Abstract
In the present book, in addition to taking advantage of my professional background as a neuroscientist to take on the difficult task of discussing how I believe alien nervous systems might be able to develop on other worlds in the universe, I also wanted to tackle the complex issues related to how difficult it might be for any possible life forms to survive in what we now believe is a universe that has frequently been characterized in the popular and scientific literature as either “life friendly” or, at other times, “unfriendly or hostile” to the existence of any known forms of life. This is, without any doubt, quite problematic to the story I am trying to present in the present book. What I would like to do is focus on how different kinds of life in different parts of the universe are affected by their own local environmental conditions. However, since I have knowledge of only one kind of life on only one kind of planet, I will have to limit my discussion to what our scientists currently believe they know about how our world may have, in the past, or could, in the future, host physical events that could support or impede the development of life right here under our own noses.
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Notes
- 1.
The author admits that our scientists frequent use of the terms “hostile” and “life friendly” in the context of how life and the universe interact with each other is an excellent example of how mankind’s mental life (thoughts) are virtually a slave to our common language system that we acquired very early in life. Carl Sagan once said that the universe seems neither benign nor hostile, but merely “indifferent”. That may sound “intellectually” more acceptable, but is it really? In Chap. 7 the author addresses the very real possibility that it may be the inherent illogical nature of our language lives that is “at the heart” of the “mind boggling” response that many of us (scientists as well as non-scientists) frequently experience when trying to understand how life and the universe works.
- 2.
In our own planetary system, the primary credit for the removal of leftover debris (asteroids , comets, meteors, etc.) needs to be assigned to the presence of the giant gas planet Jupiter. Jupiter’s huge gravitational field has acted as a magnet to make large threatening objects strike it rather than striking other smaller planetary neighbors like the Earth (see Fig. 6.1c). In addition to shielding our planet by stepping in to absorb the blows of menacing objects, Jupiter’s strong gravitational field has also assisted us by slinging large amounts of such debris out of our solar system and away from us. Other planetary systems might or might not have such “body guards” to help protect their smaller exoplanets .
- 3.
The last thing NASA should try to do is “blow up” a large asteroid or comet using some kind of explosive device. Converting a single large threatening object into a whole truckload (train load) of smaller objects would very likely increase the amount of destruction on the Earth.
- 4.
Astronomers classify stars as belonging to three basic size groups. The smallest stars (those the size of our sun or smaller) make up about 90 % of all stars, while the “giant” stars with diameters from 10 to 100 times greater than our sun make up about 9 %. Finally, the rarest and the biggest stars, called the “supergiant” stars with diameters that can be as much as 600 times or greater than our sun make up less than 1 % of all stars.
- 5.
Unless advanced multi-cellular creatures like us manage to find a way to escape from our hot sun and move to cooler friendlier homes located further out in our own solar system or to exoplanets circling other stars, life on our planet will eventually succumb to the excessive heat from our sun and all life will perish on our planet. It is interesting that life on our planet first arose as single-cell organisms (who liked it “hot”) circa 4 billion years ago, and the last life to survive on our hot planet will also be single-cell organisms who, once again, will “like it hot”. Because of the evolutionary heating of our sun, life on our planet will slowly revert back its former single-cell thermophile format before finally dying all together.
- 6.
Another way in which “history” can affect the longterm habitability of planets relates to the possible universal tendency of stars to very slowly heat up as they age. In its younger days, i.e., 3 or 4 billion years ago, Venus may have been a life friendly water world . With the subsequent slow warming of our sun, Venus became too hot (all water evaporated, and what may have been a life friendly atmosphere turned into an extremely hot and deadly “gas chamber” containing a very hot and thick cloud covered atmosphere containing nasty sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide/nitrogen gases).
- 7.
One thing that man’s incredibly short biological lifespan has done for most of us, and especially for the non-scientists among us, is to make us insensitive to the very real fact that virtually all of the larger physical systems elsewhere in the universe (planets, stars, galaxies, etc.) have unbelievably long “life spans” and go through unbelievably slow changes (ergo, the astronomer’s use of the frustrating concept of “deep time ”).On Earth, for example, man was preceded by tiny heat loving microbes billions of years ago and, because the sun is heating up, we will again be replaced by such single-cell microbes before our sun meets its final demise in another 4 or 5 billion years. Life changes as its physical environment changes, and the moons of some of our own outer planets may eventually develop multicellular carbon-based life forms as our sun heats up and converts their frozen water into rivers or oceans. Europa and Titan may undergo this change long after man has either burned up or managed to escape from our dying planet. When the Kepler planet hunters discover what now appears to be exoplanets that are probably totally hostile to our form of life, they need to keep in mind that this situation might have been entirely different many eons earlier or may be totally different in the far distant future when the exoplanet evolves into a place that would be more capable of hosting more advanced life forms of some kind.
- 8.
A few scientists have suggested that asteroids which have now been found to also exist in other stellar systems, might make an excellent “vessel” for any inhabitants that need to escape their dying planetary system. Our solar system, as well as many others, contains a huge number of relatively “small” asteroids in their asteroid belts that are constructed of rock and metal that could be converted into excellent “escape vessels”. In addition to being made of rock and metal, many of these asteroids contain large quantities of water which would also come in handy for any future escapees. If the citizens of a doomed planet were to become aware of their need to escape and had sufficient time to prepare, they could send hordes of engineers and workers (probably robotic types) into their asteroid belt to hollow out the interiors of a large number of the larger asteroids to convert them into homes for the escapees. They could then link or chain a large number of these converted vessels together and attach gigantic solar sails or some kind of nuclear rocket engines and launch these huge “mechanized cities” toward the nearest life friendly stellar system. Perhaps, in the distant future, the historical “rallying call” that American settlers or pioneers used in the early nineteenth century when relocating to California by wagon trains of “Westward ho, the wagons” will become “Starward ho, the asteroids”!
- 9.
The reader may want to look at the author’s earlier book (Cranford 2011), where I present a detailed discussion of the importance of tectonic plates on our planet for allowing the transfer of heat from the core of the Earth to outer space as well as the recycling of life critical elements (e.g., carbon) for purposes of supporting a long term life friendly environment.
- 10.
It is the constant movement of tectonic plates in the Earth’s crust that makes mantle plume eruptions so dangerous. While rising lava plumes tend to stay in one constant position over incredible lengths of time (thousands or more years), the ground (i.e. tectonic plates) located above the rising lava plumes continue to slowly move (very slowly, perhaps only a few inches per year). Over a long period involving many years a single lava plume will continue rising and repeatedly “punching” through the ground to produce new volcanoes and new land. It was the occurrence of large continual rising plumes of lava from deep in the Earth’s core that actually built the long Hawaiian Island chain as well as other island chains elsewhere in the world. Although tectonic plates did not move any faster during the Permian Period, there were more mantle plumes present than there are today. This is why virtually the entire planet was plagued by many more deadly volcanoes during this early period in Earth’s history.
- 11.
All biological systems need a readily available source of energy in order to survive and reproduce. Biological systems that perform more complex functions require more energy. On our planet, the reason that predation was needed to foster at least the early stages of the evolution of intelligent animal species is that the function we call intelligence demands more energy to work. Our nervous systems need to have a source of energy that is both quick and easy to acquire as well as being highly efficient (i.e., “more bang for the buck”). Herbivores (cows and horses) spend much of their time eating grass or other plants that have low energy content. Since these creatures do not need to be real smart to survive, they function quite well with low energy foods. Humans need to consume foods that are highly packed with energy such as meat and protein to keep their much more active brains going at full speed. This is why man’s brain , which constitutes only 2 % of the total weight of our bodies, requires 15 % of our blood supply, 20 % of our oxygen intake, and 25 % of all the energy (glucose) we take in from feeding. Intelligent ETs on other worlds would also likely have “energy greedy” nervous systems that would require they engage in some form of predatory lifestyle or its technologically developed equivalent.
- 12.
Another profound truism related to the rise of life (whether intelligent or not) on any planet anywhere in the universe may be that life, by its inherent nature, not only competes with other life forms to determine which particular species (whether animal or plant) gets to dominate the local environment, but also tends to take more resources from its environment than its environment can replace, plus also adds chemical pollutants or waste products to the environment that may eventually destroy it (see Ward 2009).
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Cranford, J.L. (2015). Just How Hostile Is Our Universe to the Development and Survival of Life Forms?. In: Astrobiological Neurosystems. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10419-5_6
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