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+--- Thread: Alien Mindscapes + Our solar system would be weird even if it didn’t harbor life (/thread-2599.html)
Alien Mindscapes + Our solar system would be weird even if it didn’t harbor life - C C - Jul 7, 2016
“Alien Mindscapes" --Radical New Changes Called for in Search for Advanced Intelligent Life
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2016/07/alien-mindscapes-sea-changes-in-the-search-for-advanced-intelligent-life.html
EXCERPT: [...] “Alien Mindscapes – A Perspective on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” authored by Nathalie A. Cabrol, Director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute, suggests the need for a sea change in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, where the full complement of physical, biological, computer and social sciences are deployed in a quest to look for life as we do not know it. Led by pioneers such as Frank Drake and Jill Tarter, SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – commenced in the 1960’s using radio astronomy to listen for signals from ET. Today, both radio and optical SETI searches seek signals generated by technology similar to ours. There are compelling reasons to continue with these endeavors, but equally compelling reasons to broaden the search criteria and expand the existing methodologies....
Our Solar System Would Be Weird Even If It Didn’t Harbor Life
http://nautil.us/blog/our-solar-system-would-be-weird-even-if-it-didnt-harbor-life
EXCERPT: [...] Let’s put the pieces together to calculate how unusual our solar system is: The fraction of stars that are like the sun (10 percent), multiplied by the fraction of sun-like stars with Jupiters (10 percent), multiplied by the fraction of Jupiter-like planets with Jupiter-like orbits (10 percent), multiplied by the fraction of sun-like stars with no hot super-Earths (50 percent), gets us 0.05 percent.
This tells us that about one in every 2000 stars in our galactic neighborhood is a sun-Jupiter system. [...] It means the solar system is not a dime-a-dozen kind of planetary system even without considering that it harbors life. Most systems are different than ours. Most planetary systems orbit puny red dwarfs instead of big yellow G stars like the sun. Most systems contain super-Earths close to their stars, and if they happen to have a gas giant, it tends to be much closer to its sun, or have a much more stretched-out orbit than Jupiter’s...