> Absolutely! But taking our own scarcity along won't get us far.
> We certainly need a lot of diverse, life sustaining technology. And all the
> rest of the bag of tricks we can muster to keep us alive on an offworld
> colony. I dont think it's going to be like in Star Trek where all the planets
> have air we can breathe and humanoids who speak English 100% ; - )
> This is all I meant by directing the attention to what we can do here and
> now. Of course we want options, lots of options...
Actually, if you do some web surfing, use AltaVista to look up
"Extrasolar;Planets" and you will learn about all the planets we are
discovering. It turns out that planets seem to be a natural phenomenon
of just about every sun-like star, though less likely with binary
systems. From this, it seems pretty likely that inhabitable, oxygen
atmophere, water ocean worlds will be pretty common.
Also, the dominant form of biological life will be based on carbon, like
we are. THe next best element as a replacement is silicon, has less than
50% of the versatility chemically as carbon, so is less likely to be
used. However, DNA may not neccessarily be the form of building bioware.
A star with a bit too much ultraviolet light output would simply
scramble DNA too much to be of use, unless you had an environment like
Seven Day Planet where massive reproduction, high metabolic rates, and
high rates of evolution would be the norm.
Additionally, though I can't promise English speaking, for obvious
reasons (though with augmentation, maybe even a fish in the ear ;),
universal translators "may" be possible), i read a recent study of
likely forms of intelligent aliens. According to the analysis of
evolutionary behavior, the humanoid form is the most likely to be
intelligent, though not necessarily mammalian or even human features,
but the bipedal, two eyes and ears, two to four arms, and four to six
fingered hand, who is omnivorous. Of course,this is based on an expected
limited database of how much we think we know about our world, and how
little we know about others.
Mike