I keep saying that I am not going to add a bunch of books to my reading list this year but I think I am up to about 4 in just the last week. So now that I have a copy of The Road to Reality on its way to me from the library thanks to Devac's suggestion I have also added Venus Revealed because I can't help it, I am curious about everything.
There is a layer in the atmosphere of Venus where water can exist at a triple point. There is a ton of carbon in the air there as well. The question becomes... Can long carbon chains form in this zone? can they reproduce? We know that there are bacteria that can use sulphur as an energy source so from what we know about life on earth, this is a possible zone for living things to exist. If there is living stuff in the clouds of Venus, however, and it has earth dna structures and amino acid chains, we have to figure out if life started once in the solar system and spread, or did it start from zero on earth and Venus?
That would be quite amazing if life actually exited in the overall hostile environment of Venus. If true, it would seem to make it likely there is life all over the solar system.
I don't know how to forward it, but I saw another article posted by francopoli stating that life may be more rare than previously believed because phosphorus is not as plentiful as previously believed. It's interesting how we seem to get very different messages from science (and other sources) about the same topic.
Here is the discussion thread. We were talking about what possible alternatives to phosphorus are for alien biology. I see your point, but would point out that this article is discussing similarity among bodies within one solar system, which makes sense as we all condensed out of the same planetary disk. The other article is highlighting dissimilarity between solar systems due to location. The makeup of planetary disks seems to differ based on what kinds of stellar explosions contributed to them. This also makes sense. Now I am wondering if the answer to Fermi is that the universe is only just now becoming capable of making planets with enough elements for complex life?
I saw that today just before posting this comment which clarifies a lot. You explained the issue better than I did. I realize it's sort of apples to oranges since Venus was exposed to the same elements Earth was at formation and other solar systems might be different because of what they were or were not exposed to. My understanding is that our solar system is in a less crowded area of the Milky Way, on a spiral arm. One would think that stars in more crowded regions were exposed to more. Maybe it's sort of like Earth in that there are deserts, savannahs, rainforests, etc. with different potentials.
That's probably the reason aliens haven't made contact with us yet. We're so far out in the boonies, we're not seen as worth the effort. Sucks to be them though. They don't know the party they're missing.My understanding is that our solar system is in a less crowded area of the Milky Way, on a spiral arm.
One's imagination tends to run wild when uncertainties about the unknown are mentioned. When we say "life" in the context of this article, that means simple microbial organisms, not little green men. I wonder if it is as some say that there are pockets where conditions are right for life to form in many places and therefore life is quite plentiful in simple forms in many environments. Complex life like what we have on Earth seems likely to be rare. There were so many conditions that had to be right from a moon that exerts a gravitational pull to maintain a molten core that generates an electromagnetic field to Jupiter acting as a natural shield absorbing comets, meteors etc. that could de-stabilize life. I have no background in astrophysics, biology (exo or otherwise) and so my opinion is not worth anything, I saw an article explaining how automobile manufacturing grew in Detroit to the exclusion of other places. Cars were not invented in Michigan and there were places better suited to establishing factories and manufacturing. I wonder if this model applies to the development of life in some way. By that I mean, life has to develop in basic forms for other more exotic forms to develop. So on Earth, without the development of basic dominant forms of life, other forms would not have developed. I realize I may be "favoring" one form of life over others as more essential or necessary but with no examples of life in other environments, any number of theories could be viable.