> The gas detected in the atmosphere is helium, which would not be able to support life
Nonsense. You mean not able to support terrestrial life.
> The gas detected in the atmosphere is helium, which would not be able to support life
Nonsense. You mean not able to support terrestrial life.
I was skeptical about that as well so I googled it and:
>Helium cannot support life because it is a chemically inert noble gas. It does not form the complex, stable molecular structures (like carbon chains) required for biology. Unlike oxygen, it cannot be used by living organisms for cellular respiration to generate energy, making it an asphyxiant.
However, maybe we are projecting our current understanding of biology and shouldn't rule it out. I'm not a scientist so I have no idea.
Note: terrestrial chemistry is no different from chemistry that can occur anywhere, given the right molecules and conditions, and even then it’s a matter of degree.
Nitrogen being replaced by helium would actually be fine but for the niggling issue that we need nitrates. There are no heliates (?) to compensate. The name doesn’t even make sense… helium is the sole gas to have an ium end like metals- chemically it’s that meaningless what you call it as an ion…it shines elsewhere though.
For biology, it’s a necessary condition that the environment react with it and it reacts to the environment. Over time the two become deeply intertwined through the process of evolution.
It’s hard to see how that kind of evolution will occur if a lot of the environment is nonreactive.
Survival may be plausible though. There’s been some research showing some bacteria can survive in high helium environments. That’s a far cry from proving something like a bacterium can evolve in a helium environment that’s non-reactive though.
Why would it be necessary for life to depend on breathing atmosphere? The atmosphere could just help in keeping the temperature even and provide some nice pressure, maybe that’s favorable over vacuum.
Well, some years ago helium was a preferred way for suicide. This reflected very bad on the producers of party balloon helium tanks, so they added an amount of oxygen and it was no longer an effective way.
So the question becomes: How much of that atmosphere is helium?
> helium was a preferred way for suicide
The era of ridiculous sounding last words came to an end
Hmm, really? That's interesting.... [time passes] ... I found more information than I really needed on how to kill one's self with helium, and I saw some places making suggestions that helium be cut with oxygen, seemingly starting with a New Zealand coroner in 2011, but nothing suggesting this had been implemented at any sort of scale. The links I found on Amazon for party balloon helium tanks all mostly proudly state they are 99%+ helium.
Would be briefly hilarious though as the squeaky response made it back through to mission control.
Helium is a noble gas. It forms no bonds and is unable to produce even a simple molecule, let along the complex ones needed for life.
Assuming non terrestrial life needs complex molecules. Which we can't know for sure.
When you think about it honestly, we really don't know anything about anything. We don't know how many planets there are in the galaxy (nor in the universe, nor in the multiverse, nor if there is a multiverse). We don't know what the chances are of a given planet being habitable (nor what "habitable (for all possible life)" means, nor what "all possible life" means). And we don't know what the chances are of life existing on a given habitable planet. So apart from the fact that all of the above probabilities may well be at or near zero, we're barely even capable of articulating the necessary questions, let alone searching for answers.
No, we really can know for sure.
Don't be so open-minded about extra-terrestrial life that your brain falls out.
Life needs energy to be moving around, without energy exchanges, by very definition, nothing interesting happens.
An inert element, for that reason is just not suitable for life. It's not a reasoning based on anthropocentricity it's just basic chemistry and mathematics. If things can't assemble together, and combine, and form more complex structures, you can't get life. If you could get life out of simple basic atoms, we would see life everywhere, and we would be creating it everyday in labs. We don't.
Doesnt mean life can't exist there by using other elements, but detecting helium is not increasing the likelihood of finding life there at the very least.
They didn't say oxygen is not present. 78% of earth's atmosphere is nitrogen and we are doing fine.