Wednesday, 06 October 2010

• Habitable planet found, god wonders wtf he was thinking

  We've found a planet very close by (in astronomical terms) that is smack dab in the middle of its parent star's habitable zone.  This planet is about three times the size of the Earth, which means it can hold an atmosphere.  I'll even depart from the article and point out that it probably has liquid water on it for the reason that so many stellar bodies we have observed in regions where water is possible (comets, Mars, the Moon, Europa, Neptune, Uranus, Pluto and other Kuiper Belt objects, etc) have water of some sort on them: the most prevalent element in the entire universe is hydrogen and the third most prevalent element in the universe is oxygen.  Do the math.

  There's just one eensy problem...

  Gravity dictates that such a close-in planet would keep the same side facing the star at all times, the same way the moon always shows the same face to Earth. That means the planet has a blazing-hot daytime side, a frigid nighttime side, and a band of eternal sunrise or sunset where water — and perhaps life — could subsist comfortably.

  This isn't a problem for the evolution of life, since it could begin in the twilight band and evolve slowly into the hot and cold sides of the planet.  It is, however, a seemingly insurmountable problem for ever putting a substantial number of humans there, though.

  But for non-human life, I think it's highly probable that something exists there.  Assuming that sometime in the planet's history a self-replicating molecule was able to assemble (an event that is not wholly improbable and which only took about 200-800 thousand years to occur on Earth), there would even be plenty of time for life to evolve.

  Another advantage for potential life on Gliese 581g is that its star is “effectively immortal,” Butler said. “Our sun will go 10 billion years before it goes nova, and life here ceases to exist. But M dwarfs live for tens, hundreds of billions of years, many times the current age of the universe. So life has a long time to get a toehold.”

  Consider for a moment that bacteria from the Surveyor 3 lunar mission in 1967 was found still alive by the Apollo 12 mission.  The bacteria survived for 31 months in a freezing vacuum at almost 100% radiation.  Microbial life is pretty resilient stuff.  Give bacteria an atmosphere and favorable conditions, and I'd wager that this planet has some form of life on it.  Give it an almost unlimited amount of time to evolve and you've got something complex.

  But here's the real kicker.  Human beings are supposedly very important to god.  He did make us in his own image, after all.  What's more, who sacrifices their only son to redeem just any ol' random form of life?  The bible is clear that the universe was created for us, so it seems reasonable to expect that the universe would appear congenial to specifically human life and that the universe be formed around it.

  But this doesn't at all seem to be the case.

  “The fact that we found one so close and so early on in the search suggests there’s a lot of these things,” Butler says. Only about 100 other stars are as close to Earth as Gliese 581, and only 9 of them have been closely examined for planets. Odds are good that 10 to 20 percent of stars in the Milky Way have habitable planets, Vogt says.

  At 10% to 20% of the 200 billion to 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone (forgetting the hundred billion other galaxies at minimum), we're looking at somewhere between 20 billion and 80 billion habitable planets.  Remember, this is only in our own galaxy, in which we seem relegated to a tiny corner.  If the universe was made for us, then god wasted 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% (and then some) of his resources. It is also odd that he made the vast majority of the cosmos lethal to humanity.  It is, after all, within god's power to have made humans survivable in a vacuum like microbes.  Of course, one could simply invent an ad hoc god that doesn't place a high priority on humans and is consistent with the rest of what we observe, but this god is an empty conclusion, and he is not the god of Abraham.

  No, the universe looks like a really big place, hostile to life almost throughout, but still large enough that pockets of life are bound to pop up naturally.  We are a consequence of the natural way of things, nothing more.  We're a small part of the universe, not the masters of it.

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