Tuesday, February 19, 2008
A post about something!
Sustainable Development has some cool stuff. For example, in the 1960s/70s, NASA was looking into the possibilities of traveling to Mars to search for life. They ended up not needing to because, as it turns out, life leaves a huge impact on the planet's climate. There are 8 or so major chemical compounds in Earth's atmosphere. One of these is Oxygen, most of which comes from photosynthesis. There is 21 (or was it 22?)%-less, and there would not be enough for animals, any more and the air would be oversaturated with it and fires would become endemic. Without life, there would be three major compounds in Earth's atmosphere. Rather than a manned expedition to Mars, NASA built a telescope to look at the atmosphere and analyzed it for life.
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3 comments:
Interesting, tho not all life is photosynthesis based. They have discovered carbon-based organisms that live around hot water vents deep in the sea where there is no light, that live off the energy from the hot water. And there are theories that some organisms could be based on other non-carbon systems, which might inhabit places like some of Jupiter's cold moons. But without all that green stuff out there, we would clearly not be here!
Oxygen and photosynthesis is just one example, I think. The idea is that you can look at the atmosphere on worlds that we know with reasonable certainty to be lifeless and see common patterns, and then look to see if any worlds break those patterns. Obviously the idea here is oxygen/carbon, but I don't see why it wouldn't work with any life form that wasn't a closed system unto itself.
Given the uncountable millions of eathlike planets that must be out there, I find it hard to believe that oxygen/carbon based life has NOT developed on many millions of them.
The very scary prospect of actually meeting each other is mostly just scary because, so far, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. And that is just too slow to drop in for tea.
I do not know of any real or hypothetical models that show us breaking that barrier anytime soon or ever. The Star Trek and science fiction folks came up with hyperspace. But hyperspace is fiction. It only works on SciFi reruns of Star Trek or Voyager.
There is work showing that if you split a photon, the two parts maintain a mysterious connection such that a change to one is reflected in a change to the other instantaneously no matter what the distance. This is very woo woo and threatens the foundations of physics AND Einsteins speed of light barrier. But no one understands it yet or its implications for travel and/or communication.
It remains intriguing.
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