Coming up around 2041 (hopefully) will be the https://habitableworldsobservatory.org - which will be the first telescope sensitive enough to detect Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars! Check out the "Simulated Observation of the Solar System" video toward the bottom of that page, coolest thing I've seen in a while!
I love all of this crazy stuff we've been finding recently. And not that this planet could support it, but I also love what this unexpected diversity in planetary bodies means for the possibility of weird and unpredictable formulas for life.
I hope we keep finding crazy stuff like this. I hope it accelerates. I hope we find life soon. I need it.
Also, I would bet on there being lots of little filters rather than one great one. Stack a dozen or so independent filters that only 1% of upstart life can develop through, and you can easily explain the apparent absence of life capable of broadcasting their existence, making life as developed as humanity extremely rare.
Maybe only 1% of stellar systems are arranged appropriately with a Jovian planet to sweep the inner system clean of killer comets and meteors. Maybe the conditions for unicellular life only occur on 1% of nominally terrestrial worlds. Maybe only 1% of unicellular life develops in a way that has a hereditary mechanism that is susceptible to random mutation, so evolution has something to work with. Maybe the jump from unicellular to multicellular is extremely unlikely to occur; it did take billions of years on Earth after all, its clearly not something that you can count on happening a week later. And maybe the chance that multicellular life develops in a direction that will eventually develop animals capable of making advanced tools is extremely rare too. Real life evolution isn't like a game of Spore, it's not a computer game with a defined goal that some force is working towards. Evolution likes robust reproducers like bugs a lot more than it likes clever monkeys. Maybe when intelligent animals do happen to evolve, they, like dolphins or octopus or corvids, almost always lack the physical characteristics necessary to put their brains towards the problem of the scientific method and industrialization. Maybe when such species even do exist, they usually socially stagnate in preindustrial times, as humanity did for a long time, and get stuck there because their culture values social stability more than innovation. Maybe only 1% manage to not nuke themselves out of existence within a few years of inventing nukes.
Stack a few of these sort of considerations up, and before long Fermi's "paradox" stops seeming very paradoxical.
Life may have existed elsewhere but it can be incredibly difficult to get started, let alone having higher intelligence coexist in the same vicinity of space at the same time!
Tack on that it appears space is expanding faster than the speed of light…
You can generate arbitrarily low probabilities for anything by stacking arbitrary fractions. If evolution has no goal, then the absence of radio loud civilizations does not demand explanation, it is only paradoxical if you implicitly believe that intelligence plus technology is a natural attractor state.
Yes, agreed. Furthermore, high tech tool makers not being a goal of evolution is certain, not merely a supposition, there's no anthropomorphic force driving life in that direction. The natural attractor states of evolution can safely be assumed to be the niches evolution has repeatedly discovered and recreated on Earth numerous times, the cases of convergent evolution. If we were digging up fossils of technology created a hundred million years ago by a high tech species of birds or something, and more from another period from yet another totally different lineage, that would substantially change the math. But all the evidence on Earth points to a species like ours being a very rare thing for evolution to create.
Agree. And also: The universe contains multiple substrates, degrees of freedom, organizational proprties etc that could support advanced intelligence while being effectively totally invisible to a species/civilization like ours.
Absolutely. The advantages provided by advanced intelligence matter a lot less when when technology is still primitive, and during that period an intelligent species is likely to be quite vulnerable. At least, we were.
The easiest filter is just that life may be incredibly difficult to get started. There's a huge complexity gap between abiotic glop and any known working cell capable of Darwinian evolution. Origin of Life research is basically various flavors of handwaving to get over this gap.
Speaking of "great filter", I often wonder about the hypothetical case that we live in a fragile universe.
Whatever the first civilization is to cause something like vacuum collapse could destroy the entire universe at the speed of light. Maybe it's already happened somewhere and is currently propagating our way.
Pretty cool, or more probable hot. Though I highly doubt it is something resembling a planet up close, it is more likely some kind of remnant from forming the neutron star that just happened to have the right size and ended up in the right orbit to show up in exoplanet surveys.
The artist's conception, with Jupiter-like bands running at an angle through the principle tidal axis really bugs me. If there's some bizarre mechanism that makes this even remotely plausible, it ought to have been explained. If (as I think is more likely) it's just a case of someone who didn't understand the article commissioning and approving and illustration by someone else who didn't understand it... why? Why even bother? It would be clearer with no illustration than with a misleading picture.
(The worst example of this I've seen was a few years back, when CNN briefly used a picture of a cow to "illustrate" an article about coconut milk).
What angle? The cloud bands are running at right angles to the terminator and roughly parallel to the axis of tidal stretching. Are you looking at "Image B"? That one might look a like tricky, but it's just because you're looking a bit upwards at one of the poles, so you can see the curvature of the cloud bands around the planet.
Now, would clouds around such a weird planet take such a familiar shape? I doubt it. But going with that familiar shape is probably better then making up something weird to happen at the stretched ends.
Right, that's what I'm objecting to. With tidal forces that strong, there should be no rotation parallel to the axis of tidal stretching. In the two-body reference frame the axis of rotation should be identical to the axis of rotation (tidal locking). So it should keep one pole towards the star.
The terminator is only secondarily significant here, but since it lies in a plane perpendicular to this axis, any bands should be parallel to it. But since this means that there will be a "hot side" and a "cold side" and convective cells between these will probably eliminate any banding.
Well, if it's tidally locked (which it probably is and the paper doesn't disabuse me), then both its rotation and orbit are about 8 hours on the sameish axis. So it's still spinning pretty dang fast, enough that the gas doesn't have to settle into hot and cold sides. I can't fully parse the part of the paper where they talk about the wind structure, but they do seem to think it still has some banding. Section 5: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae157c (linked elsewhere, here again for convenience).
* It's probably too hot there (2000K in the cold part) for fullerene. The atmosphere there is mostly C2, C3 and CO. (CO is mentioned in the paper as a very good guess, but not mentioned in the press release.)
* If you fill a fullerene with H2 or He, it will float less instead of more.
I have a chemistry specification in high school, anyway the conditions are weird. It's like inside a burning coal, but much hotter, 2000K instead of 700K. The density is 2g/ml so it's more like a liquid than a gas. It's far away from the usual conditions in a lab, so my knowledge/intuition are not very useful.
Anyway, at so high pressure and density, I expect molecules with big voids to be crushed.
Indeed, unimaginable what is possible! There will also be traces of H, N, O, S etc due to comets crashing in, so room for carbon chemistry once temperature permits.
If I'm standing near (but not directly on) the pointy part of the lemon shaped planet, do I feel like I'm standing on level ground, or am I on a slant?
The surface shape of the planet is pretty much defined by what feels gravitationally flat at that point, so it would feel flat. If it wasn't flat, the gas would flow "downhill" until it did. (Oh, yeah, by the way, gas, so you're not going to be "standing" per se.)
Makes sense, thanks. I guess it would only feel like a slant if the "force" causing the odd shape, the gravity of the pulsar, was removed. Then all the extended gas would fall back towards the center, while a solid planet might be able to maintain its odd shape. Then that pointy end would be like a giant mountain, in terms of how it would feel to be on.
Now I'm wondering if the planet is tidally locked, otherwise the forces on the extended and retracted bits of the lemon would shift widely as the planet rotates. Actually we could then model the extended bit as a giant tidal wave, er, tidal cloud. What a world.
The "solid" planet actually wouldn't keep its shape either. :D Part of the definition of a planet is being in "hydrostatic equilibrium". Even rock is basically a liquid at the scale of, say, Ceres. But yeah, you've got the idea.
Paper on which the article is based: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae157c
"A Carbon-rich Atmosphere on a Windy Pulsar Planet", PSR J2322–2650b.
No one bothered to link to it, but fortunately Google picked it up.
Coming up around 2041 (hopefully) will be the https://habitableworldsobservatory.org - which will be the first telescope sensitive enough to detect Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars! Check out the "Simulated Observation of the Solar System" video toward the bottom of that page, coolest thing I've seen in a while!
Kyplanet had a video on this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7pu0Dhu87o
“Stripped stellar core” is a crazy concept I could never come up with on my own. A literal diamond in the sky.
I just shows how energetic a close neutron star orbit is, that it could basically disassemble a star.
Great video!
What a weird setup.
I love all of this crazy stuff we've been finding recently. And not that this planet could support it, but I also love what this unexpected diversity in planetary bodies means for the possibility of weird and unpredictable formulas for life.
I hope we keep finding crazy stuff like this. I hope it accelerates. I hope we find life soon. I need it.
Hopefully we find evidence for post-great-filter life too…
Earth life may already be post-filter.
Also, I would bet on there being lots of little filters rather than one great one. Stack a dozen or so independent filters that only 1% of upstart life can develop through, and you can easily explain the apparent absence of life capable of broadcasting their existence, making life as developed as humanity extremely rare.
Maybe only 1% of stellar systems are arranged appropriately with a Jovian planet to sweep the inner system clean of killer comets and meteors. Maybe the conditions for unicellular life only occur on 1% of nominally terrestrial worlds. Maybe only 1% of unicellular life develops in a way that has a hereditary mechanism that is susceptible to random mutation, so evolution has something to work with. Maybe the jump from unicellular to multicellular is extremely unlikely to occur; it did take billions of years on Earth after all, its clearly not something that you can count on happening a week later. And maybe the chance that multicellular life develops in a direction that will eventually develop animals capable of making advanced tools is extremely rare too. Real life evolution isn't like a game of Spore, it's not a computer game with a defined goal that some force is working towards. Evolution likes robust reproducers like bugs a lot more than it likes clever monkeys. Maybe when intelligent animals do happen to evolve, they, like dolphins or octopus or corvids, almost always lack the physical characteristics necessary to put their brains towards the problem of the scientific method and industrialization. Maybe when such species even do exist, they usually socially stagnate in preindustrial times, as humanity did for a long time, and get stuck there because their culture values social stability more than innovation. Maybe only 1% manage to not nuke themselves out of existence within a few years of inventing nukes.
Stack a few of these sort of considerations up, and before long Fermi's "paradox" stops seeming very paradoxical.
We’re missing the biggest filter of all: Time.
Life may have existed elsewhere but it can be incredibly difficult to get started, let alone having higher intelligence coexist in the same vicinity of space at the same time!
Tack on that it appears space is expanding faster than the speed of light…
You can generate arbitrarily low probabilities for anything by stacking arbitrary fractions. If evolution has no goal, then the absence of radio loud civilizations does not demand explanation, it is only paradoxical if you implicitly believe that intelligence plus technology is a natural attractor state.
Yes, agreed. Furthermore, high tech tool makers not being a goal of evolution is certain, not merely a supposition, there's no anthropomorphic force driving life in that direction. The natural attractor states of evolution can safely be assumed to be the niches evolution has repeatedly discovered and recreated on Earth numerous times, the cases of convergent evolution. If we were digging up fossils of technology created a hundred million years ago by a high tech species of birds or something, and more from another period from yet another totally different lineage, that would substantially change the math. But all the evidence on Earth points to a species like ours being a very rare thing for evolution to create.
Agree. And also: The universe contains multiple substrates, degrees of freedom, organizational proprties etc that could support advanced intelligence while being effectively totally invisible to a species/civilization like ours.
Despite our advantages intelligent hominids were an endangered species confined to a small pocket of africa for ~80,000 years.
Absolutely. The advantages provided by advanced intelligence matter a lot less when when technology is still primitive, and during that period an intelligent species is likely to be quite vulnerable. At least, we were.
The easiest filter is just that life may be incredibly difficult to get started. There's a huge complexity gap between abiotic glop and any known working cell capable of Darwinian evolution. Origin of Life research is basically various flavors of handwaving to get over this gap.
It’d be interesting if there turned out to only be a few life bearing worlds in the entire cosmos. But we just have no idea. Not enough information.
Great filter might involve harsh tradeoffs like "no stupidity allowed". Do you really want to know it?
Yes because the alternative is extinction, any price is worth avoiding that
Speaking of "great filter", I often wonder about the hypothetical case that we live in a fragile universe.
Whatever the first civilization is to cause something like vacuum collapse could destroy the entire universe at the speed of light. Maybe it's already happened somewhere and is currently propagating our way.
Maybe it even is happening but will never reach us from their local observable sphere.
Guess it's good that space expands faster than the speed of light.
if you haven't read Schild's ladder, you're in for a treat :-D
you might like dragon's egg! intelligence on a neutron star.
[dead]
Pretty cool, or more probable hot. Though I highly doubt it is something resembling a planet up close, it is more likely some kind of remnant from forming the neutron star that just happened to have the right size and ended up in the right orbit to show up in exoplanet surveys.
What the HeC?
The artist's conception, with Jupiter-like bands running at an angle through the principle tidal axis really bugs me. If there's some bizarre mechanism that makes this even remotely plausible, it ought to have been explained. If (as I think is more likely) it's just a case of someone who didn't understand the article commissioning and approving and illustration by someone else who didn't understand it... why? Why even bother? It would be clearer with no illustration than with a misleading picture.
(The worst example of this I've seen was a few years back, when CNN briefly used a picture of a cow to "illustrate" an article about coconut milk).
What angle? The cloud bands are running at right angles to the terminator and roughly parallel to the axis of tidal stretching. Are you looking at "Image B"? That one might look a like tricky, but it's just because you're looking a bit upwards at one of the poles, so you can see the curvature of the cloud bands around the planet.
Now, would clouds around such a weird planet take such a familiar shape? I doubt it. But going with that familiar shape is probably better then making up something weird to happen at the stretched ends.
Right, that's what I'm objecting to. With tidal forces that strong, there should be no rotation parallel to the axis of tidal stretching. In the two-body reference frame the axis of rotation should be identical to the axis of rotation (tidal locking). So it should keep one pole towards the star.
The terminator is only secondarily significant here, but since it lies in a plane perpendicular to this axis, any bands should be parallel to it. But since this means that there will be a "hot side" and a "cold side" and convective cells between these will probably eliminate any banding.
Well, if it's tidally locked (which it probably is and the paper doesn't disabuse me), then both its rotation and orbit are about 8 hours on the sameish axis. So it's still spinning pretty dang fast, enough that the gas doesn't have to settle into hot and cold sides. I can't fully parse the part of the paper where they talk about the wind structure, but they do seem to think it still has some banding. Section 5: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae157c (linked elsewhere, here again for convenience).
I wonder if there are bucky balls full of helium hanging out under pressure in there?
I found this similar idea done in a lab: https://cen.acs.org/articles/83/i3/Filling-Fullerene.html
They use H2 instead of He. Is that good enough?
Two side remarks:
* It's probably too hot there (2000K in the cold part) for fullerene. The atmosphere there is mostly C2, C3 and CO. (CO is mentioned in the paper as a very good guess, but not mentioned in the press release.)
* If you fill a fullerene with H2 or He, it will float less instead of more.
I'm no chemist, but I was under the impression that high pressure might allow for the creations of fullerenes even at these kinds of temperatures.
I didn't think they would float (but I can see how "hanging out" could be read that way).
I have a chemistry specification in high school, anyway the conditions are weird. It's like inside a burning coal, but much hotter, 2000K instead of 700K. The density is 2g/ml so it's more like a liquid than a gas. It's far away from the usual conditions in a lab, so my knowledge/intuition are not very useful.
Anyway, at so high pressure and density, I expect molecules with big voids to be crushed.
Indeed, unimaginable what is possible! There will also be traces of H, N, O, S etc due to comets crashing in, so room for carbon chemistry once temperature permits.
If I'm standing near (but not directly on) the pointy part of the lemon shaped planet, do I feel like I'm standing on level ground, or am I on a slant?
The surface shape of the planet is pretty much defined by what feels gravitationally flat at that point, so it would feel flat. If it wasn't flat, the gas would flow "downhill" until it did. (Oh, yeah, by the way, gas, so you're not going to be "standing" per se.)
Makes sense, thanks. I guess it would only feel like a slant if the "force" causing the odd shape, the gravity of the pulsar, was removed. Then all the extended gas would fall back towards the center, while a solid planet might be able to maintain its odd shape. Then that pointy end would be like a giant mountain, in terms of how it would feel to be on.
Now I'm wondering if the planet is tidally locked, otherwise the forces on the extended and retracted bits of the lemon would shift widely as the planet rotates. Actually we could then model the extended bit as a giant tidal wave, er, tidal cloud. What a world.
The "solid" planet actually wouldn't keep its shape either. :D Part of the definition of a planet is being in "hydrostatic equilibrium". Even rock is basically a liquid at the scale of, say, Ceres. But yeah, you've got the idea.
The aliens living there have silly high pitch voices.
You should hear what the clowns on Sol-3 sound like.
Same with Canada, at least according to Pavement.
They are also rich, it is diamonds everywhere.
Getting flung around a gamma ray emitting pulsar while baking on diamonds doesn't seem very groovy
There are chemiseries and metabolisms out there beyond our wildest imaginations