Life IN space

[orbsycli]

Is it possible that somewhere in the universe, that life has formed IN space itself? Maybe on a rock like the moon without an atmosphere. This seems to me a bit extreme, but eh...just something I was curious about.

or what if there was a planet like earth, with life, and the atmosphere dissipated slowly enough that the life on the planet evolved to the extremities of outer space...or is space itself just non-inhabitable by any forms of life?

[alxian]

all it requires is low radiation and good insulation

as long as life can pass food through that protection (food being any compounds with chemical potential, very hard to find in the void), perhaps such animals would be the UV absorbers i'm seeking but they'd still require a solvent for a chemical metabolism.

or they could be ultra massive star eaters... unicron.. which isn't unlikely just if you can devour a star you you must be able to metabolize and store that power.. which will then be used to move on to the next one [star] which requires incredible amounts of power too. perhaps cooling the stars gases and liquid metals into usable forms.. but such a creature.. very unlikely..

[Fishteacher73]

Life cycles and grwoth rates would be extremely long... While there's a lot of energy floating about space, there's not much matter. The uptake of the building block compounds would be very slow and erratic for such a life form. So the entity would grow very slowly.

[alxian]

exactly, while energy is free there isn't much to subsist off of, all creatures require some amount of raw material. when you consider living in full vacuum you are exposed to an extremely dangerous environment requiring more food to repair damage, unless that outer crust is asteroid like, rocky and micrometeorite pitted, you'll get the protection from vacuum radiation and the soft gooey interior can absorb high energy radiation and such for power.. considering the size of a creature though if its large enough it could maintain homeostasis perfectly within itself, any trully toxic compounds can be expelled into space and any resources it requires makes life worth living (it'll have to move around looking for food.

example is that earth itself requires massive amounts of sunlight to keep live stirring down here, but subterranean life manages quite well with the toxic effervescence of the heat from the earths core interacting with volatile compounds in the crust. on a mass small enough you could consider the mantle as being the living creature, the crust its protective skin and a substance at the core that would heat up when exposed to radiation or other hi energy source in local space, again a solvent is required and perhaps a cycle which would carry it around the core of the small (relatively) body, such as enrichment [adding potential energy to the solvent] transport to the living flesh of the creature where it is depleted, then more transport perhaps into storage [which could occur before the depletion stage] and back again, purification which removes any toxic compounds would require a secondary system to remove it from the 'blood' where it could be removed and expelled, though i doubt such a creature would create much toxic waste in the first place.

only where you are dealing with very high energy tissues will you require complex compounds but then those compounds when used up generally they decompose into base compounds again anyway.. such an animal i think would be a fully enclosed system but would require energy in once its own chemical potential has been used up, and by that time it'll have created some pretty toxic materials which could be expelled and caked onto its crusty shell.

then you can think of crystaline creatures that would be powered by resonance, passing thru hi energy fields but would require conversion and storage media for times when there is no ambient energy to absorb.

[Tim_Lou]

if such creatures exist (in empty spaces), it would be quite hard for em to move around...

[Buffy]

Reminds me of the Star Trek episode "The Immunity Syndrome" where Kirk and crew encounter an enormous, planetary-sized Ameoba. It was very large, moved slowly and had the ability to suck in any matter or energy nearby (even created a negative energy void around itself).

Well, lots of stuff I know about physics came from Star Trek....

Live Long and Prosper,
Buffy

[alxian]

remember they'd only move around if they have to. if energy abounded they'd have no reason to move around.. but if you mean because they'd have nothing to push off of? well, assuming they need to crap and can hold pressure this crap vectored thrust would be adequate for impulse engines.. its the moving around at hypervelocity thats the snag, they could move between systems at their own pace if they were ageless.

given the incalculable amounts of energy being radiated by a star they'd have a home for its lifetime, only needing to move when the potential dropped dangerously low, the local space becomes too polluted or the star grows faster than they can move away [or can't stomach IR for elder stars]..



how better to create a dysons sphere than from the corpses of organisms that feed directly off of a star? if they keep reproducing and the LZH is thin enough that when they die the dead stay in relatively the same position without accreting [which though nice for fiction would be impossible outside of the stars planar spinning orbit (which could be radical and not as perfect as our old sol.. but i'm being convenient..).]

woot! i've been exoner8'd! no more infamy for me!!!

[FetusHead]

For a life form to have evolved with the ability to live in space, it would have to be based on something besides carbon - Silicon comes to mind. If I were a space creature, I'd want mylar eye lids or at least some cool aviator sunglasses like Tom Cruise had in Top Gun.

[the5thhorseman]

H.P. Lovecrafts short story " At the Mountains of Madness" he describes a race of creatures that are interplanetary life forms by nature ... they move planet to planet under there own power can live in deep space and are almost eternal ..

the old ones as he calls them , can go from planet to planet they can also create life on planets they descend on .

I always liked that strange story .

[BlameTheEx]

It's all a bit thin.

Life as we know it depends on chemical reactions. Chemical reactions depend on different chemicals bumping into one another. That means they need to be free to move. They have to be dissolved in a liquid, or dispersed as a gas.

Space can't contain free liquids and only contains the thinnest of gasses. Worse light pressure and solar wind sweep gas away from stars - that is if a planetary body doesn't capture it first. The only stable gas in space is interstellar. Where would the energy to drive life come from if not from a close star?

There are exceptions. Comets emit gas when they get close to the sun. That is the source of their tails. Asteroids can have water trapped inside rocks. But is there enough here to support the evolution of life? I think not.