Ever since the discovery of the first exoplanet, some two decades ago, astronomers have said that the emergence of life can be accompanied only by very strict conditions. Today, some experts suggest that this may in fact be a natural phenomenon on habitable extrasolar planets.
More than 550 such objects have already been confirmed, while 1,235 others – discovered by the NASA Kepler Telescope – await confirmation. Of these objects, many are hot Jupiters, meaning they are too large and too hot to support life.
Others are located very far away from the parent stars, exhibiting conditions that are similar to the ones on the Saturnine moon Titan or the dwarf planet Pluto. But there are those that are located in between, in areas of their respective solar systems that may in fact allow life to develop.
“Columbus forced everyone to rethink, redesign and rebuild their world view. That’s what we’re doing here. To put it in 15th-century terms, we’ve reached the Canary Islands,” explains Dimitar Sasselov.
The expert, a professor of astrophysics at the Harvard University, is also the director of the Origins of Life Initiative Project at the university. “It’s feasible that we’ll meet other sentient life forms and conduct commerce with them,” he adds.
“We don’t now have the technology to physically travel outside our solar system for such an exchange to take place, but we are like Columbus centuries ago, learning fast how to get somewhere few think possible,” says the expert, quoted by
Daily Galaxy.
According to his new proposal, life is in fact a naturally-occurring phenomenon, which may unfold on every exoplanet that has at least remotely-appropriate conditions. The only limitation in this system is time, Sasselov told a conference at Harvard recently.
“It takes a long time to do this. It may be that we are the first generation in this galaxy,” he said at the time, mentioning that heavy chemical elements, of the type needed to create life, have only been made available in the Universe recently.
Though 13.75 billion old, the Cosmos looked very differently until recently, when massive numbers of exploding stars began seeding it with a bunch of new elements. As such, Earth-like planets became possible only 7 to 8 billion years ago.
Speaking of our planet, it took more than 4 billion years for life to evolve here, and reach a degree of complexity that makes it worthy of consideration in Universal time. It's safe to conclude, the expert believes, that, given half a chance, intelligent life would develop on other exoplanets too.
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