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    The Search For Life or A Habitable Planet

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    Sajjad Husham
    The document discusses the search for life on other planets and the requirements for life to exist. It describes how Earth developed an atmosphere that allowed liquid water and was situated at a distance from the Sun to support life. Experiments by Urey and Miller demonstrated how simple organic molecules like amino acids could form from inorganic compounds in conditions similar to early Earth. For life to exist, a planet needs carbon to form complex chemistry, liquid water, and an environment within the habitable zone of its star with the right atmospheric composition and greenhouse effect. The Drake Equation tries to estimate the probability of contact with other civilizations but has many unknown variables. Further space exploration is needed to understand if Earth is unique and how life began here.

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    The Search For Life or A Habitable Planet

    Uploaded by

    Sajjad Husham
    31 views2 pages
    The document discusses the search for life on other planets and the requirements for life to exist. It describes how Earth developed an atmosphere that allowed liquid water and was situated at a distance from the Sun to support life. Experiments by Urey and Miller demonstrated how simple organic molecules like amino acids could form from inorganic compounds in conditions similar to early Earth. For life to exist, a planet needs carbon to form complex chemistry, liquid water, and an environment within the habitable zone of its star with the right atmospheric composition and greenhouse effect. The Drake Equation tries to estimate the probability of contact with other civilizations but has many unknown variables. Further space exploration is needed to understand if Earth is unique and how life began here.

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    2.9_The_search_for_life_or_a_habitable_planet

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    The document discusses the search for life on other planets and the requirements for life to exist. It describes how Earth developed an atmosphere that allowed liquid water and was situated at a distance from the Sun to support life. Experiments by Urey and Miller demonstrated how simple organic molecules like amino acids could form from inorganic compounds in conditions similar to early Earth. For life to exist, a planet needs carbon to form complex chemistry, liquid water, and an environment within the habitable zone of its star with the right atmospheric composition and greenhouse effect. The Drake Equation tries to estimate the probability of contact with other civilizations but has many unknown variables. Further space exploration is needed to understand if Earth is unique and how life began here.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    31 views2 pages

    The Search For Life or A Habitable Planet

    Uploaded by

    Sajjad Husham
    The document discusses the search for life on other planets and the requirements for life to exist. It describes how Earth developed an atmosphere that allowed liquid water and was situated at a distance from the Sun to support life. Experiments by Urey and Miller demonstrated how simple organic molecules like amino acids could form from inorganic compounds in conditions similar to early Earth. For life to exist, a planet needs carbon to form complex chemistry, liquid water, and an environment within the habitable zone of its star with the right atmospheric composition and greenhouse effect. The Drake Equation tries to estimate the probability of contact with other civilizations but has many unknown variables. Further space exploration is needed to understand if Earth is unique and how life began here.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 2

    The search for life or a habitable planet

    Some of the motivation for space exploration has been linked to the study of how life
    formed here on Earth, as such is important to fully understand how the planet and
    how its atmosphere evolved. Earth is sometimes thought of as an outlier in the solar
    system. It has managed to significantly change its atmosphere in such a way that the
    right gases have survived. In combination with the right greenhouse gases, Earth is
    also situated the right distance to the Sun to warm the planet just enough, but not too
    much, to allow liquid water to remain on its surface, to act as a beaker for chemical
    reactions and for certain kinds of radiation to permeate through the atmosphere,
    allowing life to form.
    I keep using the term 'right', but this really relies on our definition of what life is and
    how scientists think it came about on Earth. Some of the requirements for life to
    exist, as we know it, have long been under discussion by scientists. Often the search
    for life is really the search for the existence of complex molecules, such as the
    existence of amino acids, which are the basis for proteins. Amino acids are made of
    simple, abundant on Earth, elements; hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.
    Carbon in particular is an incredible element with many advantageous attributes,
    often referred to as the building block of life.
    While the initial atmosphere of Earth might have looked very similar in composition to
    Venus and Mars, a secondary atmosphere developed, which contained ammonia,
    methane, and water, amongst other things. In the 1950s, Harold Urey and Stanley
    Miller conducted an experiment based on the hypothesis that this primitive
    atmosphere combined with a liquid water environment is how life started. In a simple
    laboratory experiment, they exposed ammonia, methane, hydrogen, and water to an
    electrical discharge to kick start any possible reaction. It is believed that really
    ultraviolet light from the Sun was the catalyst for the reaction. But at the time, UV
    radiation was very hard to produce in a lab.
    After a week, the brown substance in their beaker was analysed and was found to
    contain amino acids. This experiment demonstrated the possibility for life to have
    been present once the planet cooled enough for Earth to support liquid water as a
    reaction medium. Of course, this is a long way off from what you might consider life.
    But keep in mind, billions of years have passed since this might have happened.
    Let's take a step back, though, scientifically, what are the requirements for life?
    Since we have no other examples of life, we have to model our assumptions on our
    own existence.
    These requirements are, one, the presence of carbon, being able to form complex
    chemistry; two, the presence of liquid water as a necessary medium for chemical
    reactions creating life; and three, the correct environment. For the correct
    environment, scientists often use the term habitable zone in which the proposed
    planet must lie within. Much of the assumptions going into the habitable zone are
    based on the star, the planet orbits, the type of star, longevity, type of radiation given
    off, and the atmosphere of the planet, composition, greenhouse effect. With all of
    these requirements, Frank Drake developed the so-called Drake Equation to assess
    the probability of ever making contact with civilisation. However, not many values are
    known in the Drake Equation.
    And guesses at the extreme ends of the variables lead to the number of possible
    civilisations being 10, as in each planet hosting civilised life are approximately
    10,000 light years apart from each other, or 10 to the 9, each planet separated by
    only about 15 light years on average. Obviously, there are a number of variables yet
    to be figured out. Further scientific exploration of space will help answer these
    questions, along with just how unique our planet and its atmosphere really are and
    how they came about.

    [End of transcript]

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