Recently, there have been multiple tests on possible life bearing planets such as mars and and the moon titan, to search for life. And these 2 planetoids are very practical areas to search as mars has shown to have unusual areas depositing large amounts of gases that usually carbon bases lifeforms makes such as methane and carbon dioxide, and titan has a methane atmosphere with methane oceans, making it a extremely prime candidate, and both planets have had flowing water in the past..
So I was wondering what the opinions of the people here were on this subject, hopefully you all enjoy the prospect of aliens.
You know, what if outer-space species just don't live off oxygen and water but off other minerals/toxins/gasses/etc.? It'd make sense considering evolution and all that stuff.
You know, what if outer-space species just don't live off oxygen and water but off other minerals/toxins/gasses/etc.? It'd make sense considering evolution and all that stuff.
Water and sunlight are the absolute prerequisites for life.
For earthling species, yes. There is no proof at all that outer-earth species require the same resources in order to live. There's quite the chance that they evolved into species that live other resources.
1. Sunlight is a universal prerequisite, because it simply provides energy in the form of heat and fotonic radiation. It kickstarts the whole life thing, so to speak. Without sunlight, earth would be a freezing block of inert mass. Alternatively, if you had an unusual planet full of active volcanoes and lava streams you could get energy from there. Also, deep sea vents don't give light but they do provide heat energy.
2. Water is fundamental for metabolism on earth. The simplest molecular operations would be impossible without H2O. There is some speculation as to life without water, but it looks highly unlikely. Possible, I guess...
3. According to wikipedia, other universal factors are temperature, atmosphere, gravity, nutrients, and ultraviolet solar radiation protection.
None of those actually hold true at all. If lifeforms were able to harvest the vast amounts of dark matter/energy to sustain themselves that could survive without the need for starlight. As for water, silicon based life may require some other metabolizing agent. The other things listed in 3 a pretty much up in the air. We know certain ranges of those factors are required for life, but not what the ranges are.
The problem with humans looking for alien life is that we always look relative to us. When we look for life, we look for life that is compatible with us on a chemical basis. We fail to take into account that it is likely that other lifeforms will not be carbon based.
If lifeforms were able to harvest the vast amounts of dark matter/energy
They can't simply by virtue of the fact that dark energy and matter don't interact with anything except through gravity. Those kind of interactions don't have the complexity required for life.
Regardless, life needs an energy source. On earth, the two that you see are geothermal and solar. Geothermal is something of an unlikely candidate since planets tend to cool off over time (earth seems to be the exception to this; possibly because it has an unusual amount of uranium present in its core, this could also be the case on some of Jupiter's moons due to tidal heating). Either way, it's not something to consider looking for, since the kind of life we're going to be likely to spot is going to use starlight.
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
The other things listed in 3 a pretty much up in the air.
No they're not... Temperature is needed, cause you can't have life at absolute zero. Atmosphere, cause it's hard to draw energy/nutrients from a vacuum. Gravity... maybe not prerequisite, but if there's an athmosphere then there's automatically gravity. Nutrients, obviously necessary :/. Ultraviolet rad protection also generally comes with an athmosphere, but I'm not sure how vital it is.
If you read the sentence after that quote you will see that things are already handled quite well, but I'll say it again.
We know there are certain requirements, we will use temperature for example.
Temperature is needed, cause you can't have life at absolute zero.
You can't actually have absolute zero, Absolute zero is the "temperature" matter approaches as you remove energy, it approaches but never actually reaches it. We know that any given lifeform has a temperature range at which it can live. What we do not know is what the temperature range is, as we don't know that life yet.
Atmosphere, cause it's hard to draw energy/nutrients from a vacuum.
We draw almost none of our energy from the air, we mostly use the oxygen as a metabolizing agent. If we were adapted properly, platinum would suffice as well. This is similar to the above. We know life will require some type of atmosphere to truly survive, but we don't know the exact atmosphere required, that is dependent on the life form. Perhaps the first aliens we meet require a sulfur-dioxide rich atmosphere?
Gravity... maybe not prerequisite, but if there's an athmosphere then there's automatically gravity.
International Space Station. Gravity is not really requisite for life in general.
Basically what I am saying is that you, and probably 99.999% of the human population tend to think to linearly in life requirements. This thinking isn't wrong, only very narrow. Many modern scientists shrug off the cold desolate planets because WE can't life there, but then again we aren't looking for ourselves.
Instead of asking "how can it live"", try asking "why can't it live?" instead.
Chemistry. We can understand the kind of conditions required for specific chemical reactions to occur. There's a particular range of temperatures where complicated molecules can form and exist.
International Space Station
Not exactly a naturally occurring environment. Also, live has never evolved there. Besides that, organisms from this planet fare pretty poorly in microgravity environments. There are a number of adverse health effects that result from extended exposure to low gravity (namely a significant amount of muscular and skeletal atrophy and a weakening of the immune system).
Many modern scientists shrug off the cold desolate planets because WE can't life there
No, they have better reasons than that.
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
its statistically improbable that there is not life on other planets
Yet considering the vast size of the universe AND the amount of energy within it, how can there not be conditions like on Earth which support life? Other life may not even be within the Milky Way, but it is incredibly improbable that it doesn't exist.
Indeed, we know of more than 8 planets and, of the ones in the solar system, we still can't be sure that some of those planets (or their moons) do not harbor life.
And the reason we are not receiving radio messages from aliens is the fact that all them waves cannot travel forever.
Yes they can. You'd have a hard time seeing stars and galaxies if EM radiation had a maximum range. What makes Voyager's signals difficult to detect (but still easy enough for amateur radio operators to detect using a 20 foot receiver dish) at the distance it is is the fact that it has a very low power transmitter on it (23 watts to be specific). Yes, signals get weaker with distance, but they never drop to 0. To put that transmitter power in perspective, there are radio transmitters on earth which pump out upwards of 100 kW, some reaching the MW.
Even over light-years there's something left to detect.
Cold and Hot climate creatures can exist but the chemical reactions which take place would be far slower.
In a cold climate the reactions would be slower, in a hot climate they would be faster. However, that's not the problem. The problem is, in a sufficiently cold environment certain compounds simply cannot form since you can't reach the activation energy for the reaction to even take place. In a sufficiently hot environment, it's easy to form the compounds, but it's difficult for them to stay that way. Since there's so much energy, the compounds pretty readily decompose into smaller parts since there's so much energy present.
they evolve a very resistant cell structure, live off decaying elements like plutonium.
For one, plutonium isn't naturally occurring in large quantities, it's mostly a synthetic element (i.e. humans make it). There are some isotopes with long enough half-lives that they stick around long enough to be observed in nature, but only in trace amounts, you won't see any large deposits of it.
Also, evolution can't possibly evolve a resistance to the kind of radiation the organism depends on as an energy source, since the radiation would simply kill every organism before it had a chance to reproduce. If there was life using a nuclear reactor for power, it would have arisen with that resistance already in place, since there's no other way it could live there. Regardless, I'm not sure how a resistance could be formed since things like beta radiation alter organisms on a molecular level. It's pretty much guaranteed to kill anything in sufficient quantity.
The absolute limit is a gel like creature which floats through space absorbing dust, gas, and starlight. It would have to conserve energy to the point where it only 'turns on' when it orbits at a specific temperature range (For earthlike creatures 37-38C, in other words, the habitable zone) at which point it would turn all the dust, gas and starlight into energy, grow, and if large enough split into two. When they are outside the habitable zone they would look dead and be covered in a thick coating of collected dust. They would look like asteroids even, possibly these creatures already exist.
They could be able to spread through the galaxy when they are, for whatever reason, accelerated above a systems escape velocity (Near miss of a planet) and flung off into deep space. Eventually they might fall into an orbit of another system and the cycle continues.
I'm not sure where to even start here. This looks like it was based on watching too many Star Trek episodes. Well, let's start with the orbital mechanics, since it's one of my more knowledgeable areas:
They could be able to spread through the galaxy when they are, for whatever reason, accelerated above a systems escape velocity (Near miss of a planet) and flung off into deep space.
These kinds of maneuvers require an incredibly precise trajectory and actual knowledge of where the planet would be. Not only that, but an escape trajectory usually requires multiple gravity assist maneuvers. Planets are extremely small targets in the scheme of things and it seems like this kind of precision would be beyond the capabilities of an organism that lacked a central nervous system.
Eventually they might fall into an orbit of another system and the cycle continues.
And the only way they could stay there is by expelling enough of their mass that whatever miniscule portion remains won't continue flying off into space. Either that or it would have to perform a set of precise gravity assist maneuvers to slow itself down. In any case, not something a blob is really capable of.
As for the biology portion. I'm not even going to bother. Star Trek.
Once we work out if they have life or not we can change the ratio, until then the absolute proven 100% evidence ratio is 1/8.
Only if you ignore all the moons in the solar system.
we cannot visit them or see them in great enough detail to be able to decide if they do have life or not.
The same can be said of many bodies in our solar system. There's a number of moons that could potentially harbor life and the only way is to go there and look specifically for it. One of these moons is Titan and we've sent one probe to its surface and it wasn't equipped to look for life. However, there is evidence that could point to the existence of methanogenic life on the surface (namely there's more hydrogen in the atmosphere than there should be). However, this could still be explained with a non-biological cause, so it's not conclusive.
Don't give numbers for things we don't actually know enough about. It's misleading and pointless.
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
There are many factors to life, and in my opinin alien life is inevitable, after all we are aliens, right? Life can and will take many, many forms shapes and sizes to adapt to many forms of environment for the sake of living in it. There will be life that has evolved eons beyond us, likely not even biological anymore. Aliens are indeed out there, but we aren't going to see them anytime soon thanks to the fermi paradox. Then again this is a big, big universe.
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Magic have a bigger priority than Technology when it comes to combat, but Mining and Crafting a bigger priority to Magic.
There are many factors to life, and in my opinin alien life is inevitable, after all we are aliens, right? Life can and will take many, many forms shapes and sizes to adapt to many forms of environment for the sake of living in it. There will be life that has evolved eons beyond us, likely not even biological anymore. Aliens are indeed out there, but we aren't going to see them anytime soon thanks to the fermi paradox. Then again this is a big, big universe.
You're almost defiantly right.
However,The most people will probably see is a fish.
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"Only a few find the way, Some don't recognize it when they do. Some don't ever want to..." ~Cheshire cat.
There are many factors to life, and in my opinin alien life is inevitable, after all we are aliens, right? Life can and will take many, many forms shapes and sizes to adapt to many forms of environment for the sake of living in it. There will be life that has evolved eons beyond us, likely not even biological anymore. Aliens are indeed out there, but we aren't going to see them anytime soon thanks to the fermi paradox. Then again this is a big, big universe.
You're almost defiantly right.
However,The most people will probably see is a fish.
Maybe in your lifetime, just a fish. But in hundreds of thousands of years, we will be having space wars with other sentient beings i believe. After all, there are another 10 billion years between the big bang and the creation of earth for more advanced life to evolve on other planets. But thats just my dumb 14 year old logic.
But in hundreds of thousands of years, we will be having space wars with other sentient beings i believe.
Highly unlikely. I don't think we'll ever physically encounter another intelligent species. I'm not sure we'll ever get much beyond this little corner of our galaxy. The universe is too big and light is too slow.
Probably not true either. Some structures we found recently (a star, some galaxy groups) whose complexity/size is too high for their distance from earth (ie. their age). In other words, they are too young and too big/complex to have been formed in the 14-billion years universe model.
Source? Using the CMB we've measured the age of the universe pretty accurately and if something shows up with a lot of structure then that more likely indicates that our understanding of how said structures form is flawed and not the age of the universe.
The same way all the matter in the whole current universe was spontaneously created in a millisecond in a molecule-sized dot
The time scale is more like 10^-32 seconds (this is the point where the universe was cool enough to support the formation of quarks and anti-quarks). The matter wasn't really created and calling it spontaneous is misleading since spontaneity implies that there was some state outside of and prior to the universe forming that the universe showed up in. It simply does not make sense to consider anything before the big bang just like it doesn't make sense to ask what's north of the north pole.
But it is possible there was another Big Bang somewhere else, propelling some matter out to us
This claim is dubious since these big bangs don't propel matter, they propel the expansion of space in which the matter resides. This is quite distinct from matter simply moving through space. Furthermore, the inflation during the formation of the universe was sufficient in magnitude to causally disconnect us from the majority of the universe (leaving us with the visible/observable universe). No physical object can cross this event horizon.
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
In the first entry you linked, the information isn't cited. What is cited is some irrelevant comment about how the head of the Royal Society thinks there are mysteries we may not be able to comprehend. Well, so what? This assertion remains unfounded:
Recently, cosmologists have estimated that some of these galactic walls may have taken from 80 billion to 100 billion, to 150 billion years to form
From the second article:
Several leading cosmologists, such as Sean Carroll of CalTech and Neil Turok of Cambridge University challenge the prevailing model of a "Big Bang" and believe that in the future we will only look back in wonder at how anyone could have believed in a creation event which was refuted by so much evidence.
Replace "Big Bang" with "Evolution" and you've got yourself the opening for a Creationist article. So already we're off to a bad start.
The origin of the Big Bang, that is, the state of "existence" which resulted in a Big Bang, is a mathematically obscure state - a "singularity" of zero volume that contained infinite density and infinite energy. Why this singularity existed, how it originated, and why it exploded, has led many scientists to question and challenge the very foundations of the Big Bang theory.
A veiled kind of argument from ignorance. It points out that there are things we still don't know and that big bang theory doesn't answer. Well, yeah, so what? That doesn't make it wrong.
It has been pointed out
By whom?
that an accelerated expansion limited to the most distant regions of the known universe, is incompatible with an explosive origin
How?
but instead is indicative of an attractive force -a "universe-in-mass" black hole whose super-gravity is effecting red shifts and illumination- creating the illusion of a universe which is accelerating as it speeds away, when instead the stars closest to the hole are speeding faster toward their doom.
Attractive forces aren't really known for forcing things to speed away from one another. The only way this could even remotely make sense is if the universe was somehow contained in a bizarre kind of inside-out black hole. I don't know what to make of this, but it's definitely based on a profound ignorance of how cosmic expansion actually works.
Like I mentioned earlier, this entry reads just like a creationist screed, making a bunch of assertions about the state of science without bothering to actually back any of it up. What little of it is given support is an entirely ignorant misunderstanding of the actual science. The only citation given for this article is simply a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. These academic meetings are composed of a number of presentations of scientific findings. If you are going to cite an academic meeting, you cite the relevant findings within, not the whole damn thing. Here's everything that happened on the January 6th day of the meeting (since the meeting spans over several days):
I know I'm not going to go digging through that in an attempt to find the mountains of evidence that I was promised. There are a number of additional mistakes (with a rather egregious massacre of the cosmological principle), but I'd like to move on to the third article at this point.
Also, using ISAAC near- infrared instrument aboard ESO's Very Large Telescope(VLT), and the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, a team of French and Swiss astronomers using Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory, have identified an extremely faint galaxy, Abell 1835 (image left).
Abell 1835 is a galaxy cluster, Abell 1835 IR1916 is the galaxy. However, this distinction isn't as important as the fact that the observations could not be duplicated. Check the Wikipedia article on Abell 1835 IR1916 to see more.
According to interpretations, Abell 1835 must have formed just 460 million years after the universe was born
Actually, if you check the source (the NASA article, which was written in 2004, before the existence of the galaxy was dismissed) it says it formed 750 million years after the big bang, not 460. Where did 460 come from? Someone's ass, I'd imagine, since it isn't supported by anything anywhere.
Then there is the problem of the oldest globular clusters so far discovered, whose ages are in excess of 16 billion years.
This is just patently ridiculous. If we were sure the ages of these clusters was 16 billion years, we wouldn't also think that the universe is only 13.7 billion years old, we would have pushed the lower bound of the age up. Naturally this isn't cited (probably because it's made up, since some of the oldest globular clusters date to 12.7 billion years)
Using the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) aboard NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have detected about a dozen very red galaxies at a distance of 10 to12 billion light years from Earth (cfa Harvard 2005)
Oh good, an actual inline citation. Too bad it doesn't actually show up in the sources section and is so vague that I really have no hope of tracking it down. I'm certainly not going to go through every publication from 2005 by Harvard's center for astrophysics.
tl;dr that's a very unreliable source written by someone who has a very poor understanding of astrophysics and seems to have some kind of emotional investment in showing that the age of the universe is not what we think it is (or that we even know anything about it at all). I'm almost inclined to think the author is a creationist. The style of writing is just uncannily similar to what I've seen other creationists produce (could also just be one of those new age kooks). I'm not interested in reading any more of that blog to find out, though. I.e. ****in' magnets.
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Not you, the articles, you gave me exactly what I asked for, the source. The many assertions in the articles are written in such a way that it sounds like there's a whole bunch of evidence to support them, but then absolutely none is provided and there is no means by which to actually start looking for it.
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
There probably used to be life on mars but whatever squirmy fish was there is most likely dead now...
I doubt life on titan would be of any importance...Or would be a squirmy little bug...
While this is most likely the case, these squirmy little bugs would let us conclude that there will be MORE life than just our own, as some people are skeptical about life being chance. There have been discussions about whether we should even be looking for other life on different planets, the squirmy little fishes or bugs or whatever you would like to call them would put a end to these discussions
So I was wondering what the opinions of the people here were on this subject, hopefully you all enjoy the prospect of aliens.
Mars became a dead planet. So all it's inhabitants moved underground!
For earthling species, yes. There is no proof at all that outer-earth species require the same resources in order to live. There's quite the chance that they evolved into species that live other resources.
None of those actually hold true at all. If lifeforms were able to harvest the vast amounts of dark matter/energy to sustain themselves that could survive without the need for starlight. As for water, silicon based life may require some other metabolizing agent. The other things listed in 3 a pretty much up in the air. We know certain ranges of those factors are required for life, but not what the ranges are.
The problem with humans looking for alien life is that we always look relative to us. When we look for life, we look for life that is compatible with us on a chemical basis. We fail to take into account that it is likely that other lifeforms will not be carbon based.
They can't simply by virtue of the fact that dark energy and matter don't interact with anything except through gravity. Those kind of interactions don't have the complexity required for life.
Regardless, life needs an energy source. On earth, the two that you see are geothermal and solar. Geothermal is something of an unlikely candidate since planets tend to cool off over time (earth seems to be the exception to this; possibly because it has an unusual amount of uranium present in its core, this could also be the case on some of Jupiter's moons due to tidal heating). Either way, it's not something to consider looking for, since the kind of life we're going to be likely to spot is going to use starlight.
If you read the sentence after that quote you will see that things are already handled quite well, but I'll say it again.
We know there are certain requirements, we will use temperature for example.
You can't actually have absolute zero, Absolute zero is the "temperature" matter approaches as you remove energy, it approaches but never actually reaches it. We know that any given lifeform has a temperature range at which it can live. What we do not know is what the temperature range is, as we don't know that life yet.
We draw almost none of our energy from the air, we mostly use the oxygen as a metabolizing agent. If we were adapted properly, platinum would suffice as well. This is similar to the above. We know life will require some type of atmosphere to truly survive, but we don't know the exact atmosphere required, that is dependent on the life form. Perhaps the first aliens we meet require a sulfur-dioxide rich atmosphere?
International Space Station. Gravity is not really requisite for life in general.
Basically what I am saying is that you, and probably 99.999% of the human population tend to think to linearly in life requirements. This thinking isn't wrong, only very narrow. Many modern scientists shrug off the cold desolate planets because WE can't life there, but then again we aren't looking for ourselves.
Instead of asking "how can it live"", try asking "why can't it live?" instead.
Chemistry. We can understand the kind of conditions required for specific chemical reactions to occur. There's a particular range of temperatures where complicated molecules can form and exist.
Not exactly a naturally occurring environment. Also, live has never evolved there. Besides that, organisms from this planet fare pretty poorly in microgravity environments. There are a number of adverse health effects that result from extended exposure to low gravity (namely a significant amount of muscular and skeletal atrophy and a weakening of the immune system).
No, they have better reasons than that.
we said the same thing
Indeed, we know of more than 8 planets and, of the ones in the solar system, we still can't be sure that some of those planets (or their moons) do not harbor life.
Yes they can. You'd have a hard time seeing stars and galaxies if EM radiation had a maximum range. What makes Voyager's signals difficult to detect (but still easy enough for amateur radio operators to detect using a 20 foot receiver dish) at the distance it is is the fact that it has a very low power transmitter on it (23 watts to be specific). Yes, signals get weaker with distance, but they never drop to 0. To put that transmitter power in perspective, there are radio transmitters on earth which pump out upwards of 100 kW, some reaching the MW.
Even over light-years there's something left to detect.
In a cold climate the reactions would be slower, in a hot climate they would be faster. However, that's not the problem. The problem is, in a sufficiently cold environment certain compounds simply cannot form since you can't reach the activation energy for the reaction to even take place. In a sufficiently hot environment, it's easy to form the compounds, but it's difficult for them to stay that way. Since there's so much energy, the compounds pretty readily decompose into smaller parts since there's so much energy present.
For one, plutonium isn't naturally occurring in large quantities, it's mostly a synthetic element (i.e. humans make it). There are some isotopes with long enough half-lives that they stick around long enough to be observed in nature, but only in trace amounts, you won't see any large deposits of it.
Also, evolution can't possibly evolve a resistance to the kind of radiation the organism depends on as an energy source, since the radiation would simply kill every organism before it had a chance to reproduce. If there was life using a nuclear reactor for power, it would have arisen with that resistance already in place, since there's no other way it could live there. Regardless, I'm not sure how a resistance could be formed since things like beta radiation alter organisms on a molecular level. It's pretty much guaranteed to kill anything in sufficient quantity.
I'm not sure where to even start here. This looks like it was based on watching too many Star Trek episodes. Well, let's start with the orbital mechanics, since it's one of my more knowledgeable areas:
These kinds of maneuvers require an incredibly precise trajectory and actual knowledge of where the planet would be. Not only that, but an escape trajectory usually requires multiple gravity assist maneuvers. Planets are extremely small targets in the scheme of things and it seems like this kind of precision would be beyond the capabilities of an organism that lacked a central nervous system.
And the only way they could stay there is by expelling enough of their mass that whatever miniscule portion remains won't continue flying off into space. Either that or it would have to perform a set of precise gravity assist maneuvers to slow itself down. In any case, not something a blob is really capable of.
As for the biology portion. I'm not even going to bother. Star Trek.
Only if you ignore all the moons in the solar system.
The same can be said of many bodies in our solar system. There's a number of moons that could potentially harbor life and the only way is to go there and look specifically for it. One of these moons is Titan and we've sent one probe to its surface and it wasn't equipped to look for life. However, there is evidence that could point to the existence of methanogenic life on the surface (namely there's more hydrogen in the atmosphere than there should be). However, this could still be explained with a non-biological cause, so it's not conclusive.
Don't give numbers for things we don't actually know enough about. It's misleading and pointless.
I doubt life on titan would be of any importance...Or would be a squirmy little bug...
facepalm of the month- dra6o0n
You're almost defiantly right.
However,The most people will probably see is a fish.
Maybe in your lifetime, just a fish. But in hundreds of thousands of years, we will be having space wars with other sentient beings i believe. After all, there are another 10 billion years between the big bang and the creation of earth for more advanced life to evolve on other planets. But thats just my dumb 14 year old logic.
Highly unlikely. I don't think we'll ever physically encounter another intelligent species. I'm not sure we'll ever get much beyond this little corner of our galaxy. The universe is too big and light is too slow.
Source? Using the CMB we've measured the age of the universe pretty accurately and if something shows up with a lot of structure then that more likely indicates that our understanding of how said structures form is flawed and not the age of the universe.
The time scale is more like 10^-32 seconds (this is the point where the universe was cool enough to support the formation of quarks and anti-quarks). The matter wasn't really created and calling it spontaneous is misleading since spontaneity implies that there was some state outside of and prior to the universe forming that the universe showed up in. It simply does not make sense to consider anything before the big bang just like it doesn't make sense to ask what's north of the north pole.
This claim is dubious since these big bangs don't propel matter, they propel the expansion of space in which the matter resides. This is quite distinct from matter simply moving through space. Furthermore, the inflation during the formation of the universe was sufficient in magnitude to causally disconnect us from the majority of the universe (leaving us with the visible/observable universe). No physical object can cross this event horizon.
From the second article:
Replace "Big Bang" with "Evolution" and you've got yourself the opening for a Creationist article. So already we're off to a bad start.
A veiled kind of argument from ignorance. It points out that there are things we still don't know and that big bang theory doesn't answer. Well, yeah, so what? That doesn't make it wrong.
By whom?
How?
Attractive forces aren't really known for forcing things to speed away from one another. The only way this could even remotely make sense is if the universe was somehow contained in a bizarre kind of inside-out black hole. I don't know what to make of this, but it's definitely based on a profound ignorance of how cosmic expansion actually works.
Like I mentioned earlier, this entry reads just like a creationist screed, making a bunch of assertions about the state of science without bothering to actually back any of it up. What little of it is given support is an entirely ignorant misunderstanding of the actual science. The only citation given for this article is simply a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. These academic meetings are composed of a number of presentations of scientific findings. If you are going to cite an academic meeting, you cite the relevant findings within, not the whole damn thing. Here's everything that happened on the January 6th day of the meeting (since the meeting spans over several days):
http://www.abstractsonline.com/plan/Bro ... 01/06/2010
I know I'm not going to go digging through that in an attempt to find the mountains of evidence that I was promised. There are a number of additional mistakes (with a rather egregious massacre of the cosmological principle), but I'd like to move on to the third article at this point.
So, third article starts off a bit better until you look at its sources and see that large portions of it are simply plagiarized (http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/science_blog/100520.html).
Abell 1835 is a galaxy cluster, Abell 1835 IR1916 is the galaxy. However, this distinction isn't as important as the fact that the observations could not be duplicated. Check the Wikipedia article on Abell 1835 IR1916 to see more.
Actually, if you check the source (the NASA article, which was written in 2004, before the existence of the galaxy was dismissed) it says it formed 750 million years after the big bang, not 460. Where did 460 come from? Someone's ass, I'd imagine, since it isn't supported by anything anywhere.
This is just patently ridiculous. If we were sure the ages of these clusters was 16 billion years, we wouldn't also think that the universe is only 13.7 billion years old, we would have pushed the lower bound of the age up. Naturally this isn't cited (probably because it's made up, since some of the oldest globular clusters date to 12.7 billion years)
Oh good, an actual inline citation. Too bad it doesn't actually show up in the sources section and is so vague that I really have no hope of tracking it down. I'm certainly not going to go through every publication from 2005 by Harvard's center for astrophysics.
tl;dr that's a very unreliable source written by someone who has a very poor understanding of astrophysics and seems to have some kind of emotional investment in showing that the age of the universe is not what we think it is (or that we even know anything about it at all). I'm almost inclined to think the author is a creationist. The style of writing is just uncannily similar to what I've seen other creationists produce (could also just be one of those new age kooks). I'm not interested in reading any more of that blog to find out, though. I.e. ****in' magnets.
Not you, the articles, you gave me exactly what I asked for, the source. The many assertions in the articles are written in such a way that it sounds like there's a whole bunch of evidence to support them, but then absolutely none is provided and there is no means by which to actually start looking for it.
While this is most likely the case, these squirmy little bugs would let us conclude that there will be MORE life than just our own, as some people are skeptical about life being chance. There have been discussions about whether we should even be looking for other life on different planets, the squirmy little fishes or bugs or whatever you would like to call them would put a end to these discussions