Did our solar system have life before us?

[Lord Hakk]

I was thinking. Did we under estimate the age of our sun? Maybe earth is the last planet to house life in the solarsystem. I was thinking about this because we found traces of water on mars and canals on the moon and stuff. So maybe this solar system was around longer than we thought.Maybe those bumps on Venus are ruins of alien life.

[CraigD]

Did we under estimate the age of our sun?

I doubt we’ve significantly misestimated the age of the sun or planets, because a pretty good sampling of similar stars (and less, but some data on their planets) appears to support our estimate of about 4,570,000,000 years. Most models have the planets reasonably good places for live by about 3,800,000,000 years ago. There’s pretty good evidence that some sort of live was present on earth almost as soon as this, and a lot of life by about 2,500,000,000 years ago. Despite evidence of some fairly awful catastrophes, since then, life seems firmly entrenched on Earth.

 

So, I don’t think it’s necessary for the solar system to be significantly older that current estimates to support a hypothesis of there having been life, and possibly still being life, on other planets

Maybe earth is the last planet to house life in the solarsystem.

Maybe. I think it’s premature to rule out the possibility of life on bodies of the solar system other than Earth, though evidence suggests that life on the other inner planets (Mercury through Mars) is anything from non-existent to paltry, compared to Earth.

Maybe those bumps on Venus are ruins of alien life.

I think this is unlikely, as we’ve only RADAR mapped a fraction of the surface of Venus at a resolution of about 1 km, a smaller fraction at a resolution of about 100 m, and imaged from landers a couple of tiny patches, at human eyesight-like resolution. With this resolution and coverage, even a fairly obvious large artifact, such as a road bed or a structure, could easily have been missed.

 

Although Earth seems clearly to be the “sweet spot” of the solar system for biological life, there’s much more unexplored than explored in the solar system in ways capable of detecting signs of past or present life. On the general principle learned from life on Earth that “where there’s usable energy, there’s life”, I harbor a strong suspicion that the atmospheres and moons of Jupiter and Saturn might also be “sweet spots.”

 

Whether and what sort of life we find in the solar system, the search will likely be exciting to participate in or follow!

[TheFaithfulStone]

You should try out Manifold:Space by Stephen Baxter.

 

Depressing as hell, but interesting.

 

TFS

[Tormod]

I was thinking about this because we found traces of water on mars and canals on the moon and stuff.

 

Like TFS says, read Stephen Baxter. :)

 

But where did you read that they found canals on the moon?

 

There's not only *traces* of water - both Mars and the moon has *lots* of it. And there are plenty of moons around the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn) that have plenty of water ice as well, and possibly liquid oceans. The Deep Impact mission last summer also showed that comets can contain vast amounts of water. So the water was probably present in the solar system even before the planets formed.

[Lord Hakk]

 

But where did you read that they found canals on the moon?

.

I must have ment mars or somthing. and I mean dry canals

[TheFaithfulStone]

Well for one thing "canali" I think. And it's basically an odd geophysical feature of Mars, not a real "canal" like the Eerie or something. And the "straight" canals don't really exist. They are likely billion year old dry river beds.

 

In fact, I seem to remember that even though Lowell claimed to have seen a bunch of them, people haven't ever been able to see them again.

 

edit: Sorry about that somebody named Schiaperelli. Lowell just drew a bunch of extra ones that never really existed.

 

TFS

[i've got a mule, her name is Sal]

[Lord Hakk]

oh, yea we learned about the guy who drew extra canals in science. They said it might have been a crack in the telescope lense.(well the movie said that...) but wouldnet a guy who is smart enough to map mars and everything, notice when we looked at, say, the moon, it had the same canals, so then he would have found out and bought a new telescope or lense?

[Tormod]

but wouldnet a guy who is smart enough to map mars and everything, notice when we looked at, say, the moon, it had the same canals, so then he would have found out and bought a new telescope or lense?

 

But like we already established, there ARE no canals that we see on the Moon, so why would he see them there?

 

Edit: The moon is also much, much closer to the Earth, so we can observe it with the naked eye, whereas Mars must be observed through a telescope. Lowell had a very good imagination. :shrug:

 

Carl Sagan once commented upon Percival Lowell's Martian canali (which by the way was a term Lowell did NOT coin). Sagan said something like "Lowell's observations was certainly evidence of intelligence in the universe. But at which end of the telescope?". :naughty:

[Lord Hakk]

I was saying that a theory of why he drew canals that werent there was somthing wrong with his telescope, and I said I woundered why when he looked somewhere else he didnt notice that (IF he has a cracked telescope) he didnt notice the same "canals" somewhere else.