Extraterrestrial
Alien life could thrive without a home planet, study suggests
By
T.K. RandallOctober 30, 2024 ·
12 comments
What if a planet wasn't necessary ? Image Credit: NASA / Rick Guidice
We tend to assume that an alien civilization would have its own home world - but what if they didn't actually need one ?
Given that the only example of life that we know of is right here on Earth, it's reasonable to assume that any alien civilizations out there must have a similarly habitable home world to call their own.
But what if this didn't have to be the case ?
In a new study penned by researchers from Harvard and the University of Edinburgh, scientists looked at the possibility of a civilization that can thrive out in space without having to rely on planetary bodies.
Could a species live entirely within self-sustaining ships, stations and colonies ?
Perhaps this could even foreshadow our own destiny, thousands of years in the future.
"Most astrobiology research over the past few decades has focused on increasing our understanding of life's diversity and evolution on Earth and searching for Earth-like environments (past or present) in the solar system and beyond," the researchers wrote.
"One obvious yet often neglected fact in this debate is that we already have direct evidence of life existing beyond Earth, in the form of human space missions."
"However, humans are simply a particularly complex form of life, so it is interesting to consider how much complexity is really needed for life to sustain itself beyond Earth."
It's certainly true that if we can build habitable, self-contained environments that can travel through space, then an advanced alien civilization will be able to do it too - and a lot better than we can.
Perhaps, though, it may even be possible for life to sustain its own habitable environment without having to rely on any technology at all.
"Temperature, pressure, volatile loss, radiation levels and nutrient availability all appear to be surmountable obstacles to the survival of photosynthetic life in space or on celestial bodies with thin atmospheres," the researchers added.
"Biologically generated barriers capable of transmitting visible radiation, blocking ultraviolet, and sustaining temperature gradients of 25-100 K and pressure differences of 10 kPa against the vacuum of space can allow habitable conditions between 1 and 5 astronomical units in the solar system."
"Hence ecosystems capable of generating conditions for their own survival are physically plausible, given the known capabilities of biological materials on Earth."
You can read the study for yourself -
here.
Source:
The Debrief |
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Alien, Planet
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