NASA Has Found A New Solar System With 7 Earth-Size Planets

Thanks for the video share (I should be able to watch it here shortly), and I agree completely with you on the rest of your post's points. I am slowly finishing a BS in neurobio at UT Austin (work full time unfortunately so taking a bit longer, luckily 2-3 classes left) but I find these newer methods/ideas of fighting against dangerous bacteria fascinating. I am fully pro-research/science/medical etc and hoping after this degree to switch into the health field.

 

So everytime I see these reports it seems like we are only looking for places that can sustain life "as we know it"? Are we doing this because it makes no sense to focus on places where we can't survive, or are we doing it because we don't think some form of life can exist in conditions different from ours?

 

We're looking for any signs of life not originated from Earth. This would demonstrate that life does exist outside our own genesis and is perhaps more common than we currently believe.

Since we know a great deal about our own planet and know for a fact that life started on it, scientists can then infer that similar planets like our own could also have life of their own. Life could in fact originate under bleaker living conditions than what we face on earth, but we're going for the easiest possible detections first.

A common belief is that water is a key ingredient for life to begin. That water must be able to enter gaseous, liquid, and solid states and not just be a frozen wasteland except for the possibility of oceanic volcanoes below the bodies of water coming from that planet's core.

The fact that we orbit around the Sun at the distance we do is also considered a key ingredient for life to begin known as the Goldilocks Zone. If the Earth swapped places with Mercury we would all be incinerated and life would not be able to sustain itself under such harsh conditions. If the Earth swapped places with Pluto, very little light would be received from the Sun and we would be dependent on geothermal heat to change our frozen oceans.

Also life would also be very different than what we experience now. Plants are dependent on sunlight to survive through photosynthesis. With no plants there would be no animals including us.

There's also a hypothesis that having planets like Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system is probably necessary for life to exist on Earth. Asteroids and comets can be near life ending catastrophic events. Having big gas planets like Jupiter and Saturn causes more asteroids and comets to impact them instead of our own planet.



Since life has taken billions of years to evolve into what we experience in our lives, it's probably important to have a couple of giant gas planets outside our own planet to take almost all the lumps for you instead so life can evolve with relative ease.

It's also useful to observe planets similar to our own because we can observe changes in atmosphere. If a planet were to sustain a super volcanic explosion that produced enough greenhouse gas to alter its atmosphere and potential living conditions, we could then compare that data with our own atmospheric conditions and observe positive or negative trends about our own climate and atmosphere.