James Webb & Chinese leftist internet mobs
On Christmas day in 2021, the James Webb infrared telescope, the most expensive toy ever in human history, which was produced to travel in space but has been dormant on the ground for more than a decade, finally took off. The 6.4-ton tennis court-sized telescope is worth $10 billion, 20 times NASA's first budget request to Congress. At this price, Chinese weapon makers can probably build a 003 aircraft carrier battle group, including its various types of guards above or under the surface of the sea, and dozens of fighter jets it carries. In other words, with the money for two James Webb telescopes, China would probably dominate the South China Sea. One of the tasks of this thing, which is about 27 times the price of gold, is to find possible extraterrestrial life, and its principle of finding extraterrestrial life is actually very simple: looking for the absorption spectrum of oxygen and water vapor.
With the current scientific and technological capabilities of mankind - in fact, we can boldly broaden this scope a little - the scientific and technological capabilities of any intelligent species limited by the physical laws of the known universe, are unlikely to see a planet outside the local galaxy directly. A feasible observation method is to wait for the planetary transit, the star will have a slight luminous change, and the change with a constant period can basically be determined to be caused by the planet. The James Webb telescope not only sees this change in brightness, but also detects the absorption spectrum of the light emitted from the stars through the planetary atmosphere, and the absorption spectrum of oxygen and water vapor just falls in the detection frequency band of the James Webb telescope. According to the mass of the star and the revolution period of the planet, we can roughly determine whether the planet is in the habitable zone of life. The planet in the habitable zone also has oxygen and water vapor, which is likely to be a living planet.
In Arthur Clarke's legendary classic Space Odyssey, he once imagined various forms of life existence. Even the protagonist commander Bowman defected to God-like civilization at the end and became an electromagnetic wave that exists forever in the universe. However, no matter whether life may become beyond the hydrocarbon chain, oxygen and water are always the first indications for looking for life. Water is a neutral solvent, which is the preferred adjuvant for maintaining complex life activities, while oxygen is a very active gas. If there are no things making it continuously, it will react with various elements quickly and consume it, such as Fe2O3 on red Mars. The existence of water and oxygen at the same time is a sign of life. It is even no exaggeration to say that the oxidizing atmosphere is the most incredible feat of life to transform a planet.
There are many undersea volcanoes on the earth. Due to the high pressure in the deep sea, the temperature of the seawater near these craters can even be as high as 300 ° C. The most common chemical substance brought out by craters is reductive sulfide, the life living here shows a completely different energy supply mechanism from the common life forms in the daily environment: these deep-sea hydrothermal bacteria use heat and reducing substances instead of ATP and O2. These bacteria are probably relics of ancient times, the early Earth's atmosphere was full of methane, and the first round of earth life was completely reductive. After the emergence of the ancient ancestors of cyanobacteria, this new type of bacteria quickly transformed the earth's atmosphere into an oxygen-rich environment in just a few million years by its unique skill - photosynthesis. For today's life, this is the basis for our survival, and for the creatures at that time, oxygen was the most terrible poison gas. Today, both environmentalists and anti-environmentalists always say compared with the earth, human beings are too small. The former quotes this sentence to explain that the so-called environmental protection protects the environment on which human beings depend, not the earth; the latter challenges the conclusions of the IPCC and last year's Nobel Prize in physics, just as poorly trained science enthusiasts challenge Theory of Relativity with junior high school algebra. In fact, even on the earth's scale, life is not small, they are massive power that can be very scary. They can not only greatly change the surface topography, but also carry out genocide by means of completely transforming the earth's atmosphere.
That is why the so-called 小粉红 (whose nature is yellow neo-Nazi by the way) should be stopped on the Chinese internet community.
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