Stephen Kane thinks that many Venus-like planets will be more than 4 billion years old and could well have evolved intelligent life on them at some point.
Extraterrestrial life
Astrophysicist: Alien hunters, please stop using the Drake Equation
Actually, the intuition that They Are Out There is not based on science; it is based on deductive reasoning.
Did interstellar object Oumuamua normalize space aliens as science in 2018?
At least media feel freer to treat the topic that way: The turning point came in November, when Avi Loeb, the head of the astronomy department at Harvard University, co-wrote a paper saying that Oumuamua is so unusual that scientists should consider the possibility that it’s not a far-out comet or asteroid, as his colleagues assumed, […]
Origin of life thesis: Asteroid impacts scattered life-friendly chemicals
In which case, says an astrobiologist, the origin of life may be quite a bit easier than many of us envision.
Planets with oxygen not necessarily good candidates for ET life?
Researchers have found that the presence of oxygen in a planet’s atmosphere may not be a strong indicator of life: Simulating in the lab the atmospheres of planets beyond the solar system, researchers successfully created both organic compounds and oxygen, absent of life. The findings, published Dec. 11 by the journal ACS Earth and Space […]
If life might be “programmed into” the laws of nature, why not humans?
From a review of Universe in Creation: A New Understanding of the Big Bang and the Emergence of Life by astrophysicist Roy R. Gould: Whichever specific origin of life theory we turn to, the thesis that life is somehow programmed into the universe feels uncomfortable but also attractive. Uncomfortable, because it seems to carry a […]
What Earth vs Mars can teach us about fine tuning
We are told that Earth and Mars are like two siblings who have grown apart: “There was a time when their resemblance was uncanny: Both were warm, wet and shrouded in thick atmospheres. But 3 or 4 billion years ago, these two worlds took different paths”: Long ago, Mars stopped changing, while Earth continued to […]
Is SETI an “occult cult with money”?
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”
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?
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”?
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
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
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?
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
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 […]