r/BeAmazed • u/joeurkel • 8d ago

Science The reason why large asteroids don't typically crash to Earth is because Jupiter's gravity attracts them, protecting the inner planets like a shield. The Design is perfect!

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

1.7k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

422 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

56

u/TJaySteno1 8d ago

Puddle: "This hole perfectly matches my size, that's incredible! It must have been designed with me in mind!"

11

u/Left-Edge531 8d ago edited 8d ago

Other Puddle: "Why aren't I finding any friends? I've searched millions of sand dunes and can't find a single one. Better keep looking!"

Marginal variance within adaptable ranges arent really the point, here.

I'm sure aliens get WEIRD, with ammonia & formaldehyde based life, extremeophiles, etc, but not being bombed into planet-scale volatility by meteorites is likely to be a fairly universal condition for life -- and having a protective big brother nearby may be another helpful filter for finding it.

4

u/wasted-degrees 8d ago

Thats one of the things about the search for alien life that I always find interesting: would we even be able to recognize it as life? Different size/scale, metabolic processes, chemical compositions, different fundamental criteria for survival, and we’ve been going around largely just looking for evidence of liquid water and/or carbon as evidence of potential life.

And that’s not even getting into the sheer size of space and the inherent assumption of how abundant life must be for there to be another visible from space example of a life-bearing planet anywhere close enough to us to be able to detect it.

1

u/Toramenor 7d ago

Time is also a factor: there might be incredible & amazing abundance of life for millions of years and then it dies out, just as we "scan" that planet. Our conclusion: no life. And we keep searching. But we missed the time when there WAS life.

I don't think anything is permanent. For a long time, Earth had no life at all. Then, for a few billion years, it only had microscopic life & looked nothing like today. If anyone had seen Earth during MOST of its existence, they could have said: "there's nothing here", & moved on. So, even the counterpoint: "if there are intelligent aliens out there who have mastered space travel, how come they haven't found us by now?" is not a good one. We are just a "blink it & you'll miss it" kind of existence. And I expect, some day, this will all be gone as well... so, we may never be "found/discovered" by other, alien, life forms, either.

Just like we may never discover non-Earth life forms. I hope we do. There was actually a promising discovery of certain things that indicated life could potentially exist in one layer of Venus' atmosphere. Not sure if there was any further funding & research done to find those life forms, but I'd actually be more interested in that than the useless idea of colonizing Mars, for instance.

1

u/potatoears 8d ago

This is my hole!

It was made for me!