Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

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I'd follow the guidelines of the International Astronomical Union: the name of the star followed by a lower case letter. If the planet is the nth one discovered around that star, the letter is the n+1st letter of the alphabet. The letter "a" is unused to eliminate confusion with the star itself. For example, Gliese 581 g.

Let's make it easy for people to search databases, shall we?

You may know that I'm a keen follower of the hunt for life on planets outside this solar system*. The hottest news there lately is that the folks running NASA's Kepler probe, which looks for planets crossing in front of stars (aka transits), will be having a much-anticipated press conference tomorrow.

All (all?) that Kepler can really tell us is the mass and temperature of those planets. From there you can infer quite a bit about their composition: rock, water in some phase, or hydrogen? But to answer the question of whether there's anything at all alive on them, indirect observation like transits or the heretofore common radial velocity method aren't going to cut it. You need to get at least a spectrum from the actual planet. Real Astronomer® rigel_p leads me to believe this is a few years away - you have to "null" the glare from the nearby star - but not that many; one large exoplanet has been directly imaged already. Once you have the spectrum, you look for oxygen gas, which as anyone who's lit a match knows is so reactive that it doesn't occur naturally unless it's biologically renewed.

That's all very well, but even if you've found oxygen gas, chances are what you've detected is a slimeball: for a majority of this planet's geological history, pond scum (i.e. cyanobacteria, formerly known as blue-green algae) ruled the Earth, and yes, they make oxygen.

So how do you separate the slimeballs from the modern (or at least mesozoic) Earths? Look for terrestrial vegetation. Slime never colonized the land; higher plants did, with higher animals nipping at their heels. This means you need even more precise direct observation. How far out that is I couldn't tell you, but my impression is that the problem is nulling, not angular resolution.

By then you know which way to point your radio telescopes. But gfish gave me the name of a very good point: Fermi's paradox. If intelligent life is out there and not so far away, why haven't they made their presence known? We'd do it if we were in their place.

Or would we? Survival of the species is a fine motivation for interstellar travel at the macro level, but what about the micro? How many social organisms can be induced to leave everyone and everything they've ever known behind for a place where they'd likely have to make their own dirt and air? Maybe the little green men have learned to live happily within their means. Maybe they're afraid of us. Maybe it's too early to speculate about extraterrestrial psychology.

*Why outside this solar system? Because I think we've established that Mars and the moons of the outer planets have environments too harsh to support anything terribly complicated. Like the rest of the public, I want E. goddamn T., baby.

My feet still haven't recovered completely from Saturday night. It is to laugh.

No auroras spotted last night, but I did get swooped at by what I assume was an owl. It seemed surprised to discover that I'm not a mouse; the reaction was mutual, I can assure you. I was standing a few yards into the forested Redmond watershed preserve on Novelty Hill road. Yes, that's trespassing, but only a little. It must be beautiful in the daytime. (Snoqualmie Valley was foggy and I didn't have time to go east of Duvall.)