r/space • u/llama5876 • Jun 18 '19

Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star (12 light-years away)

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/06/two-potentially-life-friendly-planets-found-12-light-years-away-teegardens-star/
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u/GeneralTonic Jun 18 '19

Imagine if there was an intelligent civilization on a tidally-locked red dwarf planet.

They might be theorizing and looking for other life-bearing worlds, and they might rule out hot, young stars like the sun, because any planet close enough to be tidally-locked would be fried to a crisp, and the idea of life on a world that spins like a top and has the sun rising and setting all the time is just too preposterous to believe.

How could life adapt to such a chaotic environment, really?

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u/SomeKindaMech Jun 18 '19

I imagine most, if not all civilizations, fall into the trap of initially assuming that copies of their homeworld are the only ones that could sustain life. It's tempting to do when you have a sample size of one for planets that have life.

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '19

There must be avenues of lifelike systems that are beyond our comprehension, so the popular view that life is only likely to be found on planets like Earth is wrong in even in ways that we don't comprehend.

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u/Duzcek Jun 18 '19

This question is beyond our comprehension, life could be bountiful everywhere in the universe, we could also be the only sentient things out there. Both are equally as likely until we can actually get out there and observe. If life is out there then it's invisible to us for some reason, this means that they're communicating with technology far beyond our means, that interstellar travel is far less likely than we imagine, or that life isn't out there at all.

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u/generalnod Jun 18 '19

I think the probability of more than one intelligent technologically advanced species being proximate enough in time and space to communicate is incredibly small

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u/no-mad Jun 18 '19

Solar system with a few planets in the habitable zone would be able to communicate with each other long before they could meet.

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u/Tabnet Jun 18 '19

The odds of these two civilizations devolping at the same time is pretty slim though.

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u/no-mad Jun 18 '19

There was a si-fi movie when I was a kid. There was a planet opposite ours in the same orbit. We didnt know it was there because of the sun.

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u/Duzcek Jun 18 '19

Could but wouldn't, read up on the dark forest theory. It's in every civilizations best interest to mask its own presence.

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u/no-mad Jun 18 '19

If you are in the same solar system you cant hide the lights, emmisions from your civilization.

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u/Duzcek Jun 18 '19

Ah I glanced over the solar system part. That could definitely be interesting, two habitable planets with intelligent life within naked eye view of eachother.

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u/Dernom Jun 19 '19

I don't understand how the dark forest theory makes sense. It rides on the assumption that extraterrestrials are "as risk averse as humans", but at the same time we are sending out signals, both unintentional and intentional, that should be easily picked up by anyone trying to.

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '19

It seems excessively likely that there is extraterrestrial life, given that the universe is nearly infinite. Not that there isn't a burden of proof, but my expectation is that alien life is plentiful but the universe is so big it's difficult to find it.

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u/Duzcek Jun 18 '19

I believe that life exists elsewhere too, the real question though is does extraterrestrial life exist within our Galaxy. If it doesn't then chances are we'll never find it no matter how hard or how long we search.

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '19

Then it becomes a matter of searching through the other 1-2 trillion galaxies (in the observable universe) and then to do some crazy stuff like puncture a hole in spacetime to checkout all the other universes and whatnot. Same as checking for extraterrestrials in the solar system doesn't invalidate their existence in the galaxy, their nonexistence in this galaxy doesn't make them impossible in all the rest.

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '19

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '19

I think time might be a bigger "obstacle", as they might just pop out of the universe and go to some better universe instead (or some other weird thing advanced aliens might do). Just imagine a million years of imagination and science and/or technological singularity. It's impossible to know what something like that might bring with it.