It was a simple question asked over lunch in 1950. Enrico Fermi, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who helped usher in the atomic age, was dining with colleagues at Los Alamos, New Mexico, when the conversation turned to extraterrestrial life. Given the vastness of the universe and the statistical likelihood of other intelligent civilizations, Fermi wondered, "Where is everybody?"

We now know that 1 in every 4 stars, at least, has a planet that is the same size as Earth and is rocky, and is the same temperature as Earth, so it’s what we would call a habitable-zone planet. Those are very secure conclusions.

The next step is identifying biosignatures—chemicals in a planet’s atmosphere that could only be there because of biological processes. Charbonneau says that the necessary evidence faces a major technological hurdle: It requires far more data than our current instruments can provide.

There’s still the question of just how common life, let alone intelligent life, really is. It’s possible, Charbonneau said, that if you take any habitable-zone planet, add water, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus, and give it about a billion years, life will develop. Or you could have those very same conditions, and it would all remain stubbornly lifeless. You only have to look at the first habitable planet to have a much better idea how common life is.

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    3·
    9 days ago

    The next step is identifying biosignatures—chemicals in a planet’s atmosphere that could only be there because of biological processes.

    This we have done. There have been several promising signs of life based on looking for biosignatures on other worlds. It’s one of the reasons we want to send missions to one of the moons of Jupiter (Europa? Titan? I forget which one specifically); because we have seen plumes of gasses that, from our current understanding, can only come from biological life processes.

    • Sony@lemmy.worldOPM
      1·
      8 days ago

      But can these life forms be exploited by the corporates and turned into Bitcoin?.. This is the big question!