AST 111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Sulfuric Acid, Tunxis Community College, Interstellar Travel

• School: Tunxis Community College
• Department: Astronomy
• Course: AST 111
• Professor: Bourne

Document Summary

Habitable planet/world = contains the basic necessity for life as we know it, including liquid water, though it does not necessarily have life. Even with these constraints, billions of stars in the milky way could potentially have habitable worlds. Scientists are considering many possible locations for extrasolar life other than just the surfaces of earth-like worlds, such as moons with habitable surfaces, super-earths, water- worlds in extended habitable zones, sub-surfaces, and orphan planets. We could look for and detect spectral signatures of life based on molecular composition, i. e. Humans have comparatively large brains, in line with primates, mammals and birds doesn"t necessarily mean our level of intelligence is improbably high. Seti experiments look for deliberate signals from extraterrestrials. To summarize: the drake equation gives us a framework to address how many civilizations are out there, seti telescopes look for deliberate communications from other worlds.