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Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet

(www.nytimes.com)
168 points julienchastang | 2 comments | 16 Apr 25 23:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.421s | source
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belinder ◴[17 Apr 25 00:04 UTC] No.43711682[source]▶
If life evolves on a planet with only oceans, no surface, imagine how much longer it would take to discover rockets that can leave the planet.

Like if there was no surface on earth, and only fish, there must be some very significant reason for advanced fish to even want to leave the water, let alone the atmosphere

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slg ◴[17 Apr 25 00:14 UTC] No.43711724[source]▶
That seems like a very landbased mindset. From a high level, what is an ocean but a thick atmosphere? I could even imagine an underwater culture would be quicker to explore because they would surely discover the surface of the ocean quicker than we discovered the concept of the atmosphere and that innately leads to the questions of whether the atmosphere has a "surface" and what is above it.
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Buttons840 ◴[17 Apr 25 02:24 UTC] No.43712493[source]▶
Land animals are more likely to develop hands. Hands wouldn't give a fish any advantage, because there is nothing to climb.

Building a rocket requires hands, and the type of intelligence that evolves only after having hands.

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1. Teever ◴[17 Apr 25 03:58 UTC] No.43712986[source]▶
This all pre-supposes that evolution will lock alien organisms into a specific and static body configuration on other planets like it has done to organisms on Earth.

Is there any particular reason why an intelligent organism couldn't evolve to be able to grow and change its body into any arbitrary size and shape that it wanted to merely by thinking about it?

Perhaps aliens from another planet would consider our limitation as four limbed bipedal organisms to be absurd.

Why can't organisms chose to grow eight hands each with 16 opposable digits?

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2. zardo ◴[17 Apr 25 19:09 UTC] No.43720916[source]▶
> This all pre-supposes that evolution will lock alien organisms into a specific and static body configuration on other planets like it has done to organisms on Earth.

It's pretty normal for organisms to have drastically different body configurations through their lives. e.g moths

Though I'm not aware of any that have choices to make in the process.

Edit: actually lots of organisms can "choose" to change their sex