[ExI] Alien Planet's Missing Methane Stumps Scientists

Stirling Westrup swestrup at gmail.com
Sat Sep 18 23:26:28 UTC 2010


On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 4:15 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>
>> >
>> > Okay. Totally off the wall speculation: ET harvested the methane and
>> > that's why it's missing. :)
>> >
>> > Of course, my guess is the cause is that the model used to predict
>> > abundance is wrong. Or there's some observational error.
>> >
>> I vote for alien chemistry. What we don't know about
>> chemistry under non-terrestrial conditions is huge... Stirling Westrup
>
...
> I am intrigued with the notion that some extremophile might have evolved
> there and devoured the methane.
>
> Wouldn't it be wicked cool if that's what is going on?
>
> {8-]
>
> spike
>

Sure, that would be one of my preferred causes (probably second only
to an alien intelligence actively harvesting the methane for some
purpose), but I wouldn't bet on it. I do think life is likely to be
abundant in the universe, but I doubt its so abundant that we'd find
evidence for it so soon in our exoplanet studies.

-- 
Stirling Westrup
Programmer, Entrepreneur.
https://www.linkedin.com/e/fpf/77228
http://www.linkedin.com/in/swestrup
http://technaut.livejournal.com



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list