Do you think alien life could evolve to achieve space flight

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OP's topic goes by the poorly chosen name of "Panspermia"

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

>>17671533
No I mean like full on animals, maybe even big 'uns. How big an animal can go into sea monkey style stasis? Could an animal evolve to travel FTL?

>>17671524
Bumping for interest

First OP says: "Do you think alien life could evolve to achieve space flight before it evolved intelligence?"

Given link to just that.

THEN OP is all: "No I mean like full on animals, maybe even big 'uns."

>>17671642
Lost hard

>>17671642
Not OP, but what OP probably means is something like our birds, but them not only flying in our atmosphere but actually being able to leave the planet and travel through space. Basically non-intelligent aliens without spacecrafts.

>>17671524
The real problem with space is the whole radiation issue. It would be extremely unlikely for any life to form under those conditions.

>>17671642
I suppose I should have said "advanced intelligence" but then some other pedant would have presumed I meant superhuman intelligence. Also panspermia isn't evolving to achieve space flight it's just being randomly spread around the universe

>>17671651
Yes basically. Of course wings are useless in space unless they're solar sails or something, you need some kind of a jet or something and even then a conventional animal wouldn't get very far. I was just pondering how and why alien animals might evolve in that direction and then if they were in a planetary system where it would truly allow them to flourish how they might go on to develop interstellar travel through entirely natural, animal instinct and what it might be like if one found its way here.

>>17671703
we can onlu guess. Probably won't be a very large animal. It could develop a large sack on its body to storage "air", so it can propel itself.
Reasons? It could be a animal that developed on a really small moon that has another moon or asteroid that has it's course really close to the "mainland", to find sources, like water or some kind of food.

>>17671712
However, how could it propel from its "motherland"?
Merely strong legs? On a really low gravity environment, living in a really small aster or something can manage to get out.

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>>17671524
I was thinking about this concept actually and came to a couple of conclusions. For an organism to develop space travel purely for the purpose of survival, it must

>Originate from a planet with a weak electromagnetic feild
This would allow for more mutations to happen quicker from radiation. Probably speed up evolution too

>Originate from a planet with an extremely thick atmosphere
Take Titan, it has such a thick atmosphere that we could strap cardboard wings to our body and fly. Flight would have to be incredibly easy for any organism on such a planet, to reach space

>Originate from a planet with extremely low gravity
It would have to be very specific, strong enough to hold an atmosphere, but significantly less than the gravitational pull of Earth. It would have to be very small, maybe a moon, or incredibly spongy and not dense

>There would have to be some benefit to space travel
Say a certain kind of bacteria living high in the atmosphere, that's extremely nutritious because it gets most of the sunlight and populous because it's so high up. Such a food source would warrant an adaptation to space travel

>Possibly a planet/moon with other close neighbors with life
Perhaps a moon system that is within the habitable zone, so has several moons with habitat conditions, and extra food sources for any space going organism.

All this being said conditions would have to be incredibly specific for such an organism to exist, but it's still possible

>>17671759
Also this

>>17671712
For space propulsion it would need some kind of gas filled bladder, to allow precision movement and flight through an environment where wings are useless

Look, there's life that doesn't need air here on Earth right now. Deep below the ground & at volcanic vents at the bottom of the seas -- meanwhile meteors strike, dinosaurs die off, climate changes -- these badass lifeforms has never given a fuck. Such a microbe could easily float dormant for damn near forever in space and land elsewhere. Read about Panspermia, this has been hashed out already.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/wildlife/7570677/New-species-lives-without-oxygen.html

https://culturingscience.wordpress.com/2010/04/07/the-discovery-of-animals-living-without-oxygen-and-its-implications-for-the-evolution-of-life/

Read the book The Black Cloud

>be Voyager 1
>ultimate in 1977 technology
>jetting at miles per second for longer than most Anons have been alive
>gathering first hand knowledge beyond measure about our solar system
>about to become first man-made object to enter interstellar space
>hit a fucking goose

>>17671759
>Originate from a planet with an extremely thick atmosphere
>Originate from a planet with extremely low gravity
Pick one.

>>17672862
>Take Titan
>Extremely thick atmosphere, extremely low gravity
Voila

What about space spores?

>>17671524
I'm finishing up editing a short story that is exactly this.

>>17671759
This.

Everything is possible in the infinity of space, my friends.

>>17671524
with what we know about organic life and how space treats it. no.

>>17674620
no, its really not. because space is a void. not many things can survive in space. water bears can, but only because they are an extreme end of the organic life spectrum. remember, there is nothing protecting you in space, extreme heat and cold, small particles being hurled around at thousand of miles per hour, the massive amounts of radiation, there are not lifeforms in space to eat, there is no oxygen(which if an animal came from a planet with no oxygen that might be a non-issue).

>>17674770
> water bears are on the extreme spectrum of carbon based life on earth
Even if our theoretical animals were carbon based, the universal spectrum of such creatures would likely be much broader

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they are called space whales OP

>>17671759
/thread

>>17674770
you are so limited in your thinking.

I can't see a reason why this isn't possible. Life thrives in places here on Earth that we thought was previously impossible. Not all life forms require the same this to survive. Can't see why some life form wouldnt be able to thrive in space.

>>17671770
>For space propulsion it would need some kind of gas filled bladder
This just reminded me of an article I read a long time ago. Here is a short article on the same topic
http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/swimming_through_empty_space

Apparently it's technically possible to translate through space without requiring any propellant, although the amount you would move would be negligibly tiny to the point where it would probably take you the entire lifetime of the universe to actually move anywhere noticeable.

But that's not to say some creature or device couldn't have a more efficient body structure that could greatly improve that rate, just as a human can technically apply some negligible upward force by flapping his arms but it's so tiny we don't notice it, yet a birds body structure allows it to take advantage of it.


The question of whether or not such a creature could evolve into that state is something else entirely though.
The only way I could see it happening is if life formed and evolved in some gas clouds. Which might be very unlikely too.
However, the amino acids necessary to form life have been found on comets and I don't think it's even very well understood how they get there, but it leads us to conclude that the building blocks of life actually litter the universe, so anything is possible.

>>17671524

With the vastness of space it better damn well evolve a long life first.

>>17679711
Or rather you mean it better not evolve a kill switch.
We only die because it's cellular degeneration is actually programmed into our DNA. It's evolutionarily beneficial for the species as a whole since it forces "older models" to be removed from the competition.

>>17671524

I like your question OP.

Our understanding of the science of organisms right now is that while they can survive in extreme conditions, those conditions usually limit what can survive there to strange, often simple and miniscule creatures. The scarcity of food and the simplicity of these creatures, who need less food because they are so small, keep them small, because to grow larger they'd need to eat more food.

Therefore, if there was some kind of organism that could "fly" and recycle its own method of 'breathing' to survive, it would probably be a tiny bit of creature not much more interesting than any other space specks.

This may also rule out intelligence, the only way we understand as humans the evolution of intelligence, is building bigger brains, which means building better sophisticated bodies

>>17671770
implying we know shit about alien physiology

>>17671619

That would mean life could evolve to such a complexity that it would be hard for us to comprehend. There have been ufos that appeared to act like space jellyfish, and other kinds of flying creatures. But perhaps that could just be creatures that live in our atmosphere that we haven't discovered.

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>>17671723

>>17672119
It wasn't a goose, but it was a bird of prey.

>>17681166
sweeeeet

>>17675585
/thread

>>17681915
Yes I've seen TMBG's Apollo 18

>>17671524
You mean like just moving around? If the organism was born in empty space and was able to survive, then it would definitely have the ability to move around in space to obtain nutrients.

>>17681937
But what bore it?

>>17681943
Parents of the species? If you are asking me how any organism came to exist in the first place then you are going to have to look elsewhere. I don't even know how DNA first came into existence

>>17681950
The universe beat off.

Panspermia'ed all up in the void.

>>17681950
Well there are two schools of thought - either the necessary inert chemical compounds randomly combined and were exposed to sufficient energy to create the necessary building blocks OR the panspermia answer posted early on. Either way I was mainly imagining life that developed on some object but trying to imagine life that could have developed more or less from its genesis entirely in empty space is pretty wild too.

>>17671524
It could be possible. Tardigrades can survive in a vacuum, and a small colony of plankton was actually found living outside the ISS

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>>17685020

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>>17685469

I, for one, welcome our new waterbear overlords.

>>17685020
>and a small colony of plankton was actually found living outside the ISS
I love NASA's comment on that
> b-but we didn't tell them to find any cool things, just boring things and clean the windows

>>17671524
I mean if fish can breath water and we can breath oxygen and plants can breath carbon monoxide then wouldn't it make sense that somewhere is a being that thrives in space but would likely die if exposed to oxygen.

>>17686815
Reminds me of the space squid from Courage The Cowardly Dog

I've wondered if life could of evolved in a nebula. There could be these colossal aliens floating through a nebula, living off the abundant gasses and dust in the area.
Imagine flying a spaceship through that, and seeing a hazy silhouette of some giant creature in the distance. That would some scary shit.
They could be the sea monsters of space.

what if dark matter is just life we can't understand.

>>17686954
One reasonable candidate for dark matter is gravity leaking into our universe from others (or higher dimensions or something)

Even string theory predicts gravity leaks out of our universe.

>>17687005
The leakiness of gravity is also proposed as a reason why it's so weak.

There are no weird signals being detected by gravity waves tho, and we have some really very sensitive detectors right now. Maybe it's just too hard to make a wave generator, or there's too much noise here on earth tho. But if it's a possible interdimensional communication medium I'm a little disappointed

>>17687143
I think you're mistaking our gravity wave detection capability with something else.

Our gravitational wave detection is so poor we literally weren't even able to prove they existed at all until just this year. (I think the actual signal came in 2015 but they spent months pouring over the data trying to make sure there was no error)
and we were only able to get that signal in the first place because of 2 super massive black holes that collided.
Gravity is the least understood of all forces known to man.

>>17671524
Nothing foregoes intelligence.

Giant space squid give me a massive hypothetical hardon.

>>17687390
you should construct a massive hardon collider

in the Book of the Damned by Charles Fort (available for free on Project Gutenberg!) there's a whole chapter on strange things astronomers have seen in the last 500 years or so. i won't spoil it for you but here's a teaser: Giant Fucking Space Bats

as far as more recent things i've seen on the internet that pique my curiosity:

youtube search: NASA Tether Incident

(these flickering donut-with-a-notch floaty things pop up in a bunch of NASA videos, but this is the best one)

-Streetcap1's/ufosightingsdaily's pictures/videos of huge (planetoid-sized) angel-looking things traversing IR cameras trained on the sun

(some of the huge fucking things that appear to pass near our sun have a clear mechanical shape to them but my favorites are definitely the ones that look like, once again, Giant Fucking Space Bats)

>>17688904
your mom is a large hardon collider

>>17688934
oh and i forgot about Sky Worms or whatever those weird things Russell Crowe tweeted about are called. There's tons of pictures of organic-looking wiggly UFOs hanging out in our atmosphere.

I know it's from the Express, but still, this is a cool story that popped up and then disappeared:

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/639279/SCIENTISTS-discover-invisible-alien-entities-spying-on-us-on-Earth

(lol @ 'SCIENTISTS' capitalized in the URL)

SCIENTISTS seeking evidence of anti-matter in space claim to have stumbled across a previously unknown "invisible life form" here on Earth, which alarmingly could be SPYING on us.

Thunder Energies Corporation, an optics, nuclear physics and energy company, claims to have detected "invisible entities" living in Earth's atmosphere.

The corporation is run by controversial Harvard-educated Italian-American nuclear physicist Dr Ruggero Santilli.

>>17688940
Holy shit the physics of that is interesting.

Even if it's all fake and they're just quacks, that's still interesting as fuck.

>>17681166
Fuck man now I want a space kangaroo.

>>17686841
That's some cosmic horror shit anon.

Space is so fuckin huge an Alan could be 6,000,000,000 km tall on some massive planet somewhere
The size of things in other galaxy's don't have to be relavent to earth

>>17689651
I dunno man 6 billion is a pretty big number. It could suplex the largest known stars in the universe.

>>17686841
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/P/plasma-based_life.html
A possible alternative to solid/liquid-state life is self-replicating plasma. Experiments in plasma physics have shown different arrangements that can reproduce. Ball lightening type orbs and string-like plasma crystals. The chemical interactions are slower so evolution would be slow, meaning plasma space amoeba could live near stars, in nebulas, or in the radiation belts of gas giants.

The real question is do space tits travel at FTL without flopping around?

>>17671619
You know, I just finished watching Gunbuster lately.

>>17690152
Neat. I wonder if ball lightning on earth is alive.

>>17691156
I'be read some crazy stories about ball lightning acting like it'a alive and even responding to its environment intelligently, but it could just be how balls of self-contained plasma react to different materials.

>>17691170
Was it my mom's story when she was a little girl that I recount on here sometimes? My grandma and aunt corroborated it also. Apparently one actually came into their house, the very house I'm in now. It navigated around corners and down a hallway and went past them then exploded in the house, melted their stereo and busted their toilet.

>>17671642
panspermia just means the building blocks of life originate in gas clouds basically, off-world at least. It doesn't mean actual life evolving in space. Just amino acids. OP is asking if life could evolve to the extent that it could move around space as a feature of its physiology/anatomy (not technology). I don't so but i'm not a space man.

>>17691185
Awesome

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Everything in earths orbit is covered in a thin film of shit, or fecal matter if you will, that could in theory travel through space on the back of something and spawn microbial life on another planet.

The shit came from astronauts, before you ask. They dumped their waste in orbit.

>yfw we we're spawned from alien shit