There's an article about life on other planets out today which, you would think, has little to do with domestic politics. But you'd be wrong because ultimately everything we do gets quickly reduced by people on the Left to a politically compatible outlook. If everything is political then nothing escapes politics, not even speculation about life on other planets.
A few years ago, in a lab in Berlin, the astrobiologist Iva Vilović was thrilled when she observed garden cress sprouting under a light designed to mimic a “K-dwarf” star — an orange-hued star that’s cooler and slower burning than our yellow sun. To her surprise, the cress grew even faster and taller than it did under simulated sunlight.
Her results suggested that photosynthesis, the process that supplies the energy for Earth’s entire food web, can happen on planets orbiting these orange stars. “K-dwarf light is a very, very interesting light source, and it should be considered, if not prioritized, for any type of search for extraterrestrial life, in my opinion,” said Dr. Vilović, now at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam, Germany.
This one observation got a few people thinking about the idea that maybe Earth isn't the actual sweet-spot for the development of life. Maybe there are other types of stars or planets where life could, in theory, develop more smoothly and for a much longer time.
A superhabitable world — as scientists imagine it — is about 20 to 30 percent wider and twice as massive as Earth, and is placed at the right distance from its star for water to flow on its surface. The stronger gravity of this bigger Earth would hold on tighter to ambient molecules than Earth does, giving the planet a thicker atmosphere and a warmer and more stable climate, fueling the growth of extraterrestrial plants and animals (or their equivalents). The super-Earth’s bigger iron core would erect a stronger magnetic field around it, better blocking cosmic radiation.
As for the superhabitable planet’s surface, picture paradise. An enlarged orb would be rounder and smoother than Earth, as its stronger gravity erodes continental shelves and fills in trenches. Water would spill evenly over its surface as shallow lakes and seas.
On Earth, tropical islands and shallow seas are among the most biodiverse habitats. Now imagine a whole world of balmy archipelagos and reefs. The islands would burst with biological activity, their diverse topographies and geographic isolation fueling explosions of distinct species. Light would reach clear to the seafloor, powering abundant alien algae and plants to feed a booming marine ecosystem.
Does anything like this actually exist? No one knows. It's just speculation at this point. We've only barely just begun to search for planets around these K-dwarf stars. But behind this there is a kind of spiritual impulse, a desire to know whether humans are alone in the universe.
For Dr. Heller, the hunt for more habitable worlds is about “finding out if we are alone, if we could have been found, if there’s someone to talk to,” he said.
“Although I am not, at least in my everyday life, a very spiritual person,” he added, “it’s nevertheless something that at least drives me — this question, Could there be someone?”
All of this is still in the realm of science fiction at this point, but it's interesting. These are questions that people have thought about and argued about for hundreds of years.
But the comments are full of NY Times subscribers who are quickly reducing this to a kind of competition among depressives to produce the most anti-human reaction to the idea. Here's the top comment.
Perhaps there are, but unless someone invents the Warp drive or discovers how to fold space, the sheer distance makes traveling there a practical impossibility. Besides, it would be better for those planets and their life forms if they never encountered us.
As it happens, I agree with the first half of this. Anything further than 100 light years away (1/1,000 the diameter of the Milky Way) might as well be infinitely far away. We can't get there and we can't even have much of a conversation. I'm not happy about that but it does seem to be the limit of physics as we currently understand it.
Unfortunately, we're just very small and the galaxy is very big and the speed limit is fixed. Voyager One, the spacecraft launched in 1977, is the farthest anything from earth has ever travelled. Next month it will be exactly one light day from earth. The closest star is about 4 light years from earth. That's the tough math we're facing and we can't do anything about it.
But it's really the second part of this that I find most telling. "It would be better for those planets and their life forms if they never encountered us." That's not reckoning with the reality of physics, that's a depressed person who sees all of humanity as some kind of blot on the universe rather than a bright spot of intelligence and self-awareness, the only one we know of at the moment.
And there are many more comments just like this. Years of scolding lectures from environmentalists have turned many progressives into depressives who have no hope for the future of the species and no belief things can improve even though, by many objective measures, they have improved dramatically.
It's that old imperative baked into the American psyche: use something up, and then move on! If there is such a planet, assuming we live long enough to get there, if we don't mend our ways, we'll probably destroy that, too.
These people need counseling.
Hopefully humans never find them. We’ve shown that we are incapable of taking care of our own perfectly habitable and sustainable planet.
I'm starting to wonder if "depressive affect" needs to be added to the Drake equation as a factor.
And we don’t belong anywhere near them.
Humanity is nothing but monsters.
...as for finding other life, “someone to talk to,” we can’t even wrap our heads around cultural backgrounds and skin color different from our own. We still refer to ethnicity as race when we are all one race - the human race. But sure, let’s go make friends, but more likely war, with extraterrestrials!
It's not just these individuals. All of these are the most upvoted comments.
Yes I’m pretty sure humans could manage to destroy any planet given enough time, no matter how super inhabitable it may be.
All of these people have given up on the human species, at least they've been taught that's the smart perspective to express publicly.
Those worlds would be much better off if humans never found a way to reach them. We only need to look at the way we're destroying our planet as a cautionary tale. We are categorically not an advanced species. We're collectively and historically a greedy, warmongering, exploitative, invasive species.
Luckily, humanity will be gone in a few hundred years.
So we have about 500 million years to find a new home. I wish it were so. Our inability to protect our beautiful world likely reduces our time horizon to several hundred years, before runaway warming destroys our ability to survive,
In all of this there was one guy from Arizona who seemed to have some remaining capacity for wonder and hope for humanity. Maybe he's a progressive too. I don't know. But he still has something of the human spirit that politics has crushed out of these others, like juice pressed from grapes.
I love hiking down South Kaibab Trail towards the bottom of the Grand Canyon on a dark night. The view of the planets and stars is simply incredible. Whenever I hike down to the Tip Off, I find a specific, relatively flat rock, use my backpack as a pillow, and just look up, wondering what else is out there in the vastness of space.
Reading this article changed how I view that night sky. The concept of a “superhabitable” planet had never occurred to me before; I had never even heard the word. The idea that Earth is actually only marginally habitable is a thought I entertained until now, but it makes perfect sense.
When I make that hike in the early morning hours of December 13th, I know I will look up into the night sky and see a completely different universe. It will be a Waxing Crescent Moon with just 17.2% of our lunar disk illuminated by our now not so perfect Sun, meaning the night sky will be exceptionally dark. Finding a truly dark sky is incredibly rare these days, and that is a profound shame. As humans, we desperately need to look up and wonder what is out there, then go find it!
Maybe we'll never find a super-earth or another inhabited planet, but it's not time to moan and cry about our failure before we've even really looked. Show a little human spirit of adventure. Have some faith in our ability to be more than our worst impulses. We've come a long way in the past 500 years. Now is not the time to throw in the towel and collapse on the fainting couch. We're just getting started and we've got a long way to go.
