THE BROWN DWARFS: TOO SMALL TO BE STARS, TOO BIG TO BE PLANETS.
Most brown dwarfs are too hot to support life as we know it. But some are just cold enough.
WISE 0855-0714 [ DISTANCE:~ 7 LIGHT YEARS, MASS:~ 3-10X JUPITER, TEMPERATURE:~ -50 TO -13 DEGREE C ]
All the prime elements for life have been detected inside their atmospheres. And within these clouds, some layers would provide ideal temperatures and pressures for habitability. There could be photosynthetic plankton in these skies, kept aloft by churning upwind. And within enough force, these upwind could even support a larger more complex life, Predators.
There are over 25 billion brown dwarfs in our galaxy alone, and their sizes will make easier targets for study. The first specimen we discover from the museum of life may not come from a planet at all.
This raises a crucial question of what we have been looking for in all the wrong places? What if nature has other ideas?
EXHIBIT II
LIFE AS WE DON'T KNOW IT
EXOTIC BIOCHEMISTRIES
Most of the universe is too cold or too hot for liquid water, and the biochemistry that supports life as we know it. But in case our biases are misleading, we have to cast a wide net. To search for life outside the habitable zone, in places that seem wildly hostile to us. Exotic environments will demand exotic biochemistries. And while no element can match carbon's versatility, one contender is a front runner.
SILICON: [ ATOMIC WEIGHT: 28.086, MELTING POINT: 1687K, BOILING POINT: 3538K, DENSITY: 2.3290 G/CM3 ]
At first glance silicon seem similar to carbon. It forms the same four-way bonds and is also abundant in the Universe. But a closer look reveals that these two elements are false twins. Silicon bonds are weaker, and less prone to forming large complex molecules. Despite this, they can withstand a wider range of temperatures, opening up intriguing possibilities. Life based on the silicon atom instead of carbon, would be more resistant to the extreme cold. Providing a whole new range of weird forms. But silicon has a problem in the presence of oxygen, it binds into solid rock. To avoid turning to stone, silicon beings might be confined to oxygen free evvironments. Like Saturn's frigid moon TITAN [ DISTANCE: 1.2 MILLION KM, MASS: 0.023X EARTH, TEMPERATURE: -179 DEGREE C ].
Its vast lakes of liquid methane and ethane could be an ideal medium for silicon-based life, or other radical biochemistries. Without ample sunlight, beings on worlds like Titan would likely be chemosynthetic. Deriving their energy by breaking down rocks. Such life forms could have ultra slow metabolisms and life cycles measured in millions of years. And frozen worlds aren't the only possible harbor for exotic life.
COROT-7B [ DISTANCE: ~520 LIGHT YEARS, MASS: ~ 8X EARTH, TEMPERATURE: 1026-1526 DEGREE C ]
In high temperatures, typically rigid silicon-oxygen bonds become more fliexible and reactive. Triggering more dynamic chemistry. This is led to a truly bizarre proposal silicon-based life forms, that live inside molten silicate rock. In theory, these forms could even exist deep beneath the Earth inside magma chambers, as part of a shadow biospere. If so then the aliens are right under our noses. Other shadow biosperes have been proposed forms of life living alongside us that we don't even know are here. Including tiny RNA-based life, small enough to go undetected by existing instruments.
[ Many billions years ago ] Clouds of dust and empty space, might seem like the last place you did expect to find anything living. But when cosmic dust makes contact with plasma, a type of ionized gas something strange happens. In simulated conditions dust particles, have been seen spontaneously self-organizing into helical structures that resemble DNA. These plasma crystals even begin to exhibit life-like behavior replicating, evolving into more stable forms and passing on information.
Could these crystals be considered alive?
To some researchers, they meet all the criteria to qualify as inorganic life forms. So far, we have only seen them in computer simulations. But some speculate we could find them among the ice particles in the rings of Uranus.
Plasma is the most common state of matter in the universe. If complex evolving plasma crystals really exist? and if they can be considered life, they could be its most common form. Or perhaps life is lurking in the polar opposite environment: inside the hearts of dead stars. When massive suns explode, some collapase into ultra dense cores called neutron stars [ PSR B1509-58 ]. Hulking masses of atomic nuclei, crammed together like sardines. Conditions on the surface are mind-boggling gravity is a hundred billion times stronger than Earth's. But beneath their iron nuclei crust lies, something starnge a hot dense sea of neutrons and subatomic particles. Stripped of their electron shells these nuclei would obey entirely different laws of chemistry, based not on the electromagnetic force, but the strong nuclear force which binds nuclei together. In theory, these particles could link-up to form larger macronuclei which could then combine into even bigger super nuclei. If so then this bewildering environment, would mimic the basic conditions for life. Heavy nucleon molecules, floating ina complex particle ocean. Some scientists have proposed the unimaginable exotic life forms drifting through the strange particle sea, living evolving and dying on incomprehensibly fast time scales.
There's probably no chance of ever detecting such a strange breed of life. But there may be hope for finding an even more exotic form.
Life is not something that has to evolve naturally. It can be designed. And ones intelligence is evolutionary process, a Pandora's box is opened. Free from typical biological limitations, synthetic and machine-based life could be the most successful of all. It could thrive almost anywhere, including the vaccum of soace, opening up vast frontiers unavailable to biological organisms. And compared to the glacial pace of natural selection, technical evolution allows exponentially faster growth, adaptability and resilience. By some estimates, autonomous self-replicating machines could colonize an entire galaxy in as little as a million years.
We can't predict how hyper-intelligent life would organize itself, but in theory, there could be convergent evolution at play. The electrical properties of silicon might make it a universal basis for machine intelligence, a redemption for its biological shortcomings. With all its potential adventages, machine life may even be a universal endpoint: The apex of the evolutionary process.
As the universe ages, perhaps machine intelligence would come to dominate, and naturally occurring biological life will be viewed as a quaint starting point. Perhaps we ourselves will lead this transition, and the great human experiment would be merely a first link in a sprawing, intergalactic chain of life.
IN THE END, WE ARE STILL THE ONLY BEINGS WE KNOW OF IN THE MUSEUM OF ALIEN LIFE.
TO TRULY KNOW OURSELVES, WE WILL HAVE TO KNOW: ARE WE THE ONLY ONES?
Loren Eiseley has said "One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human." One day that eye maybe that of an intelligent alien. And the sooner we eschew our narrow view of evolution, the sooner we can truly explore, our ultimate origins and destinations.
We have seen what could be out there. And we know how we might find it. There's only one thing left to do. GO LOOKING.
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