Saturday, January 23, 2016 2:50 pm
Life on other planets would likely be brief and go extinct quickly, say scientists at Australian National University in a new study.
In research aiming to understand how life might develop, they concluded that new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets.
“The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens,” said Aditya Chopra, lead author of a paper on the research, published in the journal Astrobiology.
“Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive.”
“Most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable.”
About four billion years ago Earth, Venus and Mars may have all been habitable, he noted. But a billion years or so after formation, Venus turned into a hothouse and Mars froze into an icebox. Early microbial life on those two worlds, if any, failed to stabilize the rapidly changing environment, said co-author Charley Lineweaver. “Life on Earth probably played a leading role in stabilizing the planet’s climate,” he added.
Chopra said the theory solves a puzzle.
“The mystery of why we haven’t yet found signs of aliens may have less to do with the likelihood of the origin of life or intelligence and have more to do with the rarity of the rapid emergence of biological regulation of feedback cycles on planetary surfaces,” he said.
Wet, rocky planets, with the ingredients and energy sources required for life seem to be common throughout the cosmos. But as physicist Enrico Fermi pointed out in 1950, no signs of surviving extra-terrestrial life have been found.
A plausible solution to Fermi’s paradox, say the researchers, is near universal early extinction, which they have named the Gaian Bottleneck.
“One intriguing prediction of the Gaian Bottleneck model is that the vast majority of fossils in the universe will be from extinct microbial life, not from multi-cellular species such as dinosaurs or humanoids that take billions of years to evolve,” said Lineweaver.
Culled from World-science.net: Why Aliens are silent
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