Does Eve have life?

[NSEP]

What if kerbals are just terrible at biological research and never noticed? 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Earth_hypothesis

[Jimmidii]

Well, the oceans on Eve are (possibly) made of rocket fuel.

Could be that it's biological processes that created them.

Incidentally, Eve almost always ends up with life on it (permanently) in most of my saves...

Edited October 20, 2017 by Jimmidii

[Geschosskopf]

Eve has a lot of stranded astronauts.  Does that count?

[NSEP]

5 minutes ago, Geschosskopf said:

Eve has a lot of stranded astronauts.  Does that count?

NyenyonyeeaaahNo.

[regex]

Quote

Does Eve have life?

Since Kerbol is an impossible star, making it entirely impossible to even estimate the habitable zone much less the temperature of Eve, with an impossible star system orbiting it, I'm going to go with "no".

[juvilado]

I would love to see some life experiments in KSP. This is the only way to confirm or deny life in other planets. 

I think Eve deserves to have some kind of life, but that's up to the developpers (and modders, hehe).

PS: Still haven't seen animal life in Kerbin so far. Where are they hidding?

[GarrisonChisholm]

In the same box that the trees recently (relative) came out of-  the toddler just hasn't set them up yet.

[RoadRunnerAerospace]

11 minutes ago, juvilado said:

I would love to see some life experiments in KSP. This is the only way to confirm or deny life in other planets. 

I think Eve deserves to have some kind of life, but that's up to the developpers (and modders, hehe).

PS: Still haven't seen animal life in Kerbin so far. Where are they hidding?

Life experiments on eve?

[juvilado]

Just now, RoadRunnerAerospace said:

Life experiments on eve?

Life experiments everywhere. So many instruments that yield science, but none of them answers the main question: Is Jeb alone out there?

[RoadRunnerAerospace]

Just now, juvilado said:

Life experiments everywhere. So many instruments that yield science, but none of them answers the main question: Is Jeb alone out there?

How would you test for life on a game thats not meant for it?

[juvilado]

4 minutes ago, RoadRunnerAerospace said:

How would you test for life on a game thats not meant for it?

That's what mods are for. Wouldn't you like so?

Yes, i know, after the first playthrough, we will all know which ones have or had life, but i imagine the first checks, im sure they would be exciting!

The first time you do athing in KSP are the most magical moments of this game. I still remember the first time i landed on the moon after almost a month of gameplay (no youtube watching makes it more epic for ourselves!)

Edited October 20, 2017 by juvilado

[SpacedCowboy]

Not Eve, Laythe is where all the action is.

[Geschosskopf]

4 minutes ago, juvilado said:

I would love to see some life experiments in KSP. This is the only way to confirm or deny life in other planets. 

I think it's safe to assume that the universe has some sort of pond scum growing essentially everywhere.  Carbon-based biology seems to be an inevitable result of how the periodic table is set up--it will happen whether you want it to or not, unless it's just too hot or too cold for such molecules to form.  But even on this planet, those limits are very far apart, certainly covering a wider range than seemed credible just a few years ago.

Free-range O2 in any significant amount (even way less than the 20% of the atmosphere it is here) is a dead giveaway of photosynthesis or something similar.  Oxygen is one of the most violently reactive elements there is so it doesn't just hang around and accumulate, it combines (often with actual fire involved) with everything it touches.  Thus, the only way to build up any measurable amount of O2 is if something is continuously outputting this highly toxic (to the vast majority of life on Earth), highly corrosive substance faster than it naturally combines with its surroundings, which is saying a lot.

On that note, I've always chuckled at the whole "Aliens" franchise trying to make the Xenomorphs even scarier by giving them corrosive acid blood.  Oh yeah?  Apart from a few non-Earthlings reading this forum, every one of us breathes oxygen and has saltwater for blood, and there's not much out there naturally occurring that's more baneful than those things until you get into radioactivity, and most of even that has to be deliberately produced.  Any being from a biology not based on what we consider vital life support resources surely considers us as Hellspawn.

[juvilado]

Just now, Geschosskopf said:

I think it's safe to assume that the universe has some sort of pond scum growing essentially everywhere.  Carbon-based biology seems to be an inevitable result of how the periodic table is set up--it will happen whether you want it to or not, unless it's just too hot or too cold for such molecules to form.  But even on this planet, those limits are very far apart, certainly covering a wider range than seemed credible just a few years ago.

Free-range O2 in any significant amount (even way less than the 20% of the atmosphere it is here) is a dead giveaway of photosynthesis or something similar.  Oxygen is one of the most violently reactive elements there is so it doesn't just hang around and accumulate, it combines (often with actual fire involved) with everything it touches.  Thus, the only way to build up any measurable amount of O2 is if something is continuously outputting this highly toxic (to the vast majority of life on Earth), highly corrosive substance faster than it naturally combines with its surroundings, which is saying a lot.

On that note, I've always chuckled at the whole "Aliens" franchise trying to make the Xenomorphs even scarier by giving them corrosive acid blood.  Oh yeah?  Apart from a few non-Earthlings reading this forum, every one of us breathes oxygen and has saltwater for blood, and there's not much out there naturally occurring that's more baneful than those things until you get into radioactivity, and most of even that has to be deliberately produced.  Any being from a biology not based on what we consider vital life support resources surely considers us as Hellspawn.

May the universe hear you!

We still know so little about life! And nothing about extraterrestrial one. But we have high hopes inside our solar system! I hope in the next century we will get many desireable surprises in this field.

Im not sure if i will live to see evidences of present or past life in outter bodies (im 36, what do you think?), but i trully believe there must be, not sure if in our solar system, but for sure in our universe.

Said that, we can wonder, imagine or deduce what  lifeforms could dwell in KSP's bodies, i even started a thread about that!

regards

[Julian.]

I Did A Probe Test, But It Kind Of Failed. The Stock Experiments Are Not Good Enough. Temperatures Are Semi Over 300.

[Geschosskopf]

14 minutes ago, juvilado said:

May the universe hear you!

I hope not.  Don't want to annoy the neighbors   

[ZooNamedGames]

On 10/20/2017 at 2:55 PM, regex said:

Since Kerbol is an impossible star, making it entirely impossible to even estimate the habitable zone much less the temperature of Eve, with an impossible star system orbiting it, I'm going to go with "no".

I'd like to see the Kerbol universe put into a super computer have it simulate what would happen to the oceans and world's in real time if we introduced correct physics and the effects of the microscopic system.

I know that many planets would be slung shot out of the system and stuff like that as others have already run proper astrophysical simulations. However I want to see aspects like Kerbol collapse on itself, the heat of the sun boil the planets and vaporize their atmosphere and so on.

[KerikBalm]

On 10/20/2017 at 8:55 PM, regex said:

Since Kerbol is an impossible star, making it entirely impossible to even estimate the habitable zone much less the temperature of Eve, with an impossible star system orbiting it, I'm going to go with "no".

Ignoring the impossible star part, we do have a solar flux value at kerbin, no? From that its possible to estimate the solar flux at Eve. Even ignoring that, we have simple temperature and pressure data for Eve (since we don't also have the molecular composition of its atmosphere [though MW suggest mostly CO2], nor its albedo).

That said.... I'm going with no. Eve is uniformly purple, its not like there's purple near the coasts and no purple on mountain peaks... even the atmosphere is purple. To me this suggests a purple chemical rather purple life.

Regex... would you prefer if the sun of kerbin was instead as it is in my config:

Quote

    @Body[Sun] 
    {
        @Properties
        {
            geeASL = 27.95 // Increase Surface G to that of Earth's sun
            radius = 65500000 // Decrease Radius to 1/4 that of stock
        }
    }
 

Then a 3x rescale is applied to the sun and all planets (though to make it more real, a 10-11x rescale is needed, but then stock parts wouldn't cut it, and I'd need RP0 or whatever, and then might as well do RSS, and that comes with stability issues on weaker systems... etc etc)

Edited October 22, 2017 by KerikBalm

[regex]

9 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Regex... would you prefer if the sun of kerbin was instead as it is in my config:

You would have to resize Kerbol in some fashion to arrive at relatively realistic solar system no matter what you did. If we resize radius and SMA, which is the normal means on this forum of making sense of a tiny solar system with impossible densities, and we use a flat value of 10 for a multiplier (Kerbin can be denser than Earth, that's fine), we end up with a Kerbol that is roughly a mid-sized B-class main sequence star. If we go from luminosity Kerbol has less than about 1/128 that of our own Sun; I'm not sure how that scales up but it is likely tied to radius. From stated temperature Kerbol is hotter than our own sun. Its mass is completely out of whack based on all this.

In the past I have assumed a middle-tier K-class main sequence star for Kerbin which I arrived at by scaling the radius up by a 6.4 multiplier, based on that old modder's rule-of-thumb for sizing realistic parts to KSP, which means it needs to be sized down considerably in stock.

But then you run into the problem of Kerbin itself. Scaling its SMA by the same factor that one would scale its radius to arrive at Earth (a factor of 10.6) would put it 5 million km closer to Kerbol than Earth is to the Sun. If Kerbol is a G-class star with its stated temperature then Kerbin would be much hotter than Earth. If Kerbol is a K-class star then Kerbin is much too far from it to support a temperate habitat. If Kerbol's radius is scaled by the same amount then Kerbin is a very hot rock indeed.

It's so hard to make sense of this solar system scientifically. Scaling its luminosity is probably the best way to go but by what factor do we do it?

Edited October 22, 2017 by regex

[KerikBalm]

I seem to remember from a spreadsheet I was making when I was making values for my own system modification, that the KSP sun is "correctly" roughly 1/100th the mass of our sun. All bodies "should" but about 1/100th the mass of their analogue if we assume surface gravity remains unchanged, but radius is 1/10th (and thus volume is 1/1000th). The thing is... the stock sun is not 1/10th the radius of our sun, its actually much bigger IIRC. So what I (attempted) to do was lower its radius and increase its surface G so that it was 1/10th the radius and 1/100th the mass of our sun, and thus the system overall would be similar to our system, but with distances being 1/10th realistic differences (similar changes were made for jool, also I scaled down its moons to only 2x their "proportional radius"). If we said 1 kerbal meter = 10 human meters, the system size would then be just fine (but that would mean Kerbin had a surface G of 98 m/s/s in "human meters", and the LV-N would have an Isp of 8000). Applying a 3x rescale to this "corrected" system makes it less ridiculous, but of course a 10x rescale is needed to bring it into a plausible realm (which still excludes laythe from plausibility)

Quote

Scaling its SMA by the same factor that one would scale its radius to arrive at Earth (a factor of 10.6) would put it 5 million km closer to Kerbol than Earth is to the Sun.

I opened my spreadsheet and had a look... Earth's radius is ~10.62x the radius of Kerbin, while its SMA is almost exactly 11x greater than Kerbin's. Is this what you mean by it being too close if you used a blanket rescale factor of 10.6? For my part when I was looking at these numbers, I figured "close enough" and let it be. I focused much more on the bloated but not very dense (assuming radius was scaled up by ~10x but not surface gravity) sun that was proportionately way too big to be an analogue of our sun... the Jupiter analogue with a surface G close to that of Saturn, the way too dense Eve, and the way too big moons of Jool (also I scaled down Dres, and bumped up Duna's surface G). Compared to those bodies, the 10.6 vs 11x rescaled of radius vs SMA for kerbin seems minor

[regex]

8 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

The thing is... the stock sun is not 1/10th the radius of our sun, its actually much bigger IIRC.

Yes, I tried to point that out earlier, that if you simply scaled Kerbol up by the same factor as you scale up the planets (usually by radius keeping geeASL constant to arrive at final mass) you end up with a radius that of a B-type main sequence star. That completely ignores the end mass, however, which would likely result in a much smaller star.

Quote

I opened my spreadsheet and had a look... Earth's radius is ~10.62x the radius of Kerbin, while its SMA is almost exactly 11x greater than Kerbin's. Is this what you mean by it being too close if you used a blanket rescale factor of 10.6?

Partly, but that misses the point of how to scale Kerbol. A large majority of the bodies in the system can be smoothly scaled up while retaining geeASL to arrive at a reasonable final density and mass, despite a few minor exceptions (Jool would also need to be corrected, and probably a few others). My point in regards to Kerbin being too close to Kerbol is in relation to Kerbol's stated temperature, which is higher than our own sun's and implies a larger star. Kerbin being 5,000,000 km closer than Earth would be if SMA was scaled by the same amount as its radius (to arrive at Earth size) only exacerbates the issue.

Assuming Kerbol is a G-type main sequence star with a temperature of 5840K, it would be slightly bigger than our own sun with its temperature of 5772K. Combine that extra solar energy with a closer planet and Kerbin is looking quite tropical. I don't know if that makes it uninhabitable, but it is something to consider.

Quote

For my part when I was looking at these numbers, I figured "close enough" and let it be. I focused much more on the bloated but not very dense (assuming radius was scaled up by ~10x but not surface gravity) sun that was proportionately way too big to be an analogue of our sun... the Jupiter analogue with a surface G close to that of Saturn, the way too dense Eve, and the way too big moons of Jool (also I scaled down Dres, and bumped up Duna's surface G). Compared to those bodies, the 10.6 vs 11x rescaled of radius vs SMA for kerbin seems minor

Sure, being "close enough" can work, but then we enter the realm of fan fiction rather than the hard numbers we have. If you're trying to figure things out in a scientific manner then I would argue examining the data as presented rather than looking to make things "close enough", which presents the very thorny problem of how to actually scale Kerbol (as opposed to Kerbin which should be our scaling point given a geeASL of Earth and clearly intended to be an Earth-analogue). Hence why I say that any exercise in determining whether life could actually be present in the Kerbol system is just an exercise in fan fiction.

Edited October 23, 2017 by regex

[KerikBalm]

Until reading your posts, I actually had no idea about the data for the temperature of "kerbol". I just figured if its got the same radius and mass as the sun, ie the same density, then it should have the same composition and same luminosity.

If the system is rescaled to be like that (or proportionately so as in my settings), then its a question if 10.62/11 AU or 0.965 AU is inside the habitable zone or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstellar_habitable_zone#Solar_System_estimates

Which is... hard to say... since the estimates vary so much, and many of them use assumptions that are very un-Earthlike (and kerbin appears similar to Earth)...  We can exclude ones that look at atmospheres of 15 millibar. We can exclude ones that assume a mostly desert planet with just a few pools of liquid water (and if the science behind venus is right, that does bad things to plate tectonics, and then possible affects the internal dynamo, outgassing and sequestration rates, etc.)  - with those estimates we see a range between 0.9 to 0.99.

Of course my assumption about luminosity for nearly the same size and mass isn't a good one.there can still be significant variance in composition with barelt detectable changes in those parameters. Our sun's output should be increasing over time (which leads to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faint_young_Sun_paradox ) but I don't know that its mass and radius have changed much in the last few billion years even if its output has increased ~30%.

It does of course come down to fan fiction.. after all I'm playing neither RSS nor stock, so my system is nothing but fan fiction... but for all stock concerns and questions like this, I think we should start with the assumption that conditions on kerbin are very similar to conditions on Earth (1 atm pressure, mostly water covered, polar ice caps, surface temperatures that are agreeable to humans), and extrapolate all other values from that.

If you say the sun is too big and bright for kerbin to have ice caps or even a liquid ocean, then I say kerbin is the standard/ruler/thing that we measure everything else against, and the sun's values are wrong. Find the right values for the sun to have ~10.62x kerbin make sense, and then apply those values to 10.62x Eve.

[Gordon Fecyk]

On ‎10‎/‎21‎/‎2017 at 4:59 PM, ZooNamedGames said:

I'd like to see the Kerbol universe put into a super computer have it simulate what would happen to the oceans and world's in real time if we introduced correct physics and the effects of the microscopic system.

Just a cursory search, and I found someone at least tried to recreate the KSP system in Universe Sandbox, but marveled at the ultra-dense worlds and gave up on it. What about 10 x size?

4 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

If the system is rescaled to be like that (or proportionately so as in my settings), then its a question if 10.62/11 AU or 0.965 AU is inside the habitable zone or not

Seems I'm not the first to think about this. How much was Universe Sandbox again...

[regex]

3 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

Find the right values for the sun to have ~10.62x kerbin make sense, and then apply those values to 10.62x Eve.

Kerbol would be a G3V or G4V main sequence star,, maybe even smaller, in order to accommodate Kerbin's SMA in a habitable zone similar to Earth. Eve itself is about 4,000,000km closer to the star than Venus is to ours and so, with a slightly smaller star, would likely receive about the same amount of energy that Venus does. Given that, we'd have to know if Eve had a magnetosphere because without one I doubt it would have much of an atmosphere left over to support life. If it were a Venus-like planet then it stands to reason that much of its atmosphere has already blown off and we are seeing the very remnants; Eve could have never supported life and never will.

[KerikBalm]

Eve's atmosphere is almost pure CO2 based on its MW... Venus lacks much of a magentic field too, and has no problem holding onto an atmosphere of dense gas (its lost most of its hydrogen containing gas). Another thing to consider... what is the age of this solar system?

You said Eve never could have supported life, and never will. I'd agree with the later, but even Venus is thought to have had a habitable period billions of years ago.

I was reading up on the faint young sun paradox... and it seems there are so many variables that need to be accounted for, and planets change so much over time

https://faculty.washington.edu/dcatling/Som2016_Earths_Low_Air_Pressure_w_supplemental.pdf

an Atmospheric pressure of just 0.23 Atms, on Earth?!?!?! 2.7 billion years ago.... Meanwhile, Mars was clearly warm enough with a thick enough atmosphere for liquid water to exist...

Clearly, we are missing some important information.