Astrobiologist: What if a significant percentage of those planets and moons require only a few hundred kilogrammes of ‘the right chemical stuff’ to spark their own, unique biotic revolutions?
Extraterrestrial life
Why do sciencey people believe in extraterrestrials but not ghosts?
People who have a fully naturalist worldview can believe that there are extraterrestrials, without evidence, but not ghosts. That’s worldview, not evidence as such.
Transcension hypothesis: The aliens live at the nanoscale and are too small for us to see
Recall that shrinking or growing can both be seen as forms of travel. While the Transcension hypothesis has the extraterrestrials traveling away from us by shrinking, it is also possible to travel away by growing rapidly. Some religious writers, like C.S. Lewis, picture Hell as a very tiny place. Those who escape it simply grow far beyond its scale.
The Privileged Planet, Redux
We’ve all heard about the fine-tuning of physical constants–just change them ever so slightly and a different kind of universe emerges. Then, there’s simply our location in our galaxy that allows us to see outwards to the galaxy itself, and beyond. Now, even the radioactivity in the earth’s core seems to be conducive to life. Read More…
What if the aliens are just not as “evolved” as us?
The Firstborn hypothesis (we achieved intelligence before extraterrestrials) lines up with the view that humans are unique but sees that status as temporary.
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…
There. It’s over! There is no life on Venus
Ethan Siegel at Forbes: “a new study has just been submitted that calls the entire detection into doubt.”
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.
Hey, it’s Friday night? Anthropologists get in on “We are NOT alone!”
Of course, there’s the detail of actually finding any extraterrestrial life forms before we all fight viciously for the right to represent them as their agents and, if they are intelligent (but not especially so) get them to sign long-term contracts … 😉
UFOs don’t go to heaven because, you see, they never die
And their existence is never really confirmed either.
Elon Musk doubts there is life in the rest of the solar system
But one researcher contends that there might be something like an octopus on Europa.
ID and space exploration: The Privileged Planet Hypothesis
Earth is actually in a favored position for space exploration
Why some think there might be life on Venus… and others don’t
The article offers lots of interesting stuff about how life forms could possibly survive in the clouds of Venus. There are several plans in the works for probes.
Exoplanets made of diamonds?
Researchers: Exoplanets around stars with a higher carbon to oxygen ratio than our sun are more likely to be carbon-rich. They hypothesize that these carbon-rich exoplanets could convert to diamond and silicate, if water (which is abundant in the universe) were present, creating a diamond-rich composition.
Claim: Possible hints of life on Venus
A friend notes that, to judge from the Abstract, the way they reasoned the matter sounds like design theorist William Dembski’s explanatory filter.