Kershenbaum wipes out, unfortunately, when he tries to claim that human culture is genetically based.
Exoplanets
Researchers: We might find extraterrestrial life in 5 to 10 years
Researchers: The new James Webb Space Telescope, which launches in October, “could feasibly detect ammonia around six gas dwarf planets after just a few orbits”
“‘Oumuamua is a spacecraft!” astronomer has come up with a SENSIBLE idea: Search the Moon
Avi Loeb has come up with a very reasonable idea for searching for evidence of other civilizations in our galaxy: Look for alien debris on our still, lifeless, atmosphere-free Moon.
Christian Scientific Society conference: Is there life in outer space?
A good chance to check out the perennial topic, “Are We Alone?” with thoughtful people.
Researchers: Watery worlds may be common rather than rare
If planets’ water resources came from accretions of tiny carbon and ice particles, rather than icy asteroid hits, many would have lots of water, and maybe life.
One theory about why we don’t see extraterrestrials provides support for Earth as a privileged planet
If intelligent life forms are trapped in the interior oceans of rocky moons and planets, Earth is a special planet—much better suited to space exploration.
Astrophysicist: If there really are extraterrestrials, what difference would it make?
Scharf: “Eventually it might all just be a bit of a relief. We’ll neither be alone, nor surrounded by anything particularly extraordinary. Copernican mediocrity will be somewhat restored, and we can go back to worrying about everything else that can go wrong on our speck of rock and water as it sails through the cosmos.”
Ethan Siegel tells us why he thinks colonizing super-Earths would end in disaster
Siegel thinks that a rocky planet of more than 30% greater radius than Earth stands a good change of becoming a gas giant in consequence of its size. Earth is the right size to avoid that.
Does the habitability of exoplanets depend on nitrogen?
It plays an unexpected role in planetary temperature, researchers found: While most research about the habitable zone has focused on a star’s brightness (as temperature dictates whether water on a planet could be liquid, ice or gas), new research is showing that this is an extremely simplified and naive picture. The true test for whether Read More…
We are now told of radio emissions from an alien world…
Like space junk Oumuamua, it’ll almost certainly turn out to be nothing. So why … ? It’s a legitimate question, at this point, whether “science” is just cultural territory now—a way of saying that one is Woke, Cool, and progressive. Depending on where you work, no actual results may be required.
Apparently, Earth is STILL rare
Andrew Zic: But given Proxima Centauri is a cool, small red-dwarf star, it means this habitable zone is very close to the star; much closer in than Mercury is to our Sun.” That would mean those planets would be “sterilised” by dangerous ionising radiation that came from their Sun.
Astronomer: I think aliens are out there but sightings claims aren’t persuasive
There may or may not be other intelligent life forms out there. As it happens, we may be in a position to get hard evidence in the next century. But there is no time where it more pays to be sceptical than a time when we could get genuine information. Or not.
We are told: There are 300 million potentially inhabitable worlds in the galaxy
And yet we never hear from anyone living there. Here’s a list, just for fun, of eight possible reasons…
Space aliens – if we can see them they can see us
The Hart-Tipler conjecture (they don’t exist) is, of course, very unpopular in sci-fi. But let’s confront it, if only to move on to more promising (or maybe scarier) speculations.
At Gizmodo: 24 planets might be better places to live than Earth
As in: “For exoplanets to be superhabitable, they should be older, larger, heavier, warmer, and wetter compared to Earth, and ideally located around stars with longer lifespans than our own. So yeah, not only is Earth inferior, so too is our Sun, according to the new research.”