Arken

I don't think so since life could have easily been carried from one place to the other via impact-created meteors. We know that microorganisms can survive in space from bacteria recovered from the exterior of an unmanned lunar probe by the Apollo astronauts. It is not unreasonable to suggest therefore that abiogenesis could occur on one planet and then be spread to other nearby planets. I suppose you could even suggest that occasionally a rock carrying dorman organisms could break free of a solar system completely and end up hitting another planet in another system millions of years later and starting life there but I would guess that an event like that is less likely.

Jesse

Since Laci's "okay, smart alec" thread was meant to be a comment here, I've merged it with this thread.

mark9950

About a parallel universe.Did you ever wander if there was/is a parrallel universe where there is a flat earth with a solid sky dome set on pillars about 2 billion light years away.Maybe they discovered a porthole came to visit and dropped their bible befgore they left.

cheetah

This MSNBC article , which is about the new, oldest known planet, talks at the end about earth-sized planets that were found 2 months ago. They are controversial though, apparently because they were formed around a dying sun and have no potential for life. I guess some people don't count them for that reason. The article does not specify what method was used to confirm their existence.

The article is interesting in and of itself, because this planet, the oldest known planet, did exist around a sun-similar star for most of its life. Its distance from its sun implies to some that a hypothetical terrestrial planet inside that orbit would have been inside the habitable zone. No evidence of a terrestrial planet exists, and there is some question, alluded to here, about existence of enough of the heavier elements (at the time) to make a solid terrestrial planet viable. However, any terrestrial planet that was there would have been destroyed in the gravitational event described, so no news isn't necessarily bad news.

Godless Dave

Thanks, Cheetah, I hadn't read anything about that before.

Laci

Not to change the subject.

But does anyone here watch the Star Trek Next Generation or Voyager? We are avid fans of all the series. They're at NOT as science fiction as people think they are. What do you think?

abe smith

To Godless Dave, Raedas, et al & Sundri the beautiful Indian
Lady:
Please accept my apologies & *note retraction* of my muddleheaded & undeliberately uninformed recent post at this thread >> about the way of finding Pluto & Neptune! "...I am truly sorry". (By the time I get here to EyeEye anyday, it's NOT my clearheaded time-of-day.)
Thanks to all who took my dummy errors to task and corrected them.
Ya know tho, the GREAT thing about doing one's junk assertions in public is exactly this: that someone-else can/will come along and CORRECT them! . Awe-raaahhhht!.
Abjectly, short-term, Abe

Godless Dave

Abe, that happens to me whenever I post in BC&A, and often in EC. Don't sweat it.

Laci, I was a big Next Generation fan. I consider it science fiction, even if it's often quite light on the science part. But it does capture the mystery and grandeur of outer space at least some of the time.

Arken

I think your posts don't make any sense.

paul30

Given the enormous number of stars we can see, and the very likely high number of planets near some of them (quite a number of such planets have been observed), it seems likely that there are planets with conditions congenial to some kind of life.

Let's just hope they are not barbarians the pinnacle of whose civilization is "Gilligan's Island" and George W. Bush.