this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
332 points (93.0% liked)
Technology
59588 readers
3987 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Sadly they cannot be communicated with in a single human life time; assuming they are intelligent and possess the capability to respond.
Even if Webb were to basically spot earth 2 5 light years away, I’d caution about getting excited for a radio chat.
Remember that life has existed on earth for something like 3 billion years, but multicellular life has only been around for 500 million or so years, humans in various forms have been around for about a million years, and we’ve only had radio for about a hundred years.
The vast majority of life that has ever existed on our planet has been single called organisms. Finding evidence of any life on another planet is huge news, but we should temper our expectations.
It’s way, way more likely for alien planets to have oceans full of plankton analogues as the dominant life. Considering the rest of this planet’s atmosphere is composed mostly of hydrogen, even their plankton would be weird by our standards.
We could irradiate Earth2 with so much RF radiation the crearures of the other planet all develop immune to cancer!
It's a planet 8x the mass of the earth with a heavy hydrogen atmosphere and is considered very hot, the water is in a super critical state. I think if we found anything it would just be bacterial life.
My bet is on "previously unknown chemistry" creating the chemicals we found. It's never aliens :(
But the definition of a single human lifetime could very well change within one human lifetime from now.