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posted by chromas on Tuesday July 31 2018, @04:53PM   Printer-friendly

With All These New Planets Found in the Habitable Zone, Maybe it's Time to Fine Tune the Habitable Zone

In the past few decades, thousands of extra-solar planets have been discovered within our galaxy. As of July 28th, 2018, a total of 3,374 extra-solar planets have been confirmed in 2,814 planetary systems. While the majority of these planets have been gas giants, an increasing number have been terrestrial (i.e. rocky) in nature and were found to be orbiting within their stars' respective habitable zones (HZ).

However, as the case of the Solar System shows, HZs do not necessary mean a planet can support life. Even though Mars and Venus are at the inner and the outer edge of the Sun's HZ (respectively), neither is capable of supporting life on its surface. And with more potentially-habitable planets being discovered all the time, a new study suggests that it might be time to refine our definition of habitable zones.

Welcome to the Inhospitable Zone.


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  • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday July 31 2018, @08:55PM (2 children)

    by acid andy (1683) on Tuesday July 31 2018, @08:55PM (#715389) Homepage Journal

    It's an intriguing idea I want to happen and I'm sure it's possible. I can see some possible problems though. Once neurons in the brain have built a network of connections to one another, that pattern of connections mostly stays there for a long time. If you've got microbes that aren't physically attached to one another, perhaps drifting around in slime or a liquid, mightn't it be harder for them to maintain a single pattern of connections to one another? It might be possible to save state even when they move about if a microbe passed its state to a neighbor that drifted into its spot, before moving off itself, but only if there was some confidence that the new arrival would stay put in that place for a while. If they're all stationary microbes, it might solve that problem but I wonder if their communication might be slower to propagate and / or require more energy than in a dense, physically connected brain. Beyond that, what would they use the intelligence for? They'd be wanting limbs to start manipulating their environment. I suppose huge clusters of them could assemble en masse to move objects but by that point haven't you really just evolved a larger animal?

    Just idle speculation and rambling on my part.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01 2018, @11:10AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01 2018, @11:10AM (#715593)

    Living cells always communicate using chemical signals, even in multicellular organisms and even in animal bodies. Neural cells are just an adaptation useful to shorten reaction times by electrically commanding release of chemical signals at remote cell boundaries.

    Now, when you have a community of cells without specialized, channelized information pathways, then the selectivity of information reception must be achieved by some sort of chemical addressing and receptors specialized for each of the signals (and we still have those, it is "endocrine system", hormones and receptors). Supposedly, the "intelligence", or complexity of interactions and cooperation between undifferentiated uni-cells contained in group entities should be proportional to number of kinds of different receptors they have, but their decision making ability should be limited by the size of their group, unless some sort of hierarchy (tiers, like in neural networks) or specialization is introduced.

    • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday August 01 2018, @03:09PM

      by fyngyrz (6567) on Wednesday August 01 2018, @03:09PM (#715709) Journal

      Living cells systems always we know of thus far communicate using chemical and electrical signals, moderated by multi-unit topology and lowest-common-denominator unit structure.

      FTFY.

      Also, our not-necessarily-complete experience in this is limited to this planet, something that in no way provides an ironclad framework for what might be going on on other planets and in other star systems. Ergo, "habitable zone" may well be complete nonsense.