Life on...

[Omega]

This is my first post here, after joining this illustrious debate-site. Which I did after my work brought me in close contact with some rather wild conspiracy theories.
Maybe this subject’s been covered already, if it has I’m sure it can be covered again. Maybe the stubborn ufologist passes by. Who knows?

Right then: According to a wide variety of people, there is life elsewhere in the Universe. Not the speculative “maybe there is life” or “there could be life”. No, we’re talking about the theories that involves the alien abduction stories, that started spreading after the 1960’s.

One of the stars, that should house a planet with evil aliens is called Bellatrax. When reading that on a page, I arched a brow. Having taken a course on astronomy at my university, I didn’t recall ever hearing that name before.
Maybe they meant Bellatrix I thought, and typed in both names in my usual search-engine. Bellatrax gave me the hundreds of conspiracy-sites, claiming grey aliens abduct innocent humans. While Bellatrix came up with all the astronomy pages.
This means we’re more or less dealing with a kind of an “urban legend”, that’s spread to the widest reaches of the Internet over the years. Obviously the conspiracy theorists haven’t even bothered to check if there was a star by that name.
They do spell Sirius, Vega and Arcturus right, though. As well as Zeta 2 Reticuli and claim aliens also come from the Pleiadians and Orion.
Now if that isn’t bad astronomy…

Regards.

[Chip]

Well, if one were inclined to be interested in the subject of aliens visiting Earth despite lack of proof, yet still maintain something of a scientific methodology, (a contradiction?) - one could begin by checking to see if anyone has detected evidence of a possible solar system or planet orbiting Bellatrix. Is Bellatrix wobbling? And...

Even if it were eventually shown that the star has a solar system, that doesn't prove aliens come from there.

[NubiWan]

"..,there is life elsewhere in the Universe."

Welp, think this is probably true. Just from the statistical probabilities, and nothing else. Is that 'kooky' too?

[Kaptain K]

I doubt very seriously that Bellatrix is home to life (intelligent or otherwise). Bellatrix is classified as B2III. That means that it is a hot (~20,000K), young (a few million years), giant main sequence star. Hot stars radiate significant amounts of ionizing radiation (UV and soft X-rays). It is 6400 times as luminous as the Sun. The habitable zone is some 80 AU out (7.5 billion miles), nearly 3 times the distance to Neptune. /phpBB/images/smiles/icon_eek.gif Although extremely luminous, it is only 6 times the diameter of the Sun. From that distance, it would be only 2 arcminutes across.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Kaptain K on 2002-03-15 05:40 ]</font>

[Omega]

On 2002-03-14 01:26, NubiWan wrote:
"..,there is life elsewhere in the Universe."


Okay, my BA-angle was mostly the bad spelling of Bellatrix. The fact that all the sites claiming aliens visit us use the spelling "Bellatrax", without anyone bothering to check if a star had that name.

Life evolved on Earth approximately 1.5 billion years after it was formed. How is still debated, but that is still 1500 million years.
And it took anoter 3 billion years before the explosion of life, the sudden formation of a wide and diversified variety of life.
The large hot lumonous stars don't even live for 1.5 billion years.

Is there life in space? Well, we're here, so the answer is yes. Is there life elsewhere? Probably.
But probability is not certainty, and it doesn't mean we've been visited.

[Simon]

On 2002-03-14 17:40, Omega wrote:
Life evolved on Earth approximately 1.5 billion years after it was formed. How is still debated, but that is still 1500 million years.


Actually, I believe that life was around even earlier than that, something to the tune of <1 billion years. I'm afraid don't remember where I read that though.