What a nothingburger of an article.... not even mentioning the fermi paradox. No actual new information and whatever do they want to say when they talk about "radically changing the way we think about the search for life in the universe"?!
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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I assumed this article wouldn’t provide much. Do they at least mention dyson spheres? I bet they don’t mention how rare our solar system is.
There doesn't appear to be anything rare about our solar system, and why would you expect them to mention Dyson spheres?
We're basically looking for and expecting simple microbial life. You know, slime.
The Dyson sphere would significantly increase the possibility of finding “Alien life” if one were built. You may be looking for slime, but just saying Alien can imply other things. Especially on mainstream media like BBC.
In recent studies, 55 CancriB is the most similar system to our own. However the star itself is an orange dwarf furthermore the system is a binary one. All other observed systems are even less similar to our own. Binary systems are the most common systems in the universe and we don’t have one.
Editors should have a rule that if they can find your exact article word for word in your own newspaper archives then the article should be trashed.
This is now article (large number) about how we’re going to find life any minute now.
It's so naive to say there is no other life than us in the universe so big that human mind cannot really comprehend how enormous and diverse it really is while being able to observe just a fcking smidge of it.
Literally the first sentence: "Many astronomers are no longer asking whether there is life elsewhere in the Universe."
Then never in the article so they do any kind of clarifying or providing proof for the "Many" part of the statement. Most this article is about a single person.
This might be really obvious, but I've never heard anyone mention it specifically - it's well known that light takes time to reach us, so when we look at far away objects, we are also looking back in time - surely this has a huge impact on detecting life?
If we were able to see what planets that could support life look like as they are currently, then perhaps we would see life?
We're not talking about planets hundreds of millions of light years. We're taking about planets a few to hundreds of light years away.
That is nothing. There's been life on earth basically as soon as it cooled enough to not be a molten ball of rock. Like 3 billion years ago.
Yeah but to see actual signs of life on those planets we'd need to either be able to see clear images of the surface, or have some way (other than the light method we use ATM) to detect microscopic lifeforms, right?
I'm just asking to try understand better, the only mention I've heard of life on other planets have been from chemicals produced by life detected in the light that passes through the planets' atmosphere, but I wouldn't say that is definitive proof
I'm glad that you're trying to understand! That's awesome.
So, I don't want to be rude, but your lack of knowledge is far too severe for me to correct in a post.
You are correct about spectrography being used in determining if there's life on a planet, but there's just so much that you don't yet know.
If you haven't seen it, watch the original Carl Sagan Cosmos.
When you've learned about that talk to me again. I'll update you from there.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently detected tantalising hints at life on a planet outside our Solar System - and it has many more worlds in its sights.
The planet is in what astronomers call ''the Goldilocks zone' - the right distance away from its star for the surface temperature to be neither too hot nor too cold, but just right for there to be liquid water, which is essential to support life.
Prof Nikku Madhusudhan of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University, who led the study, told me that if the hints are confirmed "it would radically change the way we think about the search for life".
That has injected fresh impetus, according to Dr Nathalie Cabrol, director of Seti's Carl Sagan Center for the study of life in the Universe.
But chemical signatures from faraway atmospheres, interesting readings from moon flybys and even microfossils from Mars are all open to interpretation, Dr Cabrol argues.
All the elements are in place for a discovery that will be more than just an incredible scientific breakthrough, according to Dr Subhajit Sarker of Cardiff University, who is a member of the team studying K2-18b.
The original article contains 1,297 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 85%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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In order to reasonably say this, you have to have solved the Drake Equation. Which you can't do until you've actually found life on another planet. So what is this astronomer basing their statement on? Hopes and dreams? Gut feeling?