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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 2MAR$ who wrote (46148)	2/6/2014 7:29:33 AM
From: Solon	Respond to of 69300

"The Earth just scrapes the inner edge of the solar system's habitable zone — the area in which temperatures allow Earthlike planets to have liquid surface water," Heller says in the McMaster publication The Daily News. "So from this perspective, Earth is only marginally habitable." More life-friendly planets out there than previously imagined Up for a move to Alpha Centauri B? ALPHA CENTAURI B European Southern Observatory The Alpha Centauri system may have habitable worlds, according to Rene Heller, with McMaster's physics and astronomy department. For eons, humans have stared into space wondering whether life forms on other planets are staring back at them. As astronomers pondered the question with bigger and better telescopes they figured extraterrestrials would naturally end up on planets something like ours, with water, not too far or too close to a sun. But a new paper in the journal Astrobiology — co-authored by McMaster University astrophysicist René Heller and John Armstrong of Weber State University — argues this narrow gazing may have ignored some perfectly good real estate out there in the cosmos. The paper called Superhabitable Worlds says researchers should be looking for extraterrestrial life beyond Earthlike planets. Not only are the number of potential candidates for life greater than previously thought, the paper argues, but "other worlds can offer conditions that are even more suitable for life to emerge and to evolve. Besides planets, moons could be habitable, too." In fact, a planet more suitable for life could be not that far away — universally speaking. A detailed analysis of Alpha Centauri B, the closest star to Earth after our sun, shows it would be the perfect host for a so-called "superhabitable" planet. That world could sustain life for a whopping 10 billion years. That's an impressive lifespan because Earth has had living things for only 3.5 billion years and some say it may only be able to continue for another one or two billion years as the planet heats up and congests itself in a fatal mix of carbon dioxide and sulphuric acid. Ralph Pudritz, director of the Origins Institute at Mac, says planets much larger than Earth might have an edge in creating conditions for life — such as stronger magnetic fields, which in turn would offer stronger magnetic shielding to help protect the planet's atmosphere. He also said atmospheres don't need to be chemically the same as Earth's to help create conditions conducive to life. There could be other mixes that work better than ours. "The Earth just scrapes the inner edge of the solar system's habitable zone — the area in which temperatures allow Earthlike planets to have liquid surface water," Heller says in the McMaster publication The Daily News. "So from this perspective, Earth is only marginally habitable." Asked in the article about the likelihood of humans finding life on other planets, he said, "Statistically speaking, I would say it's very unlikely that there is nothing out there. For the first time in history, we have the ability — both technical and intellectual — to find and classify potentially inhabited planets. It's just a matter of how we spend our observation time."