Webb Telescope Detects Signature Of Life On A Distant Planet, Study Suggests

[Gunnar]

Gunnar,

Very interesting. This topic is currently being talked about on a lot of outlets. The Webb Telescope is going to devote around 23 hours of observation time (which is huge for the Webb Telescope) of this planet in the next 30-40 days, which should shed more light on this planet.

What would intelligent life on an aquatic world even look like? Would the ocean planet impede developing tools and complex technology? Is it more complicated or easier for evolution to develop intelligent life on a water planet than on land?

Interesting to think about.

Yes. I found it interesting too. If my calculations are correct (and I think they are, they required nothing more advanced or complicated than high school physics and math), it seems improbable that there would be any dry land available for life to evolve on. I don't know how it being almost certainly an aquatic planet would affect the probability or ease of intelligent life evolving, but I suspect that it would be less probable. But we know that dolphins and whales on our planet are near or at the very top of the intelligence scale for animals. Some scientists think it possible that they top even humans in intelligence in some ways, and that the only real impediment to them developing an advanced scientific and technological society is inability to access and control fire at will.

Still, it is fun to speculate on how advanced science and technology could somehow evolve on such an aquatic planet. I have read one science fiction novel about an aquatic planet that colonized by humans who managed to somehow build enormous, thriving highly advanced floating, semi-submerged cities. It was an extremely noisy planet due to frequent, powerful storms all over the planet. I can't remember, at the moment, the title or the author.

ETA: Incidentally, its outer surface area would be about 6.76 times greater than that of earth.

[Gunnar]

Speaking of intelligent aquatic life, I can imagine communities of intelligent creatures existing on that planet with sophisticated language and even song skills like our world's humpback whales. How many of you are familiar with Alan Hovhaness' musical composition, And God Created Great Whales, in which he included recordings of humpback whale songs? It is a hauntingly beautiful musical composition!

[Physics Guy]

Whales and dolphins evolved from land-dwelling ancestors, so they don’t indicate how well intelligence might evolve on a landless planet. Squids and octopuses seem kind of smart.

One interesting thing about K2-18b is that we do have a good idea of its diameter as well as its mass. This is because, by a wildly unlikely fluke, its orbit around its sun happens to bring it directly in line between its sun and Earth, once in its year. This lets us see how much light it blocks.

We can‘t actually resolve clear images of exoplanets, even with space telescopes. They are too far away for their size, so there is normally no good way to tell just how big they are. An exoplanet‘s mass, on the other hand, can be pinned down quite well, by precisely measuring the motion of the planet‘s sun.

We actually can measure that motion precisely, through the changing Doppler shifts of the sun‘s light frequencies. Even when astronomy works in visible light, it uses that light in ways more like the ways human brains use sound, analyzing frequency patterns, and not much like the way our brains interpret light, using just three primary colors but resolving locations precisely. We can get some information really well even from fantastically distant objects, but we can’t get everything that one might imagine we could, if one thought we were just looking and seeing the way our eyes do on Earth.

[Gunnar]

Whales and dolphins evolved from land-dwelling ancestors, so they don’t indicate how well intelligence might evolve on a landless planet. Squids and octopuses seem kind of smart.

One interesting thing about K2-18b is that we do have a good idea of its diameter as well as its mass. This is because, by a wildly unlikely fluke, its orbit around its sun happens to bring it directly in line between its sun and Earth, once in its year. This lets us see how much light it blocks.

We can‘t actually resolve clear images of exoplanets, even with space telescopes. They are too far away for their size, so there is normally no good way to tell just how big they are. An exoplanet‘s mass, on the other hand, can be pinned down quite well, by precisely measuring the motion of the planet‘s sun.

We actually can measure that motion precisely, through the changing Doppler shifts of the sun‘s light frequencies. Even when astronomy works in visible light, it uses that light in ways more like the ways human brains use sound, analyzing frequency patterns, and not much like the way our brains interpret light, using just three primary colors but resolving locations precisely. We can get some information really well even from fantastically distant objects, but we can’t get everything that one might imagine we could, if one thought we were just looking and seeing the way our eyes do on Earth.

Thank you for that, Physics Guy! I was hoping you would weigh in on this discussion too, because I doubt anyone here is more knowledgeable about this kind of topic than you. I certainly agree with you that the facts that whales and dolphins evolved from land-dwelling animals probably makes a difference in their likelihood to evolve high intelligence. Yet, as you said, squids and octopi do seem quite smart, and octopi amazingly so, based on some things I have read and heard about them. I often wonder how much more impressive they would seem if they had longer lifespans to learn and experience things. It seems sort of tragic that for female octopi, at least, parenthood is a death sentence. As I understand it they only live long enough to see and protect their offspring just barely past their hatching and passing the embryo stage.

But, as you said, it is limited how much we can deduce about planets that are light years away. It's fun to speculate about it, though.

[Moksha]

What would intelligent life on an aquatic world even look like? Would the ocean planet impede developing tools and complex technology? Is it more complicated or easier for evolution to develop intelligent life on a water planet than on land?

Without land-based trees to produce paper, how would they print K2-18b's version of the Book of Mormon?