Venus, not Earth, may have been our Solar System’s best chance at life (Synopsis) [Starts With A Bang]

“It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy.” -Ursula Le Guin

If you were to rewind the Solar System to the very beginning, with only imperceptibly different initial conditions, how often would Earth emerge looking like it does today: teeming with life? And how often would the other worlds — Venus or even Mars — emerge overflowing with stable, long-term life either instead or in addition to Earth?

Protoplanetary disks, which all solar systems are thought to form with, will coalesce into planets over time. Illustration credit: NAOJ.

While we’ve often assumed that Earth had the right conditions for a likely life-rich outcome, we’re quite possibly biased by where we’ve come of age, and by the fact that we only know our own Solar System in detail. But as exoplanet data continues to improve and pour in, we have a whole world of other possibilities we should remember to consider.

Stromalites, in Australia today, may be some of the most conducive places to life taking hold on a planet for the first time. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user C Eeckhout under a c.c.a.-3.0 license.

Come find out how maybe it was Venus we should’ve bet on, and what else might surprise our expectations as we turn up the search for life on other worlds!

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/29qsnUl

“It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy.” -Ursula Le Guin

If you were to rewind the Solar System to the very beginning, with only imperceptibly different initial conditions, how often would Earth emerge looking like it does today: teeming with life? And how often would the other worlds — Venus or even Mars — emerge overflowing with stable, long-term life either instead or in addition to Earth?

Protoplanetary disks, which all solar systems are thought to form with, will coalesce into planets over time. Illustration credit: NAOJ.

While we’ve often assumed that Earth had the right conditions for a likely life-rich outcome, we’re quite possibly biased by where we’ve come of age, and by the fact that we only know our own Solar System in detail. But as exoplanet data continues to improve and pour in, we have a whole world of other possibilities we should remember to consider.

Stromalites, in Australia today, may be some of the most conducive places to life taking hold on a planet for the first time. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user C Eeckhout under a c.c.a.-3.0 license.

Come find out how maybe it was Venus we should’ve bet on, and what else might surprise our expectations as we turn up the search for life on other worlds!

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/29qsnUl