Scientists Believe More Planets than Previously Thought Could Harbour Life .

Its not a new thought as many of us have already postulated the idea that the Goldilocks zone is a false constraint to the existence of Extraterrestrial life , 1 for the reasons bellow and 2 for the Moons that are internally heated due to stretching caused by their orbit of their parent gas giant planets .

New computer models being developed by scientists at Aberdeen University take into account internal heating of far-flung planets that could create underground water reservoirs to provide a habitat for life .

The research was presented at the British Science Festival in Aberdeen.
Water is fundamental for life as we know it. Planets too close to their sun lose surface water to the atmosphere through evaporation.
Surface water on planets located in the more frigid distant reaches from their sun is locked away as ice. The dogma was, for water to exist in its life-giving liquid form, a planet had to be the right distance from its sun - in the habitable zone.

As you descend through the crust of the Earth, the temperature gets higher and higher. Even when the surface is frozen, water can exist below ground. Immense quantities of water in fact - teeming with primitive life.

As Prof John Parnell, also from Aberdeen University said: "There is a significant habitat for microorganisms below the surface of the Earth, extending down several kilometres. "And some workers believe that the bulk of life on Earth could even reside in this deep biosphere." So the Aberdeen team are developing models to predict which far-flung planets might harbour underground reservoirs of liquid water with the possibility of alien life.

According to Mr McMahon, "There will be several times more [habitable] planets".
www.bbc.co.uk...

As surface dwellers we tend to think of Aliens being surface dwellers too , could that be a false assumption and could an intelligent life form evolve from one of these underground habitats ...just a thought

life evolves to suit its particular environment,

it would be really arrogant to assume life can only survive between earth's rough range of 0F to 100F where we find life in teeming abundance but relatively not much life outside of that range.

that's just on our planet. on other planets moons comet and asteroids life may have either evolved and/or adapted to live in a totally different range of vibration.

and probably are even interdimensional, lucky them.

It doesn't matter if there is a planet on the other side of the universe that has Earth's exact dimensions/distance from the sun, and the hundreds of other factors that are needed to sustain life here. Life cannot simply create itself. Being able to "sustain" is not the same as "create". For all that say evolution did it, you still have the problem of explaining how the first cell came about and reproduced from non living matter.

Originally posted by kingofmd
Life cannot simply create itself.

Why not?

Originally posted by kingofmd
...Life cannot simply create itself. Being able to "sustain" is not the same as "create". For all that say evolution did it, you still have the problem of explaining how the first cell came about and reproduced from non living matter.

"Life", or life processes are simply chemical processes.

In the case of Life, life uses chemical processes (the reactions caused by combinations of chemicals) that self-replicate -- i.e., chemical processes that automatically create copies of the the original cell. However, they are chemical processes, just the same.

I don't find it too difficult to imagine that over millions or billions of years of chemicals randomly combining on a far away planet, that these random chemical combinations would -- by chance -- stumble upon one of those chemical processes that are self-replicating, and -- voila! -- you have life.

Just because we are carbon based, does not mean other life forms have to conform to our carbon ways. He have speculation but we do not have knowledge on other life forms.

For all we know about life on this planet, Pluto could be harboring life.

Yet, there isn't a single piece of evidence for intelligent extraterrestrials out there. Being habitable is one thing, harbouring intelligent life is quite another. There is the probability that the rise of intelligent life is such a rare occurrence in the universe and hence there might only be a handful of planets throughout the entire observable universe that have harboured and continue to harbour intelligent life.

reply to post by kingofmd


Isn't one of the assumptions of the Drake Equation that any habitable planet wiill develop life? Of course, life can be introduced in the form of microbes inside a meteorite that was part of a rock on a life-bearing planet that was knocked into space by an asteroid strike.

Pardon my ignorance but what is the idea behind the claim that "life can only exist with luqid water"? As far as I understand we just think so because it happened that way on the only planet with life that we know of - Earth. I remember reading hints about bacterial life in the frozen Sulfur in Pluto's moon Europa and possibility of bacterial life in Methance oceans in Titan. How do we know that life can't happen in any other compund except H2O? Isn't it a very big and naive assumption?

Edit: There's a very nice discussion (and a starting point for those interested) of other possible types of biochemistry which could harbor life in Wikipedia. In search of life I don't think we have the luxury of eliminating any possibilites and focusing on only what we are sure of.
en.wikipedia.org...

Originally posted by MathematicalPhysicist
Yet, there isn't a single piece of evidence for intelligent extraterrestrials out there. Being habitable is one thing, harbouring intelligent life is quite another. There is the probability that the rise of intelligent life is such a rare occurrence in the universe and hence there might only be a handful of planets throughout the entire observable universe that have harboured and continue to harbour intelligent life.

It might be argued that intelligent extraterrestrials would not necessarily be detectable to us at this point in our history. After all, we just started getting evidence of the existence of extrasolar planets. There is also the probability that the rise of intelligent life is all but guaranteed once life has taken hold and that every habitable planet, given enough time, will harbor it.

reply to post by bilb_o


Most scientist only say "Life as we know it" only exists where there is liquid water. There are plenty of scientist -- even astrobiology experts working for NASA -- who fully understand that different kinds of life MAY be able to live in places such as the liquid methane/ethane lakes of Titan.

Quite frankly though, the easiest life for us to find may be "Life as we know it", so that may be the first ET life we ever find. It may be very hard for us to recognize a microbe that works in a way that is totally foreign to us. Not all microbes swim around, making their presence easy to spot.

Lord Martin Rees president of the Royal Society here in the UK gave an interview recently in which he states his belief that we could discover Extraterrestrial life within the next 40 years given the developments in Planet hunting technology .

The question of whether earth is alone in supporting living organisms has dogged scientists, philosophers and amateur stargazers for centuries. But Lord Rees, president of the Royal Society, believes that developments in astronomy mean that astrophysicists could be able to view images of distant planets outside of our solar system as soon as 2025, and potentially discover whether there is some form of life on them.

He said: 'We know now that stars are orbited by retinues of planets just as our sun is. We have learned this in just the last decade, essentially. 'Within 10 or 20 years we will be able to image other planets like the earth, orbiting other stars. 'That will be a really exciting subject to see if there is evidence for [extra-terrestrial] life or not.'
www.dailymail.co.uk...

To my knowledge Lord Rees is not prone to fanciful or uninformed statements so the probability is that we may well know within our lifetimes that other planets in our Galaxy do support other life forms .