What If?

[Racoon]

What if microbes lived on Xena, or some of Saturn's moons?

Anaerobic most probably.

what would it need to survive?

 

It seems that if there is other life in this Solar System, its probably small in size?

 

Just trying to use my Imagination, tuned by science, to think of what life could possibly be out there :) :)

 

Any thoughts?

 

any scientific probability??

[pgrmdave]

The only constant I've found with life is that it strives to reproduce. Aside from that, I would think that life could come in any form, most likely something so foreign as to be difficult for terrestrials to imagine. It could even be an intelligent shade of blue (joke, if you don't get the reference)

[infamous]

The only constant I've found with life is that it strives to reproduce. Aside from that, I would think that life could come in any form, most likely something so foreign as to be difficult for terrestrials to imagine.

Truly pgrmdave, and maybe even so foreign as to be quite unrecognizeable to us humans....................Infy

[TheBigDog]

If we were to discover life, meaning something bigger than bacteria, I think it will be an insect or a frog. Follow this logic with me...

 

A billion years ago Mars is a wet planet. There are insects and frogs. As the atmosphere begins to dissipate if gets colder and colder on the shady side of the planet. Creatures learn to dig underground and hibernate in metabolic shutdown during extended cold seasons. Then when warmed by the sun they come out, eat, reproduce and bury themselves again. The cicadas do this on 13 and 17 years cycles. There are frogs that do this in Africa and can surface after years of being dormant when the hard earth they are in gets saturated by infrequent rains. There are insects and frogs that can be frozen in ice, and thaw out as good as when they were frozen. Imagine taking that survival tactic and extending it. From years, to decades, to centuries, to eons. These robust creatures waiting dormant for the correct conditions to wake them up one more time. Thousands of generations of this tactic making them far more robust than any creatures we are familiar with here on earth. All waiting, dormant, for the correct conditions to happen one more time and wake them from their eternal sleep.

 

That is what I think we will find. It would be very cool.

 

Bill

[Jay-qu]

I was thinking what if we found that on Europa or something there was acutally an ocean that could support primative (or extreme conditions) life form, why dont we put some there and see how they go. lol imagine an ocean on jupiters moon teaming with plankton :hihi:

[Stargazer]

My favourite candidates for life would be Mars, Europa, Callisto, Ganymede, Titan and the most recent addition Enceladus. Xena seems unlikely to me. What ET life would look like is hard to imagine. Would they even be carbon based, and if not, what would the chemistry be like? If we find life in the solar system, it will probably be single cell organisms, perhaps, or very exotic but primitive lifeforms. I really do hope we could find something we would define as life in our solar system.

[TheFaithfulStone]

I've always had this dark fantasy that sometime in far future, after centuries of searching for extraterrestrial life more complex than a tree and failing to find it, humanity discovers a planet with very large, very delicious broccolli. The broccoli make these strange noises when the wind blows through their succulent tops.

 

Of course, we proceed to "get our eat on" on the world of Brocclotopia. We develop an interstellar cheese sauce that is coveted throughout human space.

 

Then, one day, a humble broccoli harvester discovers a pattern in the wind, and we learn that the broccoli are actually hyper-intelligent aliens able to do tensor calculus in their heads. They have poisoned our "space cheese" in revenge! Soon all of humanity will die a slow, constipated death.

 

I move that we make broccoli illegal immediately, in order to avoid the envitable extinction of the human race at the hands of genocidal hyper-broccoli.

 

TFS

[i for one, welcome our new brocolli overlords.]