Even the most aggressive environments on our planet, like a deep undersea fracture or the freezing Arctic and Antarctic icy deserts, are swarming with various species, producing hope for theorists that the same could be happening on distant planets scattered in our galaxy.
According to Alan Stern with NASA’s long-range New Horizons space probe, purported water worlds could provide, on one hand, the kind of stable environment for intelligent life forms; shielded from space radiation and catastrophic asteroid impacts.
"Impacts and solar flares, and nearby supernovae, and what orbit you're in, and whether you have a magnetosphere, and whether there's a poisonous atmosphere - none of those things matter", Stern said, cited by The Daily Star.
On the other hand, a liquid planet could be also a shielded prison for intelligent species.
"If they have technology, and let's say they're broadcasting, or they have city lights or whatever — we can't see it in any part of the spectrum, except maybe very-low-frequency [radio]", Stern said, suggesting that it would be very complicated for intelligent aquatic creatures to launch spacecraft filled with water, according to the media report.
Currently, astronomers express some hope that so-called Super-Earths - exoplanets with a mass between two-ten times that of Earth - are perfect candidates for finding intelligent life.
Super-Earths considered to have a perfect orbit with regard to their parent star: not too distant and not too close so that the conditions for life could somehow match those that we have on our planet.
Notably, these large planets could be also a trap for local dwellers.
"On more-massive planets, spaceflight would be exponentially more expensive [...] Such civilizations would not have satellite TV, a moon mission or a Hubble Space Telescope”, astronomer Michael Hippke remarked, cited by The Daily Star.
According to Hippke, cited by the media outlet, humans are lucky to live on a comparatively "lightweight" planet with a gravitational pull that’s weak enough to escape.