Category: Extraterrestrial life
Is SETI an “occult cult with money”?
| November 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design |
Much information is offered here: Astronomer Jill Tarter discusses the search for intelligent life (Phys.org). Jill Tarter, one of the queens of SETI, was given royal treatment in a Harvard interview. The interviewer could have asked some hard questions, but one never treats royalty that way. “For me, after millennia of asking priests and philosophers […]
Astronomers: Solar system object in transit, Oumuamua, might be a “light sail of extra-terrestrial origin”
| November 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design |
A light sail is “a small spacecraft, propelled solely by sunlight.” Interstellar object Oumuamua, was discovered 2017 while passing through our solar system. It’s peculiar acceleration is explained, seriously, by a Harvard prof as an extraterrestrial spacecraft: Interestingly enough, there has also been some speculation that based on its shape, ‘Oumuamua might actually be an […]
Fine-tuning: Is Earth’s magnetic core special too, compared to Mars’s?
| October 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design |
Physicist S. Fred Singer offers some suggestions pertaining to the hunt for life on Mars: 1. Super-rotation of the core Seismic data, taken over a period of several years (Zhang, et al., Science 2005), suggest that the (innermost, solid iron) core is rotating slightly faster than the rest of the Earth, at 0.3-0.5 degrees/yr. We […]
Might Earth’s deep subsurface be “brimming with life”?
| October 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Geobiologist Alexis Templeton thinks it matters: We humans tend to see the world as a solid rock coated with a thin layer of life. But to scientists like Templeton, the planet looks more like a wheel of cheese, one whose thick, leathery rind is perpetually gnawed and fermented by the microbes that inhabit its innards. […]
Light-loving cyanobacteria found, improbably, nearly 2,000 feet underground
| October 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design |
Careful study showed that this was not the result of contamination: In a surprise to scientists, cyanobacteria have been found thriving nearly 2,000 feet below the strange landscape, where sunlight, water, and nutrients are scarce. Researchers previously thought these microbes could survive only while basking in the sun’s rays, although they are otherwise a versatile […]
SETI finds more creative ways to keep looking
| October 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design |
The aliens, we are told, are needles in a cosmic haystack: A new calculation shows that if space is an ocean, we’ve barely dipped in a toe. The volume of observable space combed so far for E.T. is comparable to searching the volume of a large hot tub for evidence of fish in Earth’s oceans, astronomer […]
Rob Sheldon: What if the “building blocks from space” are really degraded life?
| October 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design |
In the story we ran yesterday, “‘Compelling new evidence’ claimed for comets generating phosphates for earliest life,” we noted that our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon thinks that the idea that building blocks of life came from space is plausible and should be demonstrable. He offers his somewhat controversial thesis here: — I’ve argued elsewhere […]
Extraterrestrial civilizations: When all else fails, try Bayesianism
| October 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, Probability |
From ScienceDaily: Could there be another planet out there with a society at the same stage of technological advancement as ours? To help find out, EPFL scientist Claudio Grimaldi, working in association with the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a statistical model that gives researchers a new tool in the search for the kind […]
At the Guardian: Why are UFO sightings on the decline?
| September 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Extraterrestrial life, Religion |
Could it be that people just don’t care anymore? This month, the two major online sites for reporting UFOs – the National UFO Reporting Center and the Mutual UFO Network – both documented steep drops in worldwide sightings. The declines started around 2014, when reports were at a peak. They have since reduced drastically to […]
ET life: We should look for planets like Earth’s past, not it’s present
| September 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design |
Suggested at New Scientist: There may be life out there that was like life on Earth when Earth was a very different environment: In the 4.5 billion years our planet has existed, it has experienced dramatic transformations: ice ages and warming periods, times when the atmosphere was impossible to breathe, when large areas were desert, […]
There really IS a space alien religion
| September 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Religion |
We’ve often noticed that people who are bound and determined to find intelligent aliens treat it as a sort of religious quest. But now, as National Geographic reports from Brazil, it is taking an institutional form: According to Sunrise Valley followers, extraterrestrial beings landed on Earth 32,000 years ago to advance human civilizations. The beings […]
How can lots of water worlds be “bad news for life”?
| August 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, Fine tuning |
In other words, Earth doesn’t just “have water”; it is fine-tuned for life. We need to find exoplanets that are likewise fine-tuned.
At Scientific American: Maybe aliens live too fast or too slow for us to recognize
| August 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Even on Earth. And that is why we don’t see them, astrophysicist suggests: For example, could the messy chemistry we see in fossil fuels on Earth – a smorgasbord of organic reactions, a seemingly tarry chaos – be simply a short-term view of a living system that functions across hundreds of millions of years? Or […]
Atlantic writer loses his faith in aliens
| August 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Ethics, Extraterrestrial life, Mind |
And starts to come to terms with the difference that makes: If the revelation that humans are probably alone in our universe stands, and as that revelation sinks into our collective psyche, it could effect a second, weirder Copernican revolution in culture. To begin with, it’s really hard to square humanity’s status as perhaps the […]
Claim: A planet does not need plate tectonics to sustain life
| August 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design |
Plus, a friend offers a reply. From ScienceDaily: There may be more habitable planets in the universe than we previously thought, according to Penn State geoscientists, who suggest that plate tectonics — long assumed to be a requirement for suitable conditions for life — are in fact not necessary. When searching for habitable planets or […]
New paper: Cambrian explosion driven by viruses from space
| August 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Origin Of Life |
Delivered by comets. Abstract: We review the salient evidence consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology. Much of this physical and biological evidence is multifactorial. One particular focus are the recent studies which date the emergence of the complex retroviruses of vertebrate lines at or just before the Cambrian […]
Worms survive Siberian permafrost for 42,000 years
| August 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life |
Yesterday, we talked about the worm that survived the space shuttle blowup and the water bears in space, in relation to the question of whether early life forms night have ended up on the moon briefly, back when the solar system was rather soupy. And now we hear this: In Siberia, melting permafrost is releasing […]
Might we find evidence of past life on the Moon?
| July 31, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design |
Well, not today. But at one time, the Moon was not completely separate from Earth. It really depends on how long ago life got started here whether some microbial life could have been trapped on the moon and survived a while. The sagas of the worm that survived the space shuttle blowup and the water bears in space should warn against too-hasty dismissal.
Is that Mars lake way too salty for life?
| July 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life |
Hugh Ross thinks so. From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media: On Wednesday, media outlets breathlessly reported that scientists have discovered a “lake of liquid water” on Mars. Fox News called it a “game changer” in the search for alien life, and Yahoo News reported something similar. The New York Times headline spelled out the implications: […]
But if we don’t find life on either Mars or Europa…
| July 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design |
Does that mean anything? The reason we ask is, From Lisa Grossman at Science News: A Mars orbiter has detected a wide lake of liquid water hidden below the planet’s southern ice sheets. There have been much-debated hints of tiny, ephemeral amounts of water on Mars before. But if confirmed, this lake marks the first […]
