and a sample size of one? And the only case study they have (us) contradicts the theory? Welcome to government funded science.

     Indeed.

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