We’ve been picking up strange signals, discovering possibly habitable planets, and in general starting to feel a little bit hopeful about the possibility of life in some recognizable form elsewhere — perhaps a lot of elsewheres — in the universe. Now, though, like a splash of cold water to the face, a new study published in Nature Geoscience suggests that there may not, in fact, be life-sustaining liquid water out there. Or at least that it’s likely to be rare. For bodies without an active carbonate–silicate cycle, the study says, ”We find that the stellar fluxes that are required to overcome a planet’s initial snowball state are so large that they lead to significant water loss and preclude a habitable planet.
”It’s not there’s not plenty of water ice around. And it’s not uncommon for host stars to brighten, melting icy bodies around them, as happened about 600-800 million years ago with earth. In the study, though, scientists led by Jun Yang of Beijing University modeled the climatic evolution of icy bodies — such as Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus — and found that the transition between cold and hot is typically so abrupt that there’s little in-between.
The problem — ironically for us climate-changers — is their dearth of greenhouse gases. Problematic as an excess of these gases may be for us now, on an frozen world, gases from erupting volcanoes may be just what’s needed to retain heat and allow the body to warm slowly, as happened here on earth. When…
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