Still Searching For Aliens? Someone Thinks They May All Be Extinct Already..[ Read ]

by Benson Agoha | Science

Just as we are all looking forward to the imminent return of Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully of the TV series The `X' Files to our screens, a new spin to the search for aliens suggest they may have been wiped out already - long before we even arrived.

In an article titled `We Can't Find Aliens Because They're All Extinct' published on Gizmodo Friday, Campbell Simpson said that aliens may well have flourished many times around our galaxy, and even our solar system, but finding them have been difficult because they probably died out sooner rather than later.

And he suggests they have have fizzled out long before humans arrived, and that they probably didn’t last long enough to evolve into complex multicellular forms.

His conviction stemmed from a new study reportedly published by scientists and researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) which suggests that near-universal early extinction of other lifeforms in our universe — at a cellular and microbial level — was due to the relatively rapid change of the climates on planets like Venus and Mars.

According to the article Astrobiologists Aditya Chopra and Charles H. Lineweaver, from the Planetary Science Institute and the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at ANU, have released a paper saying that the lack of life on other planets — despite the ingredients for life being abundantly available — may be due to a complex interaction between the planets themselves and the life that evolves on them.

He said the researchers' model, called the Gaian bottleneck, insists the emergence of life on a planet is tied to its ability to evolve rapidly enough to regulate its greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn affect the albedo of the planet through the amount of frozen and liquid water and other reflective materials, which in turn affects the surface temperature.

"In extremely rare cases — like on Earth — the relatively rapid evolution from single- to multi-cellular organisms to complex life forms did not produce enough greenhouses gases to cause runaway negative feedback and heat the planet enough to evaporate all its liquid water." Simpson wrote.

He said provided the Gaian bottleneck explanation is accurate, it was that particular, and so far, unique quirk that has kept us alive.

Read the full article [ here ].