@@jasonmachula1472 It's an observation bias. Of course all the planets we are finding are larger than Earth and closer to their star, those are the only kinds of planets we can detect. We aren't finding planets really similar to Earth because we can't, not because they don't exist. The tech is getting better and better so we are getting closer and closer to being able to detect such planets but we are not there yet.
@@Relugus there is definitely some truth to that. large gas giants can exert strong tidal forces and shield closely orbiting moons to intense solar radiation
I'm still thinking that a lot of our findings that Earth is somewhat atypical is due to measurement bias. All of the methods we use favor more massive planets orbiting small stars. We likely wouldn't have found Mars, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune at all, and Jupiter would have been a tossup (one big transit, maybe - enough to have clearly been a planet but we haven't watched long enough to see two transits to get any info about its orbit or size).
Not really for example we see gas giants usually moving inwards closer to their host star, that means rocky planets will either be destroyed or dislodged from their orbits. Jupiter would do it if not saturn would pull on it thereby preventing it from coming closer to the Sun. But not even that would be stable over billions of years. So why is it here stable? Uranus and Neptunus have enough pull power to prevent Saturn from moving closer as well and are far enough from the sun and too small to be moving inwards themselves. We have platinum on Earth look up what process produces platinum for that you need more then your average Red star becoming a white dwarf planetary nebulea nope won't do, a supernova then? Nope not even that has enough power to produce platinum! You need something like 2 neutron stars colliding to produce that material. Colliding Neutron stars are very rare indeed and our star and our planets are made from that debries.. But perhaps the most telling proof in front of our eyes is the fact that no intelligence born millions or billions of years ago seem to have managed to colonize Earth. Even if it takes 25000 years to travel 5 lightyears you would need roughly a billion years with that speed to colonize everything in the milky way. The milky way is roughly 10 billion years old.
The article he discussed specifically discusses about efficiency of photosynthesis on exoplanets. On earth it seems like a routine thing, but on a planet with different type of sun (anything other than G type), it will be either inefficient or the star will due out quickly. Considering that G type stars are minority, thats makes us atypical. And there are other issues like opaque atmospheres (earth's transparent atmosphere is a rarity too) which can make photosynthesis inefficient. Inefficient photosynthesis doesn't mean life cannot exist. It means complex life will not exist. We are specifically looking for complex life. (And by extension intelligent life). Life is probably abundant in our galaxy. But complex life and the conditions that make it possible, seem to be extremely rare. (Not rare enough to explain the silence of the universe yet! But as we gather more data, intelligent and complex life indeed appears to be more and more rare. )
i was born in 1965, i remember our 1st television set (1969) and thinking how amazing it was. look where we are now. it is unreal how far we have come since then.
It’s because we’re currently only capable of finding big planets orbiting close to the star. Earth is not that massive and has a long orbital period, it would be extremely difficult to spot a planet like that around a star like a sun with the equipment we have now
I know this sounds more like goofy sc-fi than a serious proposition, but the speed at which we discover things now, and the ability to assess them with clarity, make me feel super excited! We're going to migrate, folks! Sure, I won't see it happen, but it'll happen. I'm jealous.
We had a very lucky collision that gave us a very large iron core that still produces an active magnetic field near a stable star. That probably is very rare.
There also may be frequency domain sweet spots for harmonics between day and year length and possibly tidal gravity cycles which affect the probability of complex life. Once we observe and confirm the first observation, we'll have a second reference from which to do differential analysis.
@JZ's BFF This is a good comment. I'm extremely literal hence my previous comments. That being said, I'm curious if 'day' on other planets would be defined by '1 planetary rotation' or 'exposure to solar light'. If tidally locked, would there be a 'time of day' or 'location of day'. One side of the planet would always be 'day' and the other would always be 'night'? right? If day was defined by one planetary rotation a day would be equal to a year if tidally locked.
Super cool video. Just because earth seems like it’s a rare planet in the 10,000 EXO planets we discovered does not mean that it’s rare in the grand scheme of the universe. 10,000 is an insignificant number when considering all the possible EXO planets in the entire universe.
It’s not just the sample size of observed exo planets that indicates planets like the earth may be rare but other condition E.g the sun, the moon, place in the galaxy etc I think rare is a good choice of word when you consider how distant objects are in the universe and how common uninhabitable planets are. You can still have a lot of earth like planets but they can still be rare when you consider the scale.
Statistically, as far as we know it is rare. I get what your saying, and some galaxies out there could potentially have higher concentrations of the required materials.
I don't think so either, but the fact that in all of earth's history only one instance of life has ever been started definitely makes it INSANELY unlikely that we will ever see one of these planets. We're on a planet that we know for a fact is capable of harboring life with ease. Yet it's only happened once in billions of years. Makes me start to doubt any chance of it ever happening.
We might be alone at this time. There could have been many worlds with advanced life, possibly civilizations that came and went over billions of years.
The density of Ganymede is 1.9, which is consistent with it being half water (ice) and half silicate rock. The density of this planet is 5.6, even larger than that of Earth. It is unlikely to have more than a few percent water, unless it has a huge iron core.
true, but, at more than 4x earths mass and volume, if it only had 4x as much water on its surface as earth, that is 4x as much water covering 2.5x the surface area still means deeper oceans, though, with higher gravity you might get lower elevation differences, so spread over more of the planets surface, making it a bit shallower, but loosing more land coverage to shallower seas
Life finds a way. There are thriving bacteria in deep ocean bed without any sunlight, using heat coming from thermal vents to live. I firmly believe that life is very common everywhere, but intelligent life, on the other hand, is most likely very rare, if not nearly impossible.
The way we find planets, based in occultation of a star, skews the catalog of planets we find. It's very rare to find a planet 1AU such as ours. That's why most exoplanets we know are so close to their star and why most habitable ones we know are around dimmer stars, where they are close to thr star. It still could be that stars like our own could have many habitable planets iut there , but rare to see them by our methods.
In theory, you could weight the estimated numbers of wider orbit planets proportionally to the decreased probability of being in their narrower occultation viewing angle. Viewing a planet at 1 AU implies there are many more out there than viewing the same planet at 0.1 AU.
The main problem right now in discovering Earth like planets seem to be observation bias. It takes at least a year or more to discover a planet like ours on a Sun like ours while Super Earths are much easier to find and take less time to boot.
That was certainly the case in the first exoplanet discoveries. The early radial velocity method also heavily favored heavy planets close in. Probably couldn't even detect Earth like mass/distance. The transit method is more sensitive to light planets, and theoretically you could weight your statistics to account for the lower eclipsing viewable angle of planets in wider orbits.
All this stuff is pure speculation. No facts. No concrete evidence, even the photos they show are simulations. Not what is actually out there. It's a jip to critical thinkers.
I guess with current methods our planet undiscoverable. All we can do is to discover gas giants near own starts if we are lucky and planetary disk at proper angle, until then the Universe will be uninhabitable for science like ours.
Anton IS the wonderful person he describes!!! God bless him for continuing to move on after his loss and he has 1mill subscribers now, thats amazing as well
I think it is extremely naive to think Earth has the only intelligent life in a Universe with trillions of galaxies and an even bigger amount of stars and planets... and we barely explored our "backyard" in an extensive way.
I mean i think there could be more intelligent life out there, but im not sure how common it is even among planets that have life. Hyper intelligence is not some end goal of life, and evolution. infact the dinosaurs held riegn over this planet for essentially 100 million years. only their death allowed us to take over. without a giant space rock who knows if it would have ever even happened here.
We have no business looking for other life. We are to wasteful, violent and selfish species. We need to work together to solve our problems and money shouldn't be the issue. Any economic system that's based on profit will neer produce anything good for the planet or society.
Beyond earth type size and habitable zone, how likely is it to find another planet with such a huge tidally locked moon? Our satellite has certainly been crucial in our development.
Would really like to see a video on current planet detection methods and the bias it creates by the current methods, ie that hot jupiters are easier to find vs smaller and longer orbits planets.
Just a quick stupid question… humanity has developed so many tools, which you continue to educate us with, for the actual observation of exoplanets. What types of observational methods would be required to detect a magnetosphere around a planet comparable to our own? I would be fascinated to hear your theories. Thank you for what you do!
Hubble discovered a magnetosphere around HAT-P-11B by making observations of a charged carbon particle tail that originated from the exoplanet -- the particles become charged (and clump into the tail formation) when they interact with the magnetosphere. I believe it's a Neptune-sized world, so the tail was prominent enough to make spectographic detection easier. The same process has been proposed for detections around smaller exoplanets as well, using charged helium or charged carbon, as they would stand out well on a spectrograph.
They cataloged a whole 10,000 planets??? That's for sure a sample size that is significant against infinite, or for us infinite. Sample size probably needs to be more towards a million if not a billion of planets to get any kind of a good estimate.
It would also require more complete detection capabilities to make any educated guesses. The 10k planets detected are all the easiest ones to detect. Finding Earths, even if they are common is just not possible right now.
What if the “great filter” is actually more like a great curtain? I think we just haven’t evolved enough to pull back the curtain yet but since we’re searching the area we’ll probably fumble into it soon. Imagine what happens to a species that develops brain computer interface well enough to sidestep death? Or a species that creates machines that do the necessary for them? What if life exists in scales of time, size and/or phases states much higher or lower than our own. Perhaps biological life depends on planetary, celestial, or quantum life, and what would that look like exactly? Are we capable of recognizing life at different scales? Our record keeping is only a few thousand years old and yet you could potentially spend many lifetimes studying only written records. I think our brains are simple enough to miss it and advanced enough to see it. Time will tell.
Planetary ,celestial and quantum life? These days one should have a source to back up a view point.. can you be more specific about what you mean by all that?
@@juanitalopez6227 sure! When something has a “life cycle” of millions to billions of years, how are we even certain we would recognize life happening? When we try to answer the question, “what is life?” There ends up being no clear answer except that we’ll know it when we see it. Even NASA uses a definition that has holes in it, “Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” Self-sustaining for how long? Do we even count by that definition since we rely on the sun and planet to provide us sustenance? Why is Darwinian evolution the only evolution considered when we know that Darwinian evolution is incomplete and in some cases wrong? There are incredible things yet to learn as a species. Since we are nowhere near the end of knowledge it seems awful arrogant to me to say that something is or is not alive when we can’t even define life. Perhaps quarks are alive in their own way, or stars might communicate through gravitational waves. Sure that seems outlandish now but in a decade it might be shown that humans are not in fact separate entities from the planet but macro-organisms operating as part of the planet the way we have micro-organisms operating within and on our bodies.
I’m an artist, I think abstractly and these concepts may not actually have places in reality but since there is so much to discover still it’s also possible that we just aren’t seeing all the possibilities.
I don't think I've ever Re-wound a video so much as i did on this one. You jam-packed sooo many Extremely Important facts into this one... You beautiful person, U.
Thank you, Anton. We are taking only baby steps in our study of the cosmos. Our sample size is expanding, but still miniscule compared to the number of stars. We haven't even discovered the tools that will make it possible to search for small planets like ours with any hope of successfully finding large numbers of them. Ultimately, we are not even sure of what forms life, itself, could take. The more baby steps we take, the further we will get, until we develop a better understanding of both life supporting places, and the nature of life, itself. I am not likely to be around when we can start putting forth sensible theories about life in the cosmos, and predict how common it may be. Just keep taking those steps...
It's a bit strange to say that having found 10,000 planets it's reasonable to conclude Earth is rare. It's a bit like dropping a bucket into ta lake and pulling it up, seeing there are no fish in it deciding there are no fish in the lake.
We would have to be looking at a G-type star for 300 to 500 days continuously plus solely use the transitmethod, which also only works when the orbital plain of this planet happens to line up with our line of sight. Red dwarfs are actually quite bad candidates to begin with. They are more active so they bombard planets inside their "habitable zone" with solarflares and are likely to strip away any atmosphere, the planets are almost always tidally locked and now this photosynthesis-problem has been identified too. The only planettype I potentially see harbouring life around a red dwarf would have to be something like a mini neptune on the outer limit of the habitable zone or even well outside of it if this planet could produce substantially more heat from its core due to radioactive decay. The latter is a bit of a stretch and I don't even think that it could even be possible.
He kind of explains one of the many reasons to conclude with present knowledge why Earth is rare. Only G- and K-type stars are favorable because it takes so long for life to develop, and because their spectral properties make photosynthesis possible. G-type stars like our sun are estimated to be 7 to 10 percent of the stars in the Milky Way. So you wouldn't say a 90 to 93 percent chance any given star system doesn't have the right star to support an Earth is reason to conclude Earth is rare?
I have to say as a biologist with little knowledge of this field, I really enjoy how Anton explains things. I also love the wonderful person catchphrase :)
Hello wonderful person, He used to say, space out. At the end of all his videos. I thought it was a great double meaning for an outer space channel. Space out!
When I took my first astronomy class, I was in awe of how much information could be drawn from the spectrums of light from distant stars... I have followed your exploration of early life and now, this video, showing the way our known life may possibly utilized the type of sun, chemistry, so forth...to develop sophisticated life ecosystems is also really exciting! I kept thinking maybe we have watched some of the same Utube videos 😋 I am sure you know about astrobiologist exploring other possible chemical energy systems of life too...wandering whither webb will be enough to satisfy What we want 😉 This feels more what it's like to be an addict... 😃...we will be soon be wanting bigger telescopes
I would like to understand this better. I mean, it's hard to imagine a star not being bright enough to achieve photosynthesis when we have plenty of plants doing just fine under grow light set-ups. Planets with photosynthetic cells under poorly lit conditions would be more transparent (if it needs to avoid heat capture), or black (if it needs to store heat), and either way just not reflecting back any light it captures. Even stars with too much light could produce photosynthetic cells that just block out more light than they take in, and be more white than green or brown in their reflectivity, producing pastel landscapes. c4 photosynthesis is something that's said to have evolved independently over 60 times, which means its more even inevitable for plant life to exploit this niche, than it is for animal life to exploit and evolve locomotion and sight. But if it turns out many potentially inhabited worlds are just barren landscapes devoid of life more spare construction materials for our species and less ethical quandaries about being an invasive species trying to spread earth life around.
If I was a betting man, I'd put odds for us being alone in the cosmos at 1 trillion to 1. I'd absolutely FLOORED if I was somehow able to know that we are alone. It would be almost unbelievable.
Thr chances of anything coming from ma...the cosmos are a trillion to one, they said. Statistically it is quite improbable that life only thrives on earth. Maybe even impossible. But it is not 'will we ever find life outside earth' that is a big question for me, but complex, eukaryotic life, that is a real questionmark. But the more common simple life will be, the higher the chances for complex life to evolve. But please cherish the life we have on earth first and think about YOUR responsibility and options sustain and protect it.
When you take the cosmos (or lets say the observable universe) as a whole, then yeah. But the more interesting question is if there is complex life on another planet within our galaxy, the milky way.
Kepler uses transit photometery, which doesn't lend itself to finding terrestrial planets easily - this doesn't mean terrestrial planets are rare; it just means we're not good at finding them yet.
Why are you talking about Kepler? Not saying you are wrong, but it is mostly about planets found by Tess in the vid. Tess is already better in finding earthsized exoplanets, despite still leaving a huge bias towards finding bigger and closer orbitting exoplanets than earth is/does.
Finding the next piece of our existence and believing we are close , other theories will start making a lot more sense . This subject should have people in awe. As always a wonderful show.
This is the best focus for your videos. You are more realistic and believable. Exoplanets is actually a serious theme. And requires people like you to teach us. Thank you.
Another great video Anton thank you. I don’t know how you were able to keep up with all the info and put out the videos, but you always do a great job!
Why should we assume that a slightly different photosynthesis wouldn't work? Evolution drove our photosynthesis to be effective in our suns wavelength. A different star might cause an evolution of a different enzyme that would be just as effective. This seems to say more about our ability to colonize this planet using our plants, for example, but I find the argument in the study to be very earth-centric. Am I wrong?
Life is earth centric , science is earth centric because this is where it happened - English is earth centric because it's discribeing life conditions on earth. Astronomy is earth centric because we are the world leaders in astronomy - it's a cool blue universe - nobody's home , there is no outside ; no contrasting opinions , no body to compete with.
Well there is the fact that Earth is the only planet we know of that has photosynthesis occurring. We can postulate what other processes may occur on other planets - but it's entirely hypothetical. At least by analyzing Earth we have something to look for on other planets. If we could create some other/new form of life under differing conditions we could look at those conditions but I don't think we are there just yet. That's the way I look at it at least.
Agreed infact it's happening right now..some intelligent life somewhere debates the same thing.. habitable means many things to many different lifeforms earth is prime example extrapolate and move outwards from our little keyhole pov.. we have No idea
@@sudafedup Exactly. We can come up with ideas about alternative forms of life. But whose to say those hypothesis’s are correct. For now it’s better to continue to look for life that is as similar to us as possible because that’s all we know.
Prob millions of earth like objects out there... however, there's billions and trillions if everything else. So yeah, relatively speaking, rare. Also really really hard to see and find.
If current Earth development theories are correct the proposed collision of Theia gave Earth much of it’s internal heat, it’s fast spin and it’s moon. The internal heat has given us the Van Allan belts which has protected us from cosmic rays and maintained our thick atmosphere. The spin now probably one quarter it’s original day length has prevented the Earth tidal locking with the Sun as has the Moon which has also kept our rotation regular.
Honestly, every student in every grade in every American classroom should be required to watch your videos every day. Our children would be so much smarter and better off. Thank you for everything you do for the world!!
Earth is not rare, it's just far. There is life all over the universe. Life that evolved at the same time as us we may never see because light takes so long to reach us.
I have just rewatched Carl Sagan 1994 speach and I like how the image of a cosmic dust, blue dot can be viewed as a unique spot in the universe. I like this permisable duality that is constantly present in our modes of thinking :)
We could quite possibly have discovered dozens of habitated planets already, but due to our single known reference for life have passed them off as uninhabitable. Perhaps some planets that don't receive enough light for photosynthesis have fungus as a dominant species providing the atmosphere that indigenous species would have evolved to survive on.
Not a fungus but something like our chemoautotrophic bacteria (candidate for first life). Problem is that this doesn't provide much energy when compared to photons from the sun. It would be difficult for it to evolve complexity. A fungus consumes organic matter which needs to be made first in some fashion.
Well, many decades ago it was considered unscientific to even think about planets around other stars ;-) And then the first discovered exoplanets (so they are called) were hot Jupiters (giant gas planets, circling their star in just a few days). And some astronomers really thought (just one step more than before), that's all that's out there, only giant planets close to their star. And they "knew" that these can only be formed much further out at a colder place around the star and then they moved inward and destroyed any potential earth like planet in the habitable zone on their way inwards. And so there could not be any earth like planet out there and Earth was the only one of it's kind. I know at least of one who even said this on TV. They did not realize the observation bias: These hot Jupiters were the easiest to detect, with a great pull on their star for an easier movement detection and with a big overlap of the star for an easier star dimming detection and it does not take very long, just a few days of observation per star are enough to find one (hot Jupiter) or to say "no, there is no such planet around this star, move on to the next star". And it took years to detect the next exoplanet and so on. Later the observation techniques were refined greatly and observations were done for many stars over a long oeriod of time (e g. with the Kepler space telescope) and so, many more exoplanets have been detected - and many of them are smaller and have a longer year, more time for circling around their star. And at this time there was the hype that you mentioned at the beginning of your video and people thought that it would be easy to find earth like planets almost around any star. But as more and more exoplanets have been detected, they realized that really earth like planets in the habitable zone of the stars are not so easy to be found. So it was an up and down in the hype of finding another earth-like planets. You started the video a bit in the middle of the detection history of exoplanets. And that hype was not so many decades ago, maybe 20 years ago, so 2 decades?
I think to add to the evolution on other plants. Not only the lifetime of the star (billions of years) I would guess that the amount of gravity would contribute to the evolutionary process. Habital zone, star life and gravity/planet density. Another theory ive heard of, silicon based life instead of carbon based. The requirements for life could be vastly different to our own.
Silicon based life would have some noteworthy challenges- in particular, on Earth-like planets the silicon oxide would tend to stay in place or slowly move to the oceans, as opposed to the gaseous nature of our own equivalent- carbon dioxide. This would greatly complicate existence for such biochemistries.
Anton's consistent grind is truly inspiring. As always, he delivers exactly what the title alludes to. Also the background info is concise and interesting. whenever I watch Anton's videos, I find myself learning more than i anticipated.😀
Photosynthesis and other processes that represent life on Earth are by far not the only possible processes in the Universe that would (maybe) manifest as living organisms. Life as a process is a much more subtle phenomenon than we are currently able to recognize.
One thing to keep in mind is that we STILL don't know if Earth-like planets are common or not because they are typically too small for us to reliably detect. The vast majority of exoplanets are larger or denser super-Earths and Jovian planets, while the smaller Earth and Mars sized bodies are often lost in the glare of their host stars.
Exaaaaactly, generally mostly anyone in Astrobiology will agree that we can’t say with any certainty at all which are “more common” because of the fact that even WITH the resolution of JWST we still can barely see a very hot SUPER Jupiter 6-12M_j - which even the earth and every other planet and asteroids in our solar system aren’t comparable to Jupiters mass and size Even seeing the big ass mf in the sky at night makes you realize how god damn but it is lolol, the more I learn in school the more I appreciate seeing our cosmic protector in the sky 🥰
@@ericv738 there's probably some ideal conditions for such kind of detections (like orbiting very close to host star to make transit or Doppler detection)
@@ericv738 "The vast majority" does not mean "ALL." Yes, we've found a hundred or so planets that are more-or-less Earth-sized... and most of them are in places where we would not expect life to survive, or even be possible to begin with -- like neutron stars or in tight orbits around red dwarfs. Even the TRAPPIST-1 planet you're referencing was only found because the host star is particularly small and dim -- that was the whole point of the TRAPPIST mission, after all, to study small and dim stars in the hope of being able to detect Earth-sized planets without having to peer through several AU's of obfuscating glare. We simply do not have the capability at present to reliably detect such planets around brighter stars, such as the Sun. If we were on TRAPPIST-1 and were to look at Sol with our current telescopes, we would only be able to detect the gas giants, and at best only be able to infer a hint of the presence of one or more planets closer in than Jupiter -- we would not be able to confirm the presence or existence of Earth, Mars, Venus, or Mercury, at all. And until we can do that, then we have no idea whatsoever how rare or common such small terrestrial planets are.
Well, we do know that planets capable of supporting Earth-like life are definitely exceedingly rare, and we can say that with or without direct observation on a large scale. The thing about our sun, is that its the perfect star for supporting life in certain respects - it lasts long enough (about 10 billion years) to have a main sequence that is long enough for life to evolve. It also produces enough energy for its habitability zone to be farther away, eliminating the chance for Earth to be tidally locked to the sun, AND the sun formed in a second generation nebula, so there are heavy elements other than hydrogen and helium that were produced by supermassive stars in the solar system, allowing rocky planets to form with chemically rich crusts. All of that also happened in a relatively calm part of the milky way, where gamma ray bursts and star-to-star encounters are rare. Roughly 75-80% of the stars in the galaxy are red dwarves, and red dwarves are understood right now to not be capable of supporting life given that their habitability zone is so close, most likely making any planet orbiting in that range tidally locked, and the surface/atmosphere would get bombarded by radiation from the more volatile solar wind/sunspot activity that happens with red dwarves. Other types of stars don't have this problem, like blue giants, but they fuse all material in a fraction of the time stars of our suns type do, so any planet similiar to Earth wouldn't be consistently habitable for all that long, making it rare we'd ever see one, and if we did see one orbiting a blue giant it would not be a great candidate for complex life due to how long it took for that to occur on Earth. Out of 200-300 billion stars of the galaxy, probably over 90% are not candidates for hosting a habitable planet. 10% of 300 billion is still an enormous number, but there were A LOT of things that needed to go right for Earth to turn out the way it did, I'd say there's only a few thousand planets on Earths level out there (in the galaxy), and probably only a handful of life forms as technologically sophisticated as us in thr milky way. Some astrophysicists think we may even be the only intelligent lifeform in the entire galaxy. It sucks but it's the cold hard reality. Mother Earth is a gem.
We are just at the beginning! The statistical scoop of exoplanets so far discovered, with some chance of life, however primitive, is very small. Against the backdrop of the cosmos, 10,000 planets is an incredibly small number. We have to keep at it, develop greater technology, the more we look, the more interesting it will get. The search in itself is forever fascinating, with all the amazing scientific understanding gained, it’s definitely worth it! Thank you, Anton, for another wonderful science video.
Another thing to consider: G-Type stars often have typically eccentric orbits around the galaxy, crossing with the galactic center where they may have their atmospheres stripped away by supernovae, and our sun (Sol) has a relatively stable orbit around the galactic orbit with every little eccentricity, which makes us even more like that G-Ary Stu of Astrophysics.
Our moon may have a lot to do with life, enabling our plate tectonics more than currently known/accepted. I could imagine a planet with an elliptical orbit having similar effects 🤔
I've always wondered if anyone has been able to calculate the observation bias for our various exoplanet missions. The ~10k planets we've identified mostly come from fast-orbit transits, which are almost certainly tidally locked and fried by stellar radiation. It's not like we've developed a good way to find planets in the 1AU range that would be more likely to be habitable.
Also detecting rocky world's around red dwarfs is easier than larger stars due to the orbit time. Yes Sun like stars are rarer but maybe the number of habitable world's dramatically increases.
And confusing given that oceans are where life began here, I have to say mankind’s arrogance to believe that we’re the only planet with life yet alone complex. But yes that shit sound horrifying 😂😂
@@ChloeV-c3d it’s almost impossible to find other intelligent life out there because of the way you would send and receive signals. Not only that, our galaxy is so far from any other, that it would take millions of light years just to come across potential intelligent life. It’s out there for such, just very hard to come by
if life maybe only needs a splash of heavy elements, the rest of getting the energy to be alive and a organism could be many different environments. there could be something like slimes would be technically alive somewhere
"Rare Earth" is so premature. That's like growing up in a very rural place, and believing there are hardly any people. Our current sample size is hilariously inept.
I bet relatively few of us on Earth would believe such a thing was discovered. There's so much fake news in the last couple decades, we are deeply cynical and probably wouldn't take it very seriously.
For that TOI planet, doesn't the high density mean it ISN'T likely to be an ocean planet? I would think that since it is slightly more dense than Earth(which is anomalously dense for it's location and relative to other planets in our system), that it is likely to have a fairly decent strength magnetic field.
FWIW, one of the things that will be necessary if we want to find actually habitable ( not irradiated to death) planets is to set up the telescopes and leave them in place for at least an Earth year at a time, or longer. Any transit that repeats in under a month is not a good candidate, so we have to watch for it for some time before we can find the ones that matter to our kinds of life.
With all the exchange of materials between planets, and now stellar systems, panspermia becomes nearly inevitable. Having said that, earth is truly a paradise for life.
Super-Earths MUST be in more distant relative orbits than Earth to avoid runaway greenhouse effects. Their larger masses will hold gas more easily, and thus be subject to greenhouse conditions more easily. On the flip side, this also means they can maintain habitability temps much farther away, and will ALSO have long-lasting volcanic activity. There will likely be pockets of habitability on a super-Earth orbiting at the distance of Ceres around a Sun-twin.
Noooo wonderful person, we can't in any way conclude anything about the uniqueness of the Earth as we know still too little about planets in the habitable zones of their star systems in our own galaxy. Earth sized planets are just not as easily detected as larger ones and we also don't have a good direct line of sight with close to 2/3rds of the other side of the galaxy!
Recalling that red dwarves' volatility means more frequent and intense solar flares and coronal mass ejections, this may negatively impact habitability, although K-type stars may be more ideal in general than G-type stars if we can breed plants that are better suited to K-types.
This confirms what ive been thinking all along. Our sun is a super slick billiards player and managed to father life on this planet like an utter genius over the space of a few billion years. The slate had to be wiped clean with the dinosaurs because they were too uncivilised and now my question is what will our star have in store for us... we just cannot be permitted to get away with destroying billions of years of evolution is what I think about us, most unfortunatly.
The light from those planets take time and we need to look for some like our hypothesis of our early history of our planet. Fun to talk about but still 200 year away due to human strife and nature.
When you are talking about life having a hard time to sustain life or a rich biosphere on the (or just any) planet around a K-Type star in minute 10, are you talking about it from the perspective of the plants with the chloroplasts from planet earth or for chloroplasts in general (for some kind of biological/physiological reason?)
Thank you Anton, as always, good information presented in an easily understood format.
I think the rarity of Earth-like planets has to do with the difficulties associated with detecting planets with the longer orbital periods.
How does the difficulty of detection affect how rare they are? There are the same number of earth-like planets regardless of how many are detected.
I theorise that Earth-like worlds, or life friendly worlds, are more often moons than planets.
@@jasonmachula1472 It's an observation bias. Of course all the planets we are finding are larger than Earth and closer to their star, those are the only kinds of planets we can detect. We aren't finding planets really similar to Earth because we can't, not because they don't exist. The tech is getting better and better so we are getting closer and closer to being able to detect such planets but we are not there yet.
@@jasonmachula1472 Its dark out there
@@Relugus there is definitely some truth to that. large gas giants can exert strong tidal forces and shield closely orbiting moons to intense solar radiation
I'm still thinking that a lot of our findings that Earth is somewhat atypical is due to measurement bias. All of the methods we use favor more massive planets orbiting small stars. We likely wouldn't have found Mars, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune at all, and Jupiter would have been a tossup (one big transit, maybe - enough to have clearly been a planet but we haven't watched long enough to see two transits to get any info about its orbit or size).
Not really for example we see gas giants usually moving inwards closer to their host star, that means rocky planets will either be destroyed or dislodged from their orbits. Jupiter would do it if not saturn would pull on it thereby preventing it from coming closer to the Sun. But not even that would be stable over billions of years. So why is it here stable? Uranus and Neptunus have enough pull power to prevent Saturn from moving closer as well and are far enough from the sun and too small to be moving inwards themselves. We have platinum on Earth look up what process produces platinum for that you need more then your average Red star becoming a white dwarf planetary nebulea nope won't do, a supernova then? Nope not even that has enough power to produce platinum! You need something like 2 neutron stars colliding to produce that material. Colliding Neutron stars are very rare indeed and our star and our planets are made from that debries.. But perhaps the most telling proof in front of our eyes is the fact that no intelligence born millions or billions of years ago seem to have managed to colonize Earth. Even if it takes 25000 years to travel 5 lightyears you would need roughly a billion years with that speed to colonize everything in the milky way. The milky way is roughly 10 billion years old.
Thank you Jason.
This exactly!!
The article he discussed specifically discusses about efficiency of photosynthesis on exoplanets.
On earth it seems like a routine thing, but on a planet with different type of sun (anything other than G type), it will be either inefficient or the star will due out quickly.
Considering that G type stars are minority, thats makes us atypical.
And there are other issues like opaque atmospheres (earth's transparent atmosphere is a rarity too) which can make photosynthesis inefficient.
Inefficient photosynthesis doesn't mean life cannot exist. It means complex life will not exist.
We are specifically looking for complex life. (And by extension intelligent life).
Life is probably abundant in our galaxy. But complex life and the conditions that make it possible, seem to be extremely rare.
(Not rare enough to explain the silence of the universe yet! But as we gather more data, intelligent and complex life indeed appears to be more and more rare. )
Three orbits needed to be a candidate...
That makes it even worse.
i was born in 1965, i remember our 1st television set (1969) and thinking how amazing it was. look where we are now. it is unreal how far we have come since then.
It’s interesting that the most promising planets for life seem to be the ones that are hardest to detect.
It’s because we’re currently only capable of finding big planets orbiting close to the star. Earth is not that massive and has a long orbital period, it would be extremely difficult to spot a planet like that around a star like a sun with the equipment we have now
I know this sounds more like goofy sc-fi than a serious proposition, but the speed at which we discover things now, and the ability to assess them with clarity, make me feel super excited! We're going to migrate, folks! Sure, I won't see it happen, but it'll happen. I'm jealous.
We had a very lucky collision that gave us a very large iron core that still produces an active magnetic field near a stable star. That probably is very rare.
I always like the updates from Anton Petrov
agreed... gotta have my daily dose of Anton vids to feed my geek brain...
Yea for sure my favourite youtuber. Always up to date with stuff I love to learn and think about.
The planets where a year is shorter than the day are intriguing. Imagine being on one, the geology and weather must be nuts.
More than likely you would be baked to death.
Venus
Not nuts, most like Pop-Corns.
There also may be frequency domain sweet spots for harmonics between day and year length and possibly tidal gravity cycles which affect the probability of complex life. Once we observe and confirm the first observation, we'll have a second reference from which to do differential analysis.
@JZ's BFF This is a good comment. I'm extremely literal hence my previous comments. That being said, I'm curious if 'day' on other planets would be defined by '1 planetary rotation' or 'exposure to solar light'.
If tidally locked, would there be a 'time of day' or 'location of day'. One side of the planet would always be 'day' and the other would always be 'night'? right?
If day was defined by one planetary rotation a day would be equal to a year if tidally locked.
Super cool video. Just because earth seems like it’s a rare planet in the 10,000 EXO planets we discovered does not mean that it’s rare in the grand scheme of the universe. 10,000 is an insignificant number when considering all the possible EXO planets in the entire universe.
it's still scary
It’s not just the sample size of observed exo planets that indicates planets like the earth may be rare but other condition E.g the sun, the moon, place in the galaxy etc I think rare is a good choice of word when you consider how distant objects are in the universe and how common uninhabitable planets are. You can still have a lot of earth like planets but they can still be rare when you consider the scale.
there was a planet with life millions of not billions of years ago in our solar system called Tiamat. aka Ki and the hammered bracelet
Earth was not made for life life was made for earth
Wouldn't cells capture more energy
Statistically, as far as we know it is rare. I get what your saying, and some galaxies out there could potentially have higher concentrations of the required materials.
i honestly don't think its even remotely possible that we are alone in the cosmos.
I don't think so either, but the fact that in all of earth's history only one instance of life has ever been started definitely makes it INSANELY unlikely that we will ever see one of these planets. We're on a planet that we know for a fact is capable of harboring life with ease. Yet it's only happened once in billions of years. Makes me start to doubt any chance of it ever happening.
In the cosmos most definitely not, but in the galaxy? I’m not so sure
@@whatistruth_1 Once? Is it supposed to be more?
We might be alone at this time. There could have been many worlds with advanced life, possibly civilizations that came and went over billions of years.
yes but its so huge 😢
Anton you expressed it so beautifully, "Hosting life". Thank you for your video.
The density of Ganymede is 1.9, which is consistent with it being half water (ice) and half silicate rock. The density of this planet is 5.6, even larger than that of Earth. It is unlikely to have more than a few percent water, unless it has a huge iron core.
true, but, at more than 4x earths mass and volume, if it only had 4x as much water on its surface as earth, that is 4x as much water covering 2.5x the surface area still means deeper oceans, though, with higher gravity you might get lower elevation differences, so spread over more of the planets surface, making it a bit shallower, but loosing more land coverage to shallower seas
Life finds a way. There are thriving bacteria in deep ocean bed without any sunlight, using heat coming from thermal vents to live. I firmly believe that life is very common everywhere, but intelligent life, on the other hand, is most likely very rare, if not nearly impossible.
The way we find planets, based in occultation of a star, skews the catalog of planets we find. It's very rare to find a planet 1AU such as ours. That's why most exoplanets we know are so close to their star and why most habitable ones we know are around dimmer stars, where they are close to thr star. It still could be that stars like our own could have many habitable planets iut there , but rare to see them by our methods.
In theory, you could weight the estimated numbers of wider orbit planets proportionally to the decreased probability of being in their narrower occultation viewing angle.
Viewing a planet at 1 AU implies there are many more out there than viewing the same planet at 0.1 AU.
The main problem right now in discovering Earth like planets seem to be observation bias. It takes at least a year or more to discover a planet like ours on a Sun like ours while Super Earths are much easier to find and take less time to boot.
That was certainly the case in the first exoplanet discoveries.
The early radial velocity method also heavily favored heavy planets close in. Probably couldn't even detect Earth like mass/distance.
The transit method is more sensitive to light planets, and theoretically you could weight your statistics to account for the lower eclipsing viewable angle of planets in wider orbits.
All this stuff is pure speculation. No facts. No concrete evidence, even the photos they show are simulations. Not what is actually out there. It's a jip to critical thinkers.
I guess with current methods our planet undiscoverable. All we can do is to discover gas giants near own starts if we are lucky and planetary disk at proper angle, until then the Universe will be uninhabitable for science like ours.
I may be wrong but, isn't our current tech insufficient for detecting small rocky planets on G type stars?
@@vladimirseven777 the Kepler is able to
Congrats on 1 million subscribers Anton! You deserve every single one
Anton IS the wonderful person he describes!!! God bless him for continuing to move on after his loss and he has 1mill subscribers now, thats amazing as well
I think it is extremely naive to think Earth has the only intelligent life in a Universe with trillions of galaxies and an even bigger amount of stars and planets... and we barely explored our "backyard" in an extensive way.
I mean i think there could be more intelligent life out there, but im not sure how common it is even among planets that have life. Hyper intelligence is not some end goal of life, and evolution. infact the dinosaurs held riegn over this planet for essentially 100 million years. only their death allowed us to take over. without a giant space rock who knows if it would have ever even happened here.
or dues god exists
@@HumbelPie or both?
it does not bode well for life as we know it.
We have no business looking for other life. We are to wasteful, violent and selfish species. We need to work together to solve our problems and money shouldn't be the issue. Any economic system that's based on profit will neer produce anything good for the planet or society.
Beyond earth type size and habitable zone, how likely is it to find another planet with such a huge tidally locked moon?
Our satellite has certainly been crucial in our development.
Would really like to see a video on current planet detection methods and the bias it creates by the current methods, ie that hot jupiters are easier to find vs smaller and longer orbits planets.
Just a quick stupid question… humanity has developed so many tools, which you continue to educate us with, for the actual observation of exoplanets. What types of observational methods would be required to detect a magnetosphere around a planet comparable to our own? I would be fascinated to hear your theories. Thank you for what you do!
Good question! I would also like to know 👍
Hubble discovered a magnetosphere around HAT-P-11B by making observations of a charged carbon particle tail that originated from the exoplanet -- the particles become charged (and clump into the tail formation) when they interact with the magnetosphere. I believe it's a Neptune-sized world, so the tail was prominent enough to make spectographic detection easier. The same process has been proposed for detections around smaller exoplanets as well, using charged helium or charged carbon, as they would stand out well on a spectrograph.
I would like to say Antov, I've always like the way you greet people, "HELLO WONDERFUL PERSONS". Besides ur video content is so amazing.
They cataloged a whole 10,000 planets??? That's for sure a sample size that is significant against infinite, or for us infinite. Sample size probably needs to be more towards a million if not a billion of planets to get any kind of a good estimate.
It would also require more complete detection capabilities to make any educated guesses. The 10k planets detected are all the easiest ones to detect. Finding Earths, even if they are common is just not possible right now.
What if the “great filter” is actually more like a great curtain? I think we just haven’t evolved enough to pull back the curtain yet but since we’re searching the area we’ll probably fumble into it soon.
Imagine what happens to a species that develops brain computer interface well enough to sidestep death? Or a species that creates machines that do the necessary for them?
What if life exists in scales of time, size and/or phases states much higher or lower than our own. Perhaps biological life depends on planetary, celestial, or quantum life, and what would that look like exactly? Are we capable of recognizing life at different scales? Our record keeping is only a few thousand years old and yet you could potentially spend many lifetimes studying only written records. I think our brains are simple enough to miss it and advanced enough to see it. Time will tell.
Well said. I often wonder these things too. And would we recognize life forms that aren't like like on Earth?
Thank you for that analysis. “The Great Curtain” has just been added to my personal lexicon.
Planetary ,celestial and quantum life? These days one should have a source to back up a view point.. can you be more specific about what you mean by all that?
@@juanitalopez6227 sure! When something has a “life cycle” of millions to billions of years, how are we even certain we would recognize life happening? When we try to answer the question, “what is life?” There ends up being no clear answer except that we’ll know it when we see it. Even NASA uses a definition that has holes in it, “Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” Self-sustaining for how long? Do we even count by that definition since we rely on the sun and planet to provide us sustenance? Why is Darwinian evolution the only evolution considered when we know that Darwinian evolution is incomplete and in some cases wrong? There are incredible things yet to learn as a species. Since we are nowhere near the end of knowledge it seems awful arrogant to me to say that something is or is not alive when we can’t even define life. Perhaps quarks are alive in their own way, or stars might communicate through gravitational waves. Sure that seems outlandish now but in a decade it might be shown that humans are not in fact separate entities from the planet but macro-organisms operating as part of the planet the way we have micro-organisms operating within and on our bodies.
I’m an artist, I think abstractly and these concepts may not actually have places in reality but since there is so much to discover still it’s also possible that we just aren’t seeing all the possibilities.
Thank you for your understanding and efforts,,🙏🌷
Your your voice and your information are top notch and I like your graphics the way you do graphs
I don't think I've ever Re-wound a video so much as i did on this one. You jam-packed sooo many Extremely Important facts into this one... You beautiful person, U.
Thank you, Anton. We are taking only baby steps in our study of the cosmos. Our sample size is expanding, but still miniscule compared to the number of stars. We haven't even discovered the tools that will make it possible to search for small planets like ours with any hope of successfully finding large numbers of them. Ultimately, we are not even sure of what forms life, itself, could take.
The more baby steps we take, the further we will get, until we develop a better understanding of both life supporting places, and the nature of life, itself.
I am not likely to be around when we can start putting forth sensible theories about life in the cosmos, and predict how common it may be. Just keep taking those steps...
You’re the best Anton! Thanks for all you do!
Red Dwarfs are tricky, does said star produce dangerous solar flares and are the planets tidally locked (in most cases around red dwarfs they are).
Thanks!
It's a bit strange to say that having found 10,000 planets it's reasonable to conclude Earth is rare. It's a bit like dropping a bucket into ta lake and pulling it up, seeing there are no fish in it deciding there are no fish in the lake.
More like a teaspoon out of the ocean lmao
Exactly 😂
Science seems to be way too biased
We would have to be looking at a G-type star for 300 to 500 days continuously plus solely use the transitmethod, which also only works when the orbital plain of this planet happens to line up with our line of sight. Red dwarfs are actually quite bad candidates to begin with. They are more active so they bombard planets inside their "habitable zone" with solarflares and are likely to strip away any atmosphere, the planets are almost always tidally locked and now this photosynthesis-problem has been identified too. The only planettype I potentially see harbouring life around a red dwarf would have to be something like a mini neptune on the outer limit of the habitable zone or even well outside of it if this planet could produce substantially more heat from its core due to radioactive decay. The latter is a bit of a stretch and I don't even think that it could even be possible.
He kind of explains one of the many reasons to conclude with present knowledge why Earth is rare. Only G- and K-type stars are favorable because it takes so long for life to develop, and because their spectral properties make photosynthesis possible. G-type stars like our sun are estimated to be 7 to 10 percent of the stars in the Milky Way. So you wouldn't say a 90 to 93 percent chance any given star system doesn't have the right star to support an Earth is reason to conclude Earth is rare?
Thanks
I have to say as a biologist with little knowledge of this field, I really enjoy how Anton explains things. I also love the wonderful person catchphrase :)
Hello wonderful person,
He used to say, space out. At the end of all his videos. I thought it was a great double meaning for an outer space channel.
Space out!
Try learning about Astrobiology! It is a starting new field, and you will love it
When I took my first astronomy class, I was in awe of how much information could be drawn from the spectrums of light from distant stars...
I have followed your exploration of early life and now, this video, showing the way our known life may possibly utilized the type of sun, chemistry, so forth...to develop sophisticated life ecosystems is also really exciting!
I kept thinking maybe we have watched some of the same Utube videos 😋
I am sure you know about astrobiologist exploring other possible chemical energy systems of life too...wandering whither webb will be enough to satisfy What we want 😉
This feels more what it's like to be an addict...
😃...we will be soon be wanting bigger telescopes
I would like to understand this better. I mean, it's hard to imagine a star not being bright enough to achieve photosynthesis when we have plenty of plants doing just fine under grow light set-ups. Planets with photosynthetic cells under poorly lit conditions would be more transparent (if it needs to avoid heat capture), or black (if it needs to store heat), and either way just not reflecting back any light it captures. Even stars with too much light could produce photosynthetic cells that just block out more light than they take in, and be more white than green or brown in their reflectivity, producing pastel landscapes. c4 photosynthesis is something that's said to have evolved independently over 60 times, which means its more even inevitable for plant life to exploit this niche, than it is for animal life to exploit and evolve locomotion and sight. But if it turns out many potentially inhabited worlds are just barren landscapes devoid of life more spare construction materials for our species and less ethical quandaries about being an invasive species trying to spread earth life around.
Wonderful as always anton. Thank you. 😁👍
Keep up the good work Anton I love these vids and the JWST is going to make so many fascinating discoveries 🧐💙
The weather on that second planet would be insane
If I was a betting man, I'd put odds for us being alone in the cosmos at 1 trillion to 1. I'd absolutely FLOORED if I was somehow able to know that we are alone. It would be almost unbelievable.
Thr chances of anything coming from ma...the cosmos are a trillion to one, they said.
Statistically it is quite improbable that life only thrives on earth. Maybe even impossible. But it is not 'will we ever find life outside earth' that is a big question for me, but complex, eukaryotic life, that is a real questionmark.
But the more common simple life will be, the higher the chances for complex life to evolve.
But please cherish the life we have on earth first and think about YOUR responsibility and options sustain and protect it.
When you take the cosmos (or lets say the observable universe) as a whole, then yeah. But the more interesting question is if there is complex life on another planet within our galaxy, the milky way.
Don't worry, you aren't alone, I promise!
Kepler uses transit photometery, which doesn't lend itself to finding terrestrial planets easily - this doesn't mean terrestrial planets are rare; it just means we're not good at finding them yet.
Why are you talking about Kepler? Not saying you are wrong, but it is mostly about planets found by Tess in the vid. Tess is already better in finding earthsized exoplanets, despite still leaving a huge bias towards finding bigger and closer orbitting exoplanets than earth is/does.
TY Anton for giving us the real estate tour. But, frankly I think I'll just stay in this neighborhood for a while. 🌍
_"Life, Uh, Finds a Way"_
Thanks as always for the wonderful videos 🙂
Finding the next piece of our existence and believing we are close , other theories will start making a lot more sense . This subject should have people in awe. As always a wonderful show.
This is the best focus for your videos. You are more realistic and believable. Exoplanets is actually a serious theme. And requires people like you to teach us. Thank you.
Another great video Anton thank you. I don’t know how you were able to keep up with all the info and put out the videos, but you always do a great job!
Why should we assume that a slightly different photosynthesis wouldn't work? Evolution drove our photosynthesis to be effective in our suns wavelength. A different star might cause an evolution of a different enzyme that would be just as effective. This seems to say more about our ability to colonize this planet using our plants, for example, but I find the argument in the study to be very earth-centric. Am I wrong?
Nope.
Life is earth centric , science is earth centric because this is where it happened - English is earth centric because it's discribeing life conditions on earth. Astronomy is earth centric because we are the world leaders in astronomy - it's a cool blue universe - nobody's home , there is no outside ; no contrasting opinions , no body to compete with.
Well there is the fact that Earth is the only planet we know of that has photosynthesis occurring. We can postulate what other processes may occur on other planets - but it's entirely hypothetical. At least by analyzing Earth we have something to look for on other planets. If we could create some other/new form of life under differing conditions we could look at those conditions but I don't think we are there just yet. That's the way I look at it at least.
Agreed infact it's happening right now..some intelligent life somewhere debates the same thing.. habitable means many things to many different lifeforms earth is prime example extrapolate and move outwards from our little keyhole pov.. we have No idea
@@sudafedup Exactly. We can come up with ideas about alternative forms of life. But whose to say those hypothesis’s are correct. For now it’s better to continue to look for life that is as similar to us as possible because that’s all we know.
Thanks for telling it like it is, truthfully, even when the truth isn't necessarily what people might want to hear.
That second planet you mentioned sounds like it would have very violent storms due to the erratic orbit.
Yep, doesn’t sound habitable for complex life
Prob millions of earth like objects out there... however, there's billions and trillions if everything else. So yeah, relatively speaking, rare. Also really really hard to see and find.
If current Earth development theories are correct the proposed collision of Theia gave Earth much of it’s internal heat, it’s fast spin and it’s moon. The internal heat has given us the Van Allan belts which has protected us from cosmic rays and maintained our thick atmosphere. The spin now probably one quarter it’s original day length has prevented the Earth tidal locking with the Sun as has the Moon which has also kept our rotation regular.
Honestly, every student in every grade in every American classroom should be required to watch your videos every day. Our children would be so much smarter and better off. Thank you for everything you do for the world!!
Earth is not rare, it's just far. There is life all over the universe. Life that evolved at the same time as us we may never see because light takes so long to reach us.
It would be very difficult for a technologically advanced civilization to arise on water world with very little, if any, dry land. No fire.
I'd say it's impossible. You can't do science under water - all your experiments ....as you say.... "no fire."
If I'm not mistaken, the definition of the word habitable is: Able to host life.
No, habitable is habitable for us, can we just go and live there with minimal effort? Mars can host life but it’s not habitable.
I have just rewatched Carl Sagan 1994 speach and I like how the image of a cosmic dust, blue dot can be viewed as a unique spot in the universe. I like this permisable duality that is constantly present in our modes of thinking :)
We could quite possibly have discovered dozens of habitated planets already, but due to our single known reference for life have passed them off as uninhabitable.
Perhaps some planets that don't receive enough light for photosynthesis have fungus as a dominant species providing the atmosphere that indigenous species would have evolved to survive on.
Not a fungus but something like our chemoautotrophic bacteria (candidate for first life). Problem is that this doesn't provide much energy when compared to photons from the sun. It would be difficult for it to evolve complexity. A fungus consumes organic matter which needs to be made first in some fashion.
You should say "possibly habitable" since we don't know if they're actually habitable even if they're in the habitable zone
Well, many decades ago it was considered unscientific to even think about planets around other stars ;-)
And then the first discovered exoplanets (so they are called) were hot Jupiters (giant gas planets, circling their star in just a few days). And some astronomers really thought (just one step more than before), that's all that's out there, only giant planets close to their star. And they "knew" that these can only be formed much further out at a colder place around the star and then they moved inward and destroyed any potential earth like planet in the habitable zone on their way inwards. And so there could not be any earth like planet out there and Earth was the only one of it's kind. I know at least of one who even said this on TV.
They did not realize the observation bias: These hot Jupiters were the easiest to detect, with a great pull on their star for an easier movement detection and with a big overlap of the star for an easier star dimming detection and it does not take very long, just a few days of observation per star are enough to find one (hot Jupiter) or to say "no, there is no such planet around this star, move on to the next star". And it took years to detect the next exoplanet and so on.
Later the observation techniques were refined greatly and observations were done for many stars over a long oeriod of time (e g. with the Kepler space telescope) and so, many more exoplanets have been detected - and many of them are smaller and have a longer year, more time for circling around their star.
And at this time there was the hype that you mentioned at the beginning of your video and people thought that it would be easy to find earth like planets almost around any star.
But as more and more exoplanets have been detected, they realized that really earth like planets in the habitable zone of the stars are not so easy to be found.
So it was an up and down in the hype of finding another earth-like planets. You started the video a bit in the middle of the detection history of exoplanets. And that hype was not so many decades ago, maybe 20 years ago, so 2 decades?
I think to add to the evolution on other plants. Not only the lifetime of the star (billions of years) I would guess that the amount of gravity would contribute to the evolutionary process. Habital zone, star life and gravity/planet density.
Another theory ive heard of, silicon based life instead of carbon based. The requirements for life could be vastly different to our own.
Silicon based life would have some noteworthy challenges- in particular, on Earth-like planets the silicon oxide would tend to stay in place or slowly move to the oceans, as opposed to the gaseous nature of our own equivalent- carbon dioxide. This would greatly complicate existence for such biochemistries.
Anton's consistent grind is truly inspiring. As always, he delivers exactly what the title alludes to. Also the background info is concise and interesting. whenever I watch Anton's videos, I find myself learning more than i anticipated.😀
Photosynthesis and other processes that represent life on Earth are by far not the only possible processes in the Universe that would (maybe) manifest as living organisms. Life as a process is a much more subtle phenomenon than we are currently able to recognize.
One thing to keep in mind is that we STILL don't know if Earth-like planets are common or not because they are typically too small for us to reliably detect. The vast majority of exoplanets are larger or denser super-Earths and Jovian planets, while the smaller Earth and Mars sized bodies are often lost in the glare of their host stars.
Exaaaaactly, generally mostly anyone in Astrobiology will agree that we can’t say with any certainty at all which are “more common” because of the fact that even WITH the resolution of JWST we still can barely see a very hot SUPER Jupiter 6-12M_j - which even the earth and every other planet and asteroids in our solar system aren’t comparable to Jupiters mass and size
Even seeing the big ass mf in the sky at night makes you realize how god damn but it is lolol, the more I learn in school the more I appreciate seeing our cosmic protector in the sky 🥰
@@ericv738 do you understand how massive 1.3 times earth is, if we found plants that were Mercury sized, sure, but we don't, we only FIND huge planets
@@ericv738 there's probably some ideal conditions for such kind of detections (like orbiting very close to host star to make transit or Doppler detection)
@@ericv738 "The vast majority" does not mean "ALL." Yes, we've found a hundred or so planets that are more-or-less Earth-sized... and most of them are in places where we would not expect life to survive, or even be possible to begin with -- like neutron stars or in tight orbits around red dwarfs.
Even the TRAPPIST-1 planet you're referencing was only found because the host star is particularly small and dim -- that was the whole point of the TRAPPIST mission, after all, to study small and dim stars in the hope of being able to detect Earth-sized planets without having to peer through several AU's of obfuscating glare.
We simply do not have the capability at present to reliably detect such planets around brighter stars, such as the Sun.
If we were on TRAPPIST-1 and were to look at Sol with our current telescopes, we would only be able to detect the gas giants, and at best only be able to infer a hint of the presence of one or more planets closer in than Jupiter -- we would not be able to confirm the presence or existence of Earth, Mars, Venus, or Mercury, at all.
And until we can do that, then we have no idea whatsoever how rare or common such small terrestrial planets are.
Well, we do know that planets capable of supporting Earth-like life are definitely exceedingly rare, and we can say that with or without direct observation on a large scale. The thing about our sun, is that its the perfect star for supporting life in certain respects - it lasts long enough (about 10 billion years) to have a main sequence that is long enough for life to evolve. It also produces enough energy for its habitability zone to be farther away, eliminating the chance for Earth to be tidally locked to the sun, AND the sun formed in a second generation nebula, so there are heavy elements other than hydrogen and helium that were produced by supermassive stars in the solar system, allowing rocky planets to form with chemically rich crusts. All of that also happened in a relatively calm part of the milky way, where gamma ray bursts and star-to-star encounters are rare.
Roughly 75-80% of the stars in the galaxy are red dwarves, and red dwarves are understood right now to not be capable of supporting life given that their habitability zone is so close, most likely making any planet orbiting in that range tidally locked, and the surface/atmosphere would get bombarded by radiation from the more volatile solar wind/sunspot activity that happens with red dwarves. Other types of stars don't have this problem, like blue giants, but they fuse all material in a fraction of the time stars of our suns type do, so any planet similiar to Earth wouldn't be consistently habitable for all that long, making it rare we'd ever see one, and if we did see one orbiting a blue giant it would not be a great candidate for complex life due to how long it took for that to occur on Earth.
Out of 200-300 billion stars of the galaxy, probably over 90% are not candidates for hosting a habitable planet. 10% of 300 billion is still an enormous number, but there were A LOT of things that needed to go right for Earth to turn out the way it did, I'd say there's only a few thousand planets on Earths level out there (in the galaxy), and probably only a handful of life forms as technologically sophisticated as us in thr milky way. Some astrophysicists think we may even be the only intelligent lifeform in the entire galaxy. It sucks but it's the cold hard reality.
Mother Earth is a gem.
Probably my favourite video on this channel!
Great video! Thanks.
love your vids keep it pushing Anton
We are just at the beginning! The statistical scoop of exoplanets so far discovered, with some chance of life, however primitive, is very small. Against the backdrop of the cosmos, 10,000 planets is an incredibly small number. We have to keep at it, develop greater technology, the more we look, the more interesting it will get. The search in itself is forever fascinating, with all the amazing scientific understanding gained, it’s definitely worth it! Thank you, Anton, for another wonderful science video.
Another thing to consider: G-Type stars often have typically eccentric orbits around the galaxy, crossing with the galactic center where they may have their atmospheres stripped away by supernovae, and our sun (Sol) has a relatively stable orbit around the galactic orbit with every little eccentricity, which makes us even more like that G-Ary Stu of Astrophysics.
Our moon may have a lot to do with life, enabling our plate tectonics more than currently known/accepted. I could imagine a planet with an elliptical orbit having similar effects 🤔
The moon's magnetic field was around long enough to protect Earth whilst its one was still forming.
Frank Drake passed away recently. This video is timely.
Love this topic
Wonderful and entertaining content, so timely with exoplanet science growing.
I've always wondered if anyone has been able to calculate the observation bias for our various exoplanet missions. The ~10k planets we've identified mostly come from fast-orbit transits, which are almost certainly tidally locked and fried by stellar radiation. It's not like we've developed a good way to find planets in the 1AU range that would be more likely to be habitable.
Unfortunately, we still have a very small sample of extraterrestial planets. So we cannot judge anything by them.
Also detecting rocky world's around red dwarfs is easier than larger stars due to the orbit time. Yes Sun like stars are rarer but maybe the number of habitable world's dramatically increases.
Imagine entering a ocean that’s empty… now that is scary to think about
And confusing given that oceans are where life began here, I have to say mankind’s arrogance to believe that we’re the only planet with life yet alone complex.
But yes that shit sound horrifying 😂😂
@@ChloeV-c3d it’s almost impossible to find other intelligent life out there because of the way you would send and receive signals. Not only that, our galaxy is so far from any other, that it would take millions of light years just to come across potential intelligent life. It’s out there for such, just very hard to come by
@@DrSnipzz is exactly what I said
if life maybe only needs a splash of heavy elements, the rest of getting the energy to be alive and a organism could be many different environments. there could be something like slimes would be technically alive somewhere
Ja,"Hosting life" is a beautiful expression,agree😊
Thank you Anton! You do a great job!
"Rare Earth" is so premature. That's like growing up in a very rural place, and believing there are hardly any people. Our current sample size is hilariously inept.
"This blue ball right here" Oh my
I think going out into cosmos and finding artifacts from long gone civilizations is as exciting as meeting some alien race face to face
I bet relatively few of us on Earth would believe such a thing was discovered. There's so much fake news in the last couple decades, we are deeply cynical and probably wouldn't take it very seriously.
Sounds like Earth is a rare and precious jewel.
For that TOI planet, doesn't the high density mean it ISN'T likely to be an ocean planet?
I would think that since it is slightly more dense than Earth(which is anomalously dense for it's location and relative to other planets in our system), that it is likely to have a fairly decent strength magnetic field.
FWIW, one of the things that will be necessary if we want to find actually habitable ( not irradiated to death) planets is to set up the telescopes and leave them in place for at least an Earth year at a time, or longer. Any transit that repeats in under a month is not a good candidate, so we have to watch for it for some time before we can find the ones that matter to our kinds of life.
Don't worry, Anton. Life finds a way.
Thanks Anton!
Greetings from the BIG SKY. I think the photosynthesis link is relevant.
Very entertaining mate nicely done
With all the exchange of materials between planets, and now stellar systems, panspermia becomes nearly inevitable. Having said that, earth is truly a paradise for life.
Super-Earths MUST be in more distant relative orbits than Earth to avoid runaway greenhouse effects. Their larger masses will hold gas more easily, and thus be subject to greenhouse conditions more easily.
On the flip side, this also means they can maintain habitability temps much farther away, and will ALSO have long-lasting volcanic activity. There will likely be pockets of habitability on a super-Earth orbiting at the distance of Ceres around a Sun-twin.
Hi Anton great vid. can the jwt really detect artificial lights on other planets?
Click bait from bad RUclips channels I think. Thank goodness for Anton and the credibility he brings!
No.
Noooo wonderful person, we can't in any way conclude anything about the uniqueness of the Earth as we know still too little about planets in the habitable zones of their star systems in our own galaxy. Earth sized planets are just not as easily detected as larger ones and we also don't have a good direct line of sight with close to 2/3rds of the other side of the galaxy!
Recalling that red dwarves' volatility means more frequent and intense solar flares and coronal mass ejections, this may negatively impact habitability, although K-type stars may be more ideal in general than G-type stars if we can breed plants that are better suited to K-types.
This confirms what ive been thinking all along. Our sun is a super slick billiards player and managed to father life on this planet like an utter genius over the space of a few billion years. The slate had to be wiped clean with the dinosaurs because they were too uncivilised and now my question is what will our star have in store for us... we just cannot be permitted to get away with destroying billions of years of evolution is what I think about us, most unfortunatly.
do you know we only find huge planets, because small planets are very hard to find
Hopefully, we Never take ourselves for granted !
The light from those planets take time and we need to look for some like our hypothesis of our early history of our planet. Fun to talk about but still 200 year away due to human strife and nature.
When you are talking about life having a hard time to sustain life or a rich biosphere on the (or just any) planet around a K-Type star in minute 10, are you talking about it from the perspective of the plants with the chloroplasts from planet earth or for chloroplasts in general (for some kind of biological/physiological reason?)