
The Solar System and Beyond Is Awash in Water - dodders
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2015-119
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crimsonalucard
Water being common doesn't mean life is common. We have the intuition to be
aware that the exact atomic configuration of a boeing 747 getting replicated
by pure chance on a planet 500 light years away is impossibly low. So
impossibly low that I'm willing to bet my life that it won't ever happen, not
just on a planet 500 light years away, but on every planet in the universe.
What are the chances of life being on a planet 500 light years away?
Unfortunately the definition of life is vague and the chemical processes
required by life aren't even completely understood.

Without knowing the processes/materials necessary to ignite the self
replicating processes required for life we don't possess the information
necessary to know whether life is probable or improbable. Even in a universe
with plentiful water and plentiful habitable planets, without context on what
started it all we can't make any meaningful prediction. Is life like the
boeing 747 or is it not?

I always find it ludicrous when someone says the universe is just so vast that
life has to exist somewhere else. We just don't have enough
understanding/context to know.

~~~
throwaway344
Of course, there is a planet that astronomers and others are very familiar
where 747s appear all the time. They just happen through complex chemical
reactions. Apparently they do that near some hive of theirs called "Seattle"

~~~
crimsonalucard
every planet, OTHER then this one.

~~~
meric
The probability of humans colonising another planet and setting up a museum
with a 747 is a little bit more than impossibly low.

~~~
crimsonalucard
ha! I meant the spontaneous formation of a 747. Like a tornado throwing all
the materials together and a 747 being formed just off of pure chance.

I'd still bet against that museum though.

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pdx

        Recently verifying its thousandth exoplanet, Kepler data 
        confirm that the most common planet sizes are worlds just 
        slightly larger than Earth.
    

I found this interesting in terms of the rocket equation[1] and the fermi
paradox[2]

If most planets are larger than we are, their populations will struggle even
harder than we do, getting off their rock.

[1]
[https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/exped...](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html)

[2] no link needed

~~~
grey-area
_If most planets are larger than we are_

Do you have a source for that assertion?

Most _discovered_ planets to date are larger than Earth and closer to the
star, but that's probably because it's easier to discover those planets given
our current technology...

Interesting to think that the size of planets would limit exploration though
(from the article):

 _If our planet was 50% larger in diameter, we would not be able to venture
into space, at least using rockets for transport._

~~~
stromgo
> Most _discovered_ planets to date are...

It's possible to do better than lump all of the discovered planets together
and complain that the set is biased. For example, Kepler can detect a planet
iff there is a chance alignment of its orbit with our line of sight, so for
each discovered planet, it's possible to compute the probability that its
orbit was correctly aligned, and divide by it to compensate. That way it's
possible to make unbiased statements about the distribution of planet sizes
and orbits, the fraction of stars with planets, etc.

~~~
mturmon
This appears to be exactly what they're doing. Here's an exchange on HN a
couple of years ago on a similar question:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5668324](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5668324)

In that submission, astronomers including Mike Brown of Caltech, Steve Vogt of
UCSC, and Sara Seager of MIT all make assertions about typical exoplanet
composition. A HN reader asked about the biased sampling issue. You can bet
they are not just ignoring the possibility of biased sampling.

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codeshaman
When I was young, the big mystery of pop astronomy was: are there any other
planets like Earth? And does water exist anywhere outside Earth.

At some point during my lifetime, exoplanets have been discovered and at some
other point, the idea that planets, including earth-sized planets are almost
as widespread (or rarefied) as stars themselves. At least 10 billion earth-
sized planets in our galaxy alone.

So it seems like the Universe is full of Planets and a lot of those planets
contain water.

The next logical step is that extra-terrestrial Life is just as common as
water, planets and stars.

If that is the case, that means that life is a natural consequence of star
formation/runtime, which is extremely interesting.

Which, if we now really think about it, is not _entirely_ out of the question,
in fact, it's quite probable.

~~~
thearn4
> And does water exist anywhere outside Earth

Was this a big pop science mystery back in the day? The simplicity of the
composition of water ("burned hydrogen gas") would lead me to think that we
should expect to find it in some phase of matter fairly regularly. Caveat
though: I'm not a chemist.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I think the big question was whether there is _liquid_ water somewhere else in
the universe.

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cygnus_a
It doesn't surprise me how much water there is in the solar system,
considering how simple of a chemical water is. Life itself is a chemical
reaction that takes much longer to complete (though I'm starting to think that
it's more abundant than I think :P).

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JoeAltmaier
And at the edge of the known universe, an expanding shockwave from a
supernovae fuses hydrogen into oxygen, forming the largest known water bubble
totaling ten trillion times all the water on earth.

~~~
chatmasta
This sounds fascinating. Do you have a link to good reading on this?

~~~
jonreem
Possibly this: [http://www.space.com/12400-universe-biggest-oldest-cloud-
wat...](http://www.space.com/12400-universe-biggest-oldest-cloud-water.html)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Wow! Even bigger! But no explanation of how it formed in that link...

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clavalle
I wonder if they can tell anything about a possible Mars water and atmosphere
burn off by studying the asteroid belt.

It may be detectably frosted since the solar wind would push it in that
direction.

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kellyabraham
Seems like NASA announces every few months that we have found water for the
first time on Mars, or in the universe. Isn't there a meme about this?

