Study shows life may be rarer than we thought

[Perspicuo]

SmithsonianScience: Harsh space weather dooms life on red-dwarf planets
http://smithsonianscience.org/2014/06/harsh-space-weather-may-doom-potential-life-red-dwarf-planets/

Life in the universe might be even rarer than we thought. Recently, astronomers looking for potentially habitable worlds have targeted red dwarf stars because they are the most common type of star, comprising 80 percent of the stars in the universe. But a new study shows that harsh space weather might strip the atmosphere of any rocky planet orbiting in a red dwarf’s habitable zone.

“A red-dwarf planet faces an extreme space environment, in addition to other stresses like tidal locking,” says Ofer Cohen of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Cohen presented their findings this week in a press conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Allow me to play devil's advocate to spice up this sht: This proves God loves us. Life is so rare and could only exist if He custom-builds an environment to cradle life.

 

[Kharakov]

Allow me to play devil's advocate to spice up this sht: This proves God loves us. Life is so rare and could only exist if He custom-builds an environment to cradle life.

By "environment" do you mean the creature comforts of the modern world, the internet, or the universe that is absurdly well tuned for the existence of Protons, electrons, and spacetime?

don't read the following:

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Ok, so you couldn't resist.
There was a Proton scientist who observed infinite possible stable spacetimes, only some of which would be comfortable and useful to Protons. Various Protons selected various spacetimes to explore. There is a faction of Protons that do not believe in God because of the existence of infinite possible spacetimes in which they can not comfortably exist, as only a small portion of the total are comfortable for them to exist within. This existence of choices that are challenging or possibly painful make this wimpy faction of Protons the crybabies of existence, even though truthfully they too love a challenge and are excited by the possibility of danger, and they fucking know it (and they aren't actually wimpy, they are just babies, with all the implied innocence).

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

You're wrong, Satan! It wasn't always this way. Before Eve all these planets were Edens. They were brimming with life as was every corner of the universe. All this radiation is poison that men brought on themselves because they fucked with god. They should have known better than to trust a talking snake. There was nothing bad before Eve and the talking snake.

 

[Underseer]

The Bible doesn't mention life on other planets, therefore there are no life on other planets. QEDuh.

 

[untermensche]

Most of this talk about the odds of life in other places in the universe is little more than speculation.

We have no evidence of how life started or what conditions were necessary for life to begin.

All we know is that it did, and we use that fact combined with the vast number of likely other planets out there to speculate it probably happened elsewhere.

But those that think they can assign odds to it with accuracy are dreamers, not scientists.

 

[lpetrich]

That's because potentially-habitable planets are close to red dwarfs' strong stellar flares, much closer than the Earth is to the Sun's flares.

So one ought to look for habitable planets around Sunlike stars, even though they will be very difficult to find.

 

[Dutch_labrat]

What gets me about debates on alien life what an enormous certainty some people achieve with little or no data at all.

As it stands now we have observed one planet with life on it. Its abiogenesis is uncertain, huge parts of its surface or still mostly unexplored and only a fraction of its species are recorded. Really, we know squat about how life is distributed through the universe and have no data at all to make predictions on how, when and where life can or will form.

Don't fall for the old prosecutor's fallacy here. With only one positive result known we can make no predictions at all on the probability of life forming on a planet. All we can say for certain is that it happened once so it is possible, not that it is likely.