Rogue Planet

There’s a first season episode of Star Trek Enterprise (now out on DVD so I finally got to see it since I had the dinkiest cable in the world when the show first aired and didn’t get UPN) called "Rogue Planet," in which the crew of the Enterprise finds a . . . rogue planet–that is, a planet with no sun.

Surprisingly, this planet has life on it, its biosphere being fueled by heat from within the planet.

Now, we’ve seen Thomas Gold’s idea that there’s a "deep, hot biosphere" down in the Earth and that, in his view, one is likely to be found on any other planet possessing hydrocarbons and enough heat for liquid water, so what about . . .

FREAKY IDEA #5

From the WIRED interview (sorry for delaying the link, but I didn’t want everybody to go read all the freaky ideas before I could introduce them):


If meteorites can move material from one planet to another, do you think that life could have moved between the deep biospheres?

Yes. I also believe there may be a huge number of bodies that are
like planets that are not tied to stars. All we know is that we are
tied to a star. And we’ve seen a few other stars like ours. But that is
no reason for thinking that the formation of planetary bodies needs a
star. It’s only because that’s the only place where we’ve been able to
look. If you had an Earth-sized body floating by itself through space,
we would not have had any chance to observe it.


But its deep biosphere could keep ticking.

Ticking as it has here for billions of years.


So life could spread not just within solar systems but over greater distances?

Yes.

Now, I noted this in the first post in this series, but some may have missed it, so let me repost

THE BIG RED DISCLAIMER: I have no idea if
the abiogenic theory of the origin of petroleum is correct. I’m not
advocating this theory or any other theory of Thomas Gold. I’m
presenting interesting ideas for consideration. Nothing more.

And thus Freaky Friday draws to a close here on the blog.

(Except for the photo caption that’s about to go up.)

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

3 thoughts on “Rogue Planet”

  1. This is rather like the “panspermia” hypothesis put forward by Francis Crick (after he lost his mind, IMHO) and his associate Chandra Wickramasinghe. Even back in the day when I was non-Christian/non-Catholic, I thought this idea kinda stooopid as all it does, on the grand scale of things, is push the where-did-life-come-from? question off planet; it offers absolutely no help as to the whys and wherefores, but just attempts to move the issue to where current scientific instruments cannot reach. Even in my most agnostic heyday, I thought that rather well outside the paradigm of the scientific method.
    [Side Note: Thomas Gold has dabbled in this field before, but most of the papers of his that I’ve read are quite rigorous]

  2. Just wanted to let you know I found these posts about the deep hot biosphere fascinating. No comment, just “really cool”.

  3. Thanks! I found them fascinating, too. (The theories, that is, not my own posts.)

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