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Asked by tjputler50 to Sofia, Tommy on 22 Nov 2013.
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Sofia Franco answered on 22 Nov 2013:
I would love for that to be true 🙂 however, for evolution to take place from little singled cell organisms, to photosynthetic organisms, to multicellular photosynthetic organisms, to all the types of plants and trees as we know them, took millions of years and only happened like this because there were very specific conditions that gave these photosynthetic organisms an advantage and a large set of other conditions that have driven their evolution to how they are today! For that to happen in another place would be a 1 in a million chance 🙂 but for sure not impossible! Also, trees as we know them need carbon dioxide, oxygen, water, nutrients, loads of stuff…and are adapted to a specific climate and ecosystems… in my opinion for that to be replicated somewhere else, would be really difficult, bet definitely not impossible 🙂 though it would be fascinating!
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Comments
Tommy commented on :
There is an hypothesis known as the Drake equation, that estimates the probability of CIVILIZATIONS occuring on other planets. It bases this on the likelihood of a planet being the same distance from its Sun as Earth is to its own Sun. With this knowledge, they estimated quite conservatively that of the billions of stars out there, there is some probability that there are Earth-like planets, and would thus have a chance of life occurring on them, and to have existed long enough for life to evolve and derive intelligent beings. This gave rise to a number of 1000 to 10,000 planets that are capable of having life, even civilizations. How the living things get their energy to survive and reproduce is not known, but it is possible that it will be a process very similar to photosynthesis on the cellular level. If not photosynthesis, there could also be chemosynthesis, where energy can be obtained from other means, like in deep sea vents. And as life can consist of organisms of different sizes of different levels of organization, it would be reasonable to find a large organism on another planet that obtains its energy from its Sun, a bit like a tree.
Tommy commented on :
-STOP PRESS-
There has last week been a published study of 42,000 stars using careful measurements of the light coming from them, which indicates planets passing orbit. They found that 10 of these had Earth-like planets, which have the type of orbit where water would occur in liquid form. The made a calculation that of the known proportion of Sun-like stars in the Universe, 22% of these would have Earth-like planets.
Here is the link to the paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/48/19273.short