Earth size planets need to be at the right distance from their sons to generate or sustain life? It is a joke or something!

Charles Krauthammer
Opinion Writer
Are we alone in the universe?
   Text Size PrintE-mailReprints
By Charles Krauthammer, Published: December 29

Huge excitement last week. Two Earth-size planets found orbiting a sun-like star less than a thousand light-years away. This comes two weeks after the stunning announcement of another planet orbiting another star at precisely the right distance — within the “habitable zone” that is not too hot and not too cold — to allow for liquid water and therefore possible life.

Unfortunately, the planets of the right size are too close to their sun, and thus too scorching hot, to permit Earth-like life. And the Goldilocks planet in the habitable zone is too large. At 2.4 times the size of Earth, it is probably gaseous, like Jupiter. No earthlings there. But it’s only a matter of time — perhaps a year or two, estimates one astronomer — before we find the right one of the right size in the right place.

1523
Comments
Weigh InCorrections?


inShare
Charles Krauthammer

Krauthammer writes a politics column that runs on Fridays.
Archive
@krauthammerFacebookRSS

George F. Will
Lifting up the fatherless

And at just the right time. As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.

That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation, but because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist?

It’s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti- isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.”

How many of them should there be? The Drake Equation (1961) tries to quantify the number of advanced civilizations in just our own galaxy. To simplify slightly, it’s the number of stars in the galaxy . . .

multiplied by the fraction that form planets . . .

multiplied by the average number of planets in the habitable zone . . .

multiplied by the fraction of these that give birth to life . . .

multiplied by the fraction of these that develop intelligence . . .

multiplied by the fraction of these that produce interstellar communications . . .

multiplied by the fraction of the planet’s lifetime during which such civilizations survive.

Modern satellite data, applied to the Drake Equation, suggest that the number should be very high. So why the silence? Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.

In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.

This is not mere theory. Look around. On the very day that astronomers rejoiced at the discovery of the two Earth-size planets, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity urged two leading scientific journals not to publish details of lab experiments that had created a lethal and highly transmittable form of bird flu virus, lest that fateful knowledge fall into the wrong hands.

Wrong hands, human hands. This is not just the age of holy terror but also the threshold of an age of hyper-proliferation. Nuclear weapons in the hands of half-mad tyrants (North Korea) and radical apocalypticists (Iran) are only the beginning. Lethal biologic agents may soon find their way into the hands of those for whom genocidal pandemics loosed upon infidels are the royal road to redemption.

And forget the psychopaths: Why, a mere 17 years after Homo sapiens — born 200,000 years ago — discovered atomic power, those most stable and sober states, America and the Soviet Union, came within inches of mutual annihilation.

Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.

There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.

We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.

Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com


Nymous
1/2/2012 10:28 PM EST
I'm sure there's intelligent life elsewhere in the known universe, but it's going to be quite rare. We're probably going to spend centuries trying to gain the attention of aliens after we've found them, and it's also quite likely they say the same things. The problem is that everything is so very, very far away. The best hope we can really have is to trade information. People should not fear our oh so very rare neighbors, even though we haven't yet met them, and probably never will.
RecommendRecommended by 2 readersReport

Thinkyhead
1/4/2012 5:14 AM EST
Not just distance but time. How long do intelligent species survive and thrive before they go quiet? 650 million years for the dinosaurs. Perhaps there are many nearby planets with only the first burgeoning of amphibian life, and a few in which intelligent species were wiped out by bacteria, yet only one a hundred thousand light years away who has developed radio technology. We will pick up their signals in about 99,000 years.
RecommendReport

PineWalrus
1/1/2012 4:57 PM EST
Are we alone in the universe? Well yes.....we were exiled to this universe because we are such loons.
RecommendReport

bethg1841
12/31/2011 9:44 AM EST
The earthquake/nuclear disaster in Japan shows us how little control we have in this universe. We can't control the natural progression or changes on our planet, but we can certainly avoid manmade causes. I would like to see every nuclear power plant shut down.
RecommendRecommended by 1 readerReport

kl826
12/31/2011 10:00 AM EST
Until that sad day comes I promise to continue operating the two units I'm in charge of safely and reliably.
RecommendRecommended by 2 readersReport
View more responses

Perspectives: Evolution or Global Extinction- the tale of Solar Storm and GeoMagma Eruptions!

Perspective is every thing.  We have the micro and macro event perspectives depending on our lenses. Those of us who spend too much time with Microscopes tend to look at events in their diasaggregated sums and make narrow focused perspectives.  Those of us that visualize our respective ecosystems with telescopes tend to look at the aggregated telescoped Macro perspective.

Natural selection, survival of the fittest and the concept of Evolutionary and Revolutionary creation, be it the slow second to second changes that take place in our ecosystem and the revolutionary big and small bangs, indicate that our ecosystem is designed to change.  Some of these changes are gradual and cannot be noticed easily, others are momentous and tend to be too big to miss.  The fact is that change is the most constant event in our ecosystem.

The following story is headed as Global Extinction and need to be looked at as Global Evolution or Change, whether it is considered to be continuous or abrupt, change is taking place around us all the time.

The recent Solar Flares and series of volcanoes, earthquakes, massive winds and tsunamis are images of the same Solar and Global movements.  The recent bubbles or Halo-spheres are worth our attention as we examine this report.

The real challenge of our time is connecting and integrating knowledge as part of our greater wisdom pool for a better understanding our our immediate distant past be it in time or distance.

All the same, the following is a very interesting story that improves our understanding of our ecosystem

Belai Habte-Jesus, MD, MPH
www.GlobalBelaiJesus.com


Global Extinction: Gradual Doom Is Just As Bad As Abrupt

Around 250 million years ago, most life on Earth was wiped out in an extinction known as the “Great Dying.” A team led by University of Cincinnati geologist Thomas J. Algeo finds that the end came slowly from thousands of centuries of volcanic activity.

Date: 2/3/2012 12:00:00 AM
By: Greg Hand
Phone: (513) 556-1822
Photos By: Ashley Kempher

   A painstakingly detailed investigation shows that mass extinctions need not be sudden events. The deadliest mass extinction of all took a long time to kill 90 percent of Earth’s marine life, and it killed in stages, according to a newly published report.

Thomas J. Algeo, professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati, worked with 13 co-authors to produce a high-resolution look at the geology of a Permian-Triassic boundary section on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic. Their analysis, published Feb. 3 in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, provides strong evidence that Earth’s biggest mass extinction phased in over hundreds of thousands of years.


Thomas J. Algeo

About 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, Earth almost became a lifeless planet. Around 90 percent of all living species disappeared then, in what scientists have called “The Great Dying.” Algeo and colleagues have spent much of the past decade investigating the chemical evidence buried in rocks formed during this major extinction.

The world revealed by their research is horrific and alien: a devastated landscape, barren of vegetation and scarred by erosion from showers of acid rain, huge “dead zones” in the oceans, and runaway greenhouse warming leading to sizzling temperatures.

The evidence that Algeo and his colleagues are looking at points to massive volcanism in Siberia. A large portion of western Siberia reveals volcanic deposits up to five kilometers (three miles) thick, covering an area equivalent to the continental United States. And the lava flowed where it could most endanger life, through a large coal deposit.

“The eruption released lots of methane when it burned through the coal,” he said. “Methane is 30 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. We’re not sure how long the greenhouse effect lasted, but it seems to have been tens or hundreds of thousands of years.”

A lot of the evidence ended up being washed into the ocean, and it is among fossilized marine deposits that Algeo and his colleagues look for it. Previous investigations have focused on deposits created by a now vanished ocean known as Tethys, a kind of precursor to the Indian Ocean. Those deposits, in South China particularly, record a sudden extinction at the end of the Permian.

“In shallow marine deposits, the latest Permian mass extinction was generally abrupt,” Algeo said. “Based on such observations, it has been widely inferred that the extinction was a globally synchronous event.”

Recent studies are starting to challenge that view.

Algeo and his co-authors focused on rock layers at West Blind Fiord on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic. That location, at the end of the Permian, would have been a lot closer to the Siberian volcanoes than sites in South China.

The Canadian sedimentary rock layers are 24 meters (almost 80 feet) thick and cross the Permian-Triassic boundary, including the latest Permian mass extinction horizon. The investigators looked at how the type of rock changed from the bottom to the top of the section. They looked at the chemistry of the rocks. They looked at the fossils contained in the rocks.

They discovered a total die-off of siliceous sponges about 100,000 years earlier than the marinemass extinction event recorded at Tethyan sites. Chemical clues, Algeo said, confirm that life on land was in crisis. Dying plants and eroding soil were being flushed into the ocean where the over-abundant nutrients led to a microbial feeding frenzy and the removal of oxygen – and life – from the late Permian ocean.

What appears to have happened, according to Algeo and his colleagues, is that the effects of early Siberian volcanic activity, such as toxic gases and ash, were confined to the northern latitudes. Only after the eruptions were in full swing did the effects reach the tropical latitudes of the Tethys Ocean.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Exobiology Program.

A complete list of co-authors for this paper :

Thomas Algeo, University of Cincinnati
Charles Henderson, University of Calgary
Brooks Ellwood, Louisiana State University
Harry Rowe, University of Texas at Arlington
Erika Elswick, Indiana University, Bloomington
Steven Bates, University of California, Riverside
Timothy Lyons, University of California, Riverside
James C. Hower, University of Kentucky
Christina Smith, University of Cincinnati
Barry Maynard, University of Cincinnati
Lindsay E. Hays, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Roger E. Summons, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
James Fulton, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Katherine H. Freeman, Pennsylvania State University