Post by Nugget on Aug 28, 2016 12:07:55 GMT -6
This is a pretty interesting read and would certainly explain a lot of mysteries. I have often wondered if we humans don't have some complicity in creating paranormal events.
motherboard.vice.com/read/what-if-we-havent-found-aliens-because-humans-came-first?trk_source=popular
Even if our own Milky Way galaxy is currently teeming with extraterrestrial beings, their worlds could be scattered thousands of light years distant from each other, passing blindly like cosmic ships in the night.
But what if the key obstacle to detecting alien pen pals is not spatial, but rather temporal? That’s one of the questions posed by a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
Supposing red dwarfs could host life, it stands to reason that the long, stable, adult lifespans of red dwarf systems would amplify opportunity for fledgling ecosystems to bloom. “Our conclusion is that if low-mass stars can support life, then life is much more likely in the future,” Loeb told me. “Since [low-mass stars] live so much longer, they are providing heat to keep a planet warm for longer.”
Loeb’s team found that life would be about one thousand times more likely to arise in the distant future by calculating the probability of habitable, Earthlike planets forming over trillions of years.
he scenario casts Earthlings as early bloomers, prematurely born long before the universe’s most fertile life-bearing years. Perhaps this is one possible explanation for the classic Fermi paradox: Have we struck out in our attempts to detect alien intelligence simply because we are the first example of it to show up to the cosmic party?
“It might be morning in the cosmos, to quote Reagan,” Seth Shostak, senior astronomer and director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, told me. “There’s going to be a lot more life to come.”
Another recent study led by Pratika Dayal, an astrophysicist based at the University of Groningen, came to a similar conclusion by delving into the role that radiation from sources like supernovae and gamma ray bursts have played in habitability over the course of the last 13 billion years.
Her team’s models show that decreasing radiation may have resulted in a universe that is 20 times more liveable today than it was four billion years ago, when life first appeared on Earth. The study also projected that our cosmic surroundings will continue to evolve into a more nurturing environment for life in the future.
But what if the key obstacle to detecting alien pen pals is not spatial, but rather temporal? That’s one of the questions posed by a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
Supposing red dwarfs could host life, it stands to reason that the long, stable, adult lifespans of red dwarf systems would amplify opportunity for fledgling ecosystems to bloom. “Our conclusion is that if low-mass stars can support life, then life is much more likely in the future,” Loeb told me. “Since [low-mass stars] live so much longer, they are providing heat to keep a planet warm for longer.”
Loeb’s team found that life would be about one thousand times more likely to arise in the distant future by calculating the probability of habitable, Earthlike planets forming over trillions of years.
he scenario casts Earthlings as early bloomers, prematurely born long before the universe’s most fertile life-bearing years. Perhaps this is one possible explanation for the classic Fermi paradox: Have we struck out in our attempts to detect alien intelligence simply because we are the first example of it to show up to the cosmic party?
“It might be morning in the cosmos, to quote Reagan,” Seth Shostak, senior astronomer and director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, told me. “There’s going to be a lot more life to come.”
Another recent study led by Pratika Dayal, an astrophysicist based at the University of Groningen, came to a similar conclusion by delving into the role that radiation from sources like supernovae and gamma ray bursts have played in habitability over the course of the last 13 billion years.
Her team’s models show that decreasing radiation may have resulted in a universe that is 20 times more liveable today than it was four billion years ago, when life first appeared on Earth. The study also projected that our cosmic surroundings will continue to evolve into a more nurturing environment for life in the future.
