It should be OBVIOUS to anyone paying attention to space and biology over the last two decades that the “habitable zone” is just being a fool to the anthropic principle.
For two blatantly obvious reasons:
We DO NOT KNOW what forms “life” can take, so assuming they must need our type of environment is … stupid. See every extremophile species on this planet, let alone anything developing in worse environments.
It has been proven time and time again that many different scenarios can produce habitable conditions, or the opposite: Moons orbiting gas giants can absolutely get enough heat and tectonic action, amongst many other specific scenarios. On the opposite end, some entire types of stars turn out to not have ANY “habitable zone” in reality, such as red dwarfs having way too powerful of solar flares.
On the first point… I don’t know if the assumption is that life can only thrive in our type of environment, so much as that our type of environment is the only one that we know can support life so, as a starting point, it’s the best type to look for.
Well yeah, why would anyone “rule out” anything? That’s not what I said. It’s prioritising some places over others because there needs to be some kind of priority so we can decide where to look first.
A good summary of all we know is in the freely available Astrobiology Primer (currently v3), Chapter 7 is about exotic forms of life and why we look at the bands we do. You’ll find they comfortably cover all earth conditions including extremophiles, and they do consider exoplanet moons, although those are harder to observe.
It also has several chapters about why we look to earth like life, including that it’s the entirety of life observed, the only we could currently discover, etc.
Have a read, it’s quite interesting. It goes particularly well with touching some grass.
This is so stupid.
It should be OBVIOUS to anyone paying attention to space and biology over the last two decades that the “habitable zone” is just being a fool to the anthropic principle.
For two blatantly obvious reasons:
Such articles are nothing but ignorance manifest.
On the first point… I don’t know if the assumption is that life can only thrive in our type of environment, so much as that our type of environment is the only one that we know can support life so, as a starting point, it’s the best type to look for.
Maybe not, but that’s my interpretation.
That’s the consensus. We can’t search everywhere all at once, we have to start somewhere.
Yet nobody with any clue what’s going on is actually ruling out other sources… You are choosing to believe fiction authors over scientists. Sad.
Well yeah, why would anyone “rule out” anything? That’s not what I said. It’s prioritising some places over others because there needs to be some kind of priority so we can decide where to look first.
You misunderstand what I said. Nobody said life NEEDS our style of life…
BUT the “habitable zone” LITERALLY ASSUMES THAT. That’s the ENTIRE POINT of the “habitable zone”.
It’s NOTHING but an assumption that life must imitate us.
A good summary of all we know is in the freely available Astrobiology Primer (currently v3), Chapter 7 is about exotic forms of life and why we look at the bands we do. You’ll find they comfortably cover all earth conditions including extremophiles, and they do consider exoplanet moons, although those are harder to observe.
It also has several chapters about why we look to earth like life, including that it’s the entirety of life observed, the only we could currently discover, etc.
Have a read, it’s quite interesting. It goes particularly well with touching some grass.
lol good job absolutely failing to understand the lessons such materials teach…
We ARE NOT the only pattern for life. Period. Ever. Your ignorance is laughable to the universe.
So tell me what we should look for and why, preferably with an estimation of how likely it is that we’ll find something.
Hello Ryland.