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| Personal background |
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My name is Gunjan. I am 33 years old, currently working towards my PhD in Machine Learning after two jaunts of 3 years and 3.5 years working between my Bachelors and Masters and PhD degrees in the last 10 years. I like cooking, hiking, skiing, roller-skating, painting, reading and writing science-fiction. Most of all, I want to see the colonization and terraforming of Mars and the eventual evolution of humanity as a multi-stellar species. Why? Intelligent and other advanced life forms from our tiny planet (since microbes might already have travelled far in the the last 4 billion years of cosmic collisions) will become immortal only when humans become a multi-stellar species.
I am an active member of the Mars Society and maintain two local chapter websites: Austin Mars Society and the New Mexico Mars Society
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Yes, I believe the universe is teeming with extra-terrestrial life and that our galaxy has at least 100,000 advanced civillizations with active interstellar space-travel or communication (we can count ourselves in this category because of organizations such as Setiathome !!), 10s of millions of planets with complex life-forms, millions with intelligent life, 100s of millions of habitable earth-like planet where a human being can survive on the surface without a spacesuit, and billions teaming with microorganisms, out of the 100 billion or more starts in our galaxy, and dozens in our solar system.
Offcourse I am using planet in a general sense here to include satellites around gas giants.
Trillions of Super Europa
Besides these very earthly environments, there is a list of potentially trillions that few talk about in the context of habitability - large, dark, rocky, solitary planets that are far away from their parent stars or do not have a parent star but are in a non-circular orbit around another large body: this is a huge list that includes planets that have lost their parent stars and are adrift in interstellar space, planets around dead stars, planets around brown dwarfs or even smaller gaseous bodies that have one amazing property- they have heavy warm liquid oceans, hydrothermal tidal heating from the mother planet or star or a large sister moon, and a huge nuclear fission core that has kept the tectonic plates and a strong magnetic field going for billions of years into the present. These planets would be very watery and will have a thin coating of ice on their oceans- and can be considered to be mega versions of Europa, and by some estimates might outnumber terrestrial planets bathed by warm solar radiation. The forms of life that might evolve in such a harsh, changing but also well-protected environment is unimaginable- especially since many such systems would be much older than our Sun. It is important to note that once our Sun dies, Europa and yet undiscovered hundreds of large Kuiper-belt objects similar to the recently discovered Xena might continue to remain warm and hospitable just below the surface because of a strong tidal effect from their large parent or Moon.
Some with tidal effects strong enough might even have localized liquid water surface environments: imagine a moon close to the mass of Earth around a
solitary gas giant a few times the mass of Jupiter orbiting it at the same distance as Io is from Jupiter. Imagine such a system a bit closer to the center of our galaxy. The higher metallic content of the region, and a large amount of intense radation from the first few million years of the gas giant can give such a planet a density substantially higher than that of Io or Europa making it so much like Earth, a global ocean much larger than that of Earth kept mostly liquid because of tidal heating and a huge amount of tectonic activity, and strong sources of both radiative and heat energy near hundreds of ever erupting volcanoes and a thick atmosphere- perhaps mostly of nitrogen, methane and other gases spewed by the volcanoes. Such large volcanoes could even create surface land masses. Such a dynamic habitable system full of fresh nutrients would be very suiable for evolution of complex, fast-adapting and perhaps even intelligent life- compared to the much slower changing environment in the oceans of Earth- one argument for why land animals on Earth got smarter faster. On Earth we know of at least one hydrothermal species that uses the volcanic radiation for photosynthesis! It would be such a surreal environment; on many such Worlds where the right combination of mass, density and parent gas giant creates an atmospheric pressure not too high, a human could scuba dive naked or walk in shirt sleeves on a planet with no Sun! A planet far from being dark with glowing streams of lava flows all around in the distance, massive lightning storms visible in the sky from the atmosphere of the dark gas giant that cover a large part of the sky- the silhoutte would be very obvious in the starry background of the sky. If such a planet had a distant Sun, there would be almost continuous beautiful auroras caused by the strong magnetic fields of the planet capturing the distant solar flux and raining it down near the poles; the strong magnetic field of the rocky planet would also protect it from the radiation belt of the gas gaint, unlike the surface sterilization received by Europa and Io- but again such a protection would be unnecessary if the gas giant did not have a parent Sun. The possibilities are just mindboggling- we are only beginning to realize in baby steps how Earth-centric we have been in our definitions of what cosmic conditions result in an earthly warm, watery, habitable envirionment.
Everything that we can do to make the first contact with an extant extra-terrestrial life - I believe,is not only good for humanity in the long run, but must be the adriving force behind our technology - a fundamental duty for us as sentient denizens of this universe. The the first contact - even with simple extra-terrestrial life-forms, is going to change and mature humanity forever. Even finding convincing fossils of past life on Mars will partiallly have this effect. It will help in giving the people of this small blue marble of a planet a global perspective, and hopefully finally bring world peace, as we begin to realize how unimportant our personal squirmishes are on Earth, over a small piece of land or ideological differences about hypothetical concepts such as God, compared to what lies out there waiting for us to discover, explore and develop - maybe even bring another planet to life. We have the ability to destroy life. With recent advances in genetics,
material science, computing, robotics and propulsion systems, we also have the ability to create life, perhaps on another world that almost succeeded on its own. Finding ET signal will give a good impetus for humanity to move itself out of its womb and explore the universe. Bringing Mars back to life is the first challenge. |
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