DailyDirt: Life Across The Universe
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Astrobiology is a field that doesn't have a whole lot of experimental evidence, but it's interesting to entertain the possibilities of life that might exist elsewhere in the universe. So far, we've been looking for ET biology that's similar to our own, but there's nothing that says biology must be based on DNA/RNA/proteins/etc. Here are just a few more links on possibly finding life on other worlds.- Stars in our galaxy generally travel only a few hundred miles per second relative to their peers, but some hypervelocity stars traveling at hundreds of thousands of miles per second might escape our galaxy -- and spread life across the universe. It could happen theoretically, but no one has yet observed this phenomenon directly. [url]
- Data from the Kepler mission suggests possibly-habitable planets exist near a significant fraction of all stars -- providing better estimates for values in the Drake equation. However, we're still probably very far away from our nearest neighbors (if they even exist). [url]
- How tough is DNA? Tough enough to survive on the outside of a rocket going to space and also re-entry from orbit. Presumably, this also means that it's not impossible for ET DNA to arrive on the tons of meteorites that hit our planet every day.[url]
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Filed Under: alien, astrobiology, dna, drake equation, et, exoplanet, extraterrestrial, habitable, kepler, life
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