Queso Posted February 16, 2005 Report Share Posted February 16, 2005 Is it possible that somewhere in the universe, that life has formed IN space itself? Maybe on a rock like the moon without an atmosphere. This seems to me a bit extreme, but eh...just something I was curious about. ;) or what if there was a planet like earth, with life, and the atmosphere dissipated slowly enough that the life on the planet evolved to the extremities of outer space...or is space itself just non-inhabitable by any forms of life? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alxian Posted February 16, 2005 Report Share Posted February 16, 2005 all it requires is low radiation and good insulation as long as life can pass food through that protection (food being any compounds with chemical potential, very hard to find in the void), perhaps such animals would be the UV absorbers i'm seeking but they'd still require a solvent for a chemical metabolism. or they could be ultra massive star eaters... unicron.. which isn't unlikely just if you can devour a star you you must be able to metabolize and store that power.. which will then be used to move on to the next one [star] which requires incredible amounts of power too. perhaps cooling the stars gases and liquid metals into usable forms.. but such a creature.. very unlikely.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fishteacher73 Posted February 16, 2005 Report Share Posted February 16, 2005 Life cycles and grwoth rates would be extremely long... While there's a lot of energy floating about space, there's not much matter. The uptake of the building block compounds would be very slow and erratic for such a life form. So the entity would grow very slowly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alxian Posted February 16, 2005 Report Share Posted February 16, 2005 exactly, while energy is free there isn't much to subsist off of, all creatures require some amount of raw material. when you consider living in full vacuum you are exposed to an extremely dangerous environment requiring more food to repair damage, unless that outer crust is asteroid like, rocky and micrometeorite pitted, you'll get the protection from vacuum radiation and the soft gooey interior can absorb high energy radiation and such for power.. considering the size of a creature though if its large enough it could maintain homeostasis perfectly within itself, any trully toxic compounds can be expelled into space and any resources it requires makes life worth living (it'll have to move around looking for food. example is that earth itself requires massive amounts of sunlight to keep live stirring down here, but subterranean life manages quite well with the toxic effervescence of the heat from the earths core interacting with volatile compounds in the crust. on a mass small enough you could consider the mantle as being the living creature, the crust its protective skin and a substance at the core that would heat up when exposed to radiation or other hi energy source in local space, again a solvent is required and perhaps a cycle which would carry it around the core of the small (relatively) body, such as enrichment [adding potential energy to the solvent] transport to the living flesh of the creature where it is depleted, then more transport perhaps into storage [which could occur before the depletion stage] and back again, purification which removes any toxic compounds would require a secondary system to remove it from the 'blood' where it could be removed and expelled, though i doubt such a creature would create much toxic waste in the first place. only where you are dealing with very high energy tissues will you require complex compounds but then those compounds when used up generally they decompose into base compounds again anyway.. such an animal i think would be a fully enclosed system but would require energy in once its own chemical potential has been used up, and by that time it'll have created some pretty toxic materials which could be expelled and caked onto its crusty shell. then you can think of crystaline creatures that would be powered by resonance, passing thru hi energy fields but would require conversion and storage media for times when there is no ambient energy to absorb. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim_Lou Posted February 16, 2005 Report Share Posted February 16, 2005 if such creatures exist (in empty spaces), it would be quite hard for em to move around... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buffy Posted February 16, 2005 Report Share Posted February 16, 2005 Reminds me of the Star Trek episode "The Immunity Syndrome" where Kirk and crew encounter an enormous, planetary-sized Ameoba. It was very large, moved slowly and had the ability to suck in any matter or energy nearby (even created a negative energy void around itself). Well, lots of stuff I know about physics came from Star Trek.... Live Long and Prosper,Buffy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alxian Posted February 16, 2005 Report Share Posted February 16, 2005 remember they'd only move around if they have to. if energy abounded they'd have no reason to move around.. but if you mean because they'd have nothing to push off of? well, assuming they need to crap and can hold pressure this crap vectored thrust would be adequate for impulse engines.. its the moving around at hypervelocity thats the snag, they could move between systems at their own pace if they were ageless. given the incalculable amounts of energy being radiated by a star they'd have a home for its lifetime, only needing to move when the potential dropped dangerously low, the local space becomes too polluted or the star grows faster than they can move away [or can't stomach IR for elder stars].. ;) how better to create a dysons sphere than from the corpses of organisms that feed directly off of a star? if they keep reproducing and the LZH is thin enough that when they die the dead stay in relatively the same position without accreting [which though nice for fiction would be impossible outside of the stars planar spinning orbit (which could be radical and not as perfect as our old sol.. but i'm being convenient..).] woot! i've been exoner8'd! no more infamy for me!!! :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FetusHead Posted February 17, 2005 Report Share Posted February 17, 2005 For a life form to have evolved with the ability to live in space, it would have to be based on something besides carbon - Silicon comes to mind. If I were a space creature, I'd want mylar eye lids or at least some cool aviator sunglasses like Tom Cruise had in Top Gun. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the5thhorseman Posted March 1, 2005 Report Share Posted March 1, 2005 H.P. Lovecrafts short story " At the Mountains of Madness" he describes a race of creatures that are interplanetary life forms by nature ... they move planet to planet under there own power can live in deep space and are almost eternal .. the old ones as he calls them , can go from planet to planet they can also create life on planets they descend on . I always liked that strange story . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlameTheEx Posted March 15, 2005 Report Share Posted March 15, 2005 It's all a bit thin. Life as we know it depends on chemical reactions. Chemical reactions depend on different chemicals bumping into one another. That means they need to be free to move. They have to be dissolved in a liquid, or dispersed as a gas. Space can't contain free liquids and only contains the thinnest of gasses. Worse light pressure and solar wind sweep gas away from stars - that is if a planetary body doesn't capture it first. The only stable gas in space is interstellar. Where would the energy to drive life come from if not from a close star? There are exceptions. Comets emit gas when they get close to the sun. That is the source of their tails. Asteroids can have water trapped inside rocks. But is there enough here to support the evolution of life? I think not. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
C1ay Posted March 15, 2005 Report Share Posted March 15, 2005 Is it possible that somewhere in the universe, that life has formed IN space itself? Maybe on a rock like the moon without an atmosphere. This seems to me a bit extreme... I don't think it's extreme at all. We have discovered life here on Earth living in volcanic vents and we recently discovered life that had been frozen for 32,000 years that still lives after being thawed out. There could be a wealth of extreme life forms we've never imagined, particularly when you include plant life. There could be exotic algaes living on Venus or Mercury or other places in the Universe. Perhaps some type of plankton living in a methane sea on Titan. IMO, I think it's very possible that there is other life out there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nismoskyline Posted March 15, 2005 Report Share Posted March 15, 2005 Im not exactly sure if im right, but I heard life can also exist in the form of pure energy. This kind of life could develope anywhere in space, could it not? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tormod Posted March 15, 2005 Report Share Posted March 15, 2005 Im not exactly sure if im right, but I heard life can also exist in the form of pure energy. This kind of life could develope anywhere in space, could it not? I have never heard of such a claim outside of my sci-fi books...this would be the realm of cyberpunk and The Matrix. But if we look at the big picture, matter is energy, so all life is basically concentrated energy consuming and radiating energy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nismoskyline Posted March 15, 2005 Report Share Posted March 15, 2005 That must have been where I heard that from. Some sci-fi movie or show maybe. Sorry for the mistake. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlameTheEx Posted March 22, 2005 Report Share Posted March 22, 2005 I don't think it's extreme at all. We have discovered life here on Earth living in volcanic vents and we recently discovered life that had been frozen for 32,000 years that still lives after being thawed out. There could be a wealth of extreme life forms we've never imagined, particularly when you include plant life. There could be exotic algaes living on Venus or Mercury or other places in the Universe. Perhaps some type of plankton living in a methane sea on Titan. IMO, I think it's very possible that there is other life out there.You are going a bit off the topic here. Life could certainly exist on planets, or for that matter on moons. The question in front of us is if life can FORM in free space. Those volcanic vents are in liquid water. Hardly a likely environment in free space. Life can be preserved in a frozen state, but in that state it is not being formed. growing, reproducing or evolving. Before it can do that it will have to be defrosted. You have to show some possibility of it growing or reproducing after it is defrosted in space. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paultrr Posted March 23, 2005 Report Share Posted March 23, 2005 Actually, and while this was some 2 to 3 years ago there was an article about a possible detection of microbes high in the earth atmosphere and if memory serves me the altitude was something like 60 miles up. However, given that I have never seen a follow up article on this I have tended to assume they found out the microbes were from earth itself. The link on that is: CNN.com - Space - Scientists discover possible microbe from space - November 24, 2000 An international team of scientists claim they have recovered a microorganism in the upper reaches of the atmosphere that originated from outer space. ... reaches of the atmosphere that could have originated from outer space, a participant in the study said Friday ... be arriving from space. " If we find microbes at great heights ... archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/11/24/alien.microbe.claim Also, Microbes Rain Down from Space, a Second Scientist Says A controversial finding last year of microbes high in Earth's atmosphere and thought to have come from space gained another scientist's support this week. ... Report: Microbes Rain Down from Space? More Support for Controversial Theory ... Germs from Outer Space! Researchers Say Flu Bugs Rain Down from Beyond ... http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/space_bugs_021217.html In general, its possible. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Queso Posted March 22, 2006 Author Report Share Posted March 22, 2006 this thread is amazing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.