BBC:

A red dwarf star 20 light-years away is again providing hints that it hosts the first definitively habitable planet outside our Solar System.

The planet Gliese 581d is at the colder outer edge of the “Goldilocks zone” in which liquid water can be sustained.

As Thomas Gold points out at the end of his paper, “The Deep Hot Biosphere,” there most likely is life on other planets, but this life is most likely in the ground and not the surface. So, what ever life there is in the rest of the solar system or galaxy or universe, it’s probably at the bacterial stage. To achieve complex, surficial, and large life, you need the gateway of the Oxygen Evolving Complex, in the photosynthesis process. To obtain large life as we know it, life that can power the kinds of brains we have, brains that can formulate theories and make machines that are powerful enough to look at distant stars and find other worlds, you need an atmosphere with lots of oxygen. This byproduct of photosynthesis protects and provides a powerful form of respiration. A world will need something like the miraculous unification (PSII and PSI) of the Z-scheme (pronounced “zed”) to get animals like us going about its surface.

But there is something else…

Getting to any habitable planet will certainly require something that looks like the spaceship, Icarus II, in the movie Sunshine:

Icarus II is probably the most realistic vision of space travel in all of cinema. An unrealistic vision of space travel is Star Trek. The great biologist Lynn Margulis explains why:

If people ever journey for extended periods in outer space, endeavor will never be as machinate and barren as Star Trek. The vision of sterile engineering emancipating us from our planetmates is not only tasteless and boring, it borders on the hideous. No matter how much our own species preoccupies us, life is a far wider system. Life is an incredibly complex interdendence of matter and energy among millions of species beyond (and within ) our own skin… Without “the other” we do not survive.

Indeed, Sunshine, a generally bad film, gets this one thing correct: space travel will mean traveling with other living organisms.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

6 replies on “The Facts of Life”

  2. I’ll admit I’m shocked to have gone through an entire post without really disagreeing with you on any scientific point Charles. I’m almost at a loss as to what to say 😉

    Two smallish things to add, one sci, the other sci-fi.

    The Goldilocks zone is a good place to look for life-sustaining planets, but I would stress it’s not the only place to look. Energy from stars can lead to liquid water, but so can the internal heat of a sufficiently large planet or moon. There is ample evidence that Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, has subsurface oceans that could potentially harbor life.
    On a slightly less scientific note, I’m not convinced that we have sufficient imagination when it comes to life. Our assumption that cognitively advanced life would have to consist of oxygen breathers is great when you’re talking about the evolutionary path and conditions of Earth, but I’m not convinced that the evidence is in that this is the only real viable path towards evolutionarily advanced life.

    Finally on an entirely non-scientific note, I have to step up to defend Star Trek. As any half-assed trekkie knows, the reason crops and animals weren’t needed on Star Trek is because of the existence of replicators (I swear I didn’t choose the video for its title). At least they have the decency to simply invent a non-existent technology, instead of decidin, ala Sunshine, that you can re-ignite the Sun with, what else, a nuclear device.

  4. “To obtain large life as we know it, life that can power the kinds of brains we have, brains that can formulate theories and make machines that are powerful enough to look at distant stars and find other worlds, you need an atmosphere with lots of oxygen.”

    The most important words there are “as we know it.” We have a hard time imagining any other path to intelligence, but it is entirely possible that other intelligences evolve along a path very dissimilar from our own.

    Also I liked Sunshine except for the third act. The monster was pointless. Yes, it made no sense to the sun dying like that or being re-ignited like that, but I could suspend my disbelief. I couldn’t get around how the movie started as a study of people in extreme stress/boredom and got trapped in some stupid monster bullshit. If they were gonna be stupid, why not at least have Michelle Yeoh kick somebody in the head?

  5. Sunshine was a great movie (with a great soundtrack).

    Also, the sensational misreporting of that paper overstates any actual findings: http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.1031

    It seems pretty unlikely that humans will ever travel interstellar distances, for the obvious reasons you touch on above. Transhumans, posthumans or our artificial antecedents, maybe, but humans have too much baggage to be cost-effective space travelers.

  6. If – or when – we travel to another world, I just wonder how badly we’ll screw it up when we introduce our novel earthean invasives into their (soon to be formerly) virgin biosphere…

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