Extraterrestrial 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 consider a chunk of complex rock, a mixture of minerals and carbon chemistry. It may be bathed for a billion years in cosmic rays and indigenous particle radiation. It changes over that timescale, electrons are freed and captured, slow, slow chemistry and structural variation happens. Your pet rock might be just that, except you’re living too fast to notice. Of course, rather frustratingly, to make Read More ›

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 only intelligent species in all of time and space with the idea that we are insignificant. To the contrary, the everyday breath of the least of us contains meaning in so concentrated a form that a cup’s worth of it could be doled out to a dozen star systems, transforming the arid matter into a garden of significance. There’s been a lot of talk in Read More ›

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 life on other planets, scientists look for biosignatures of atmospheric carbon dioxide. On Earth, atmospheric carbon dioxide increases surface heat through the greenhouse effect. Carbon also cycles to the subsurface and back to the atmosphere through natural processes. “Volcanism releases gases into the atmosphere, and then through weathering, carbon dioxide is pulled from the atmosphere and sequestered into surface rocks and sediment,” said Bradford Foley, Read More ›

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 Explosion of ∼500 Ma. Such viruses are known to be plausibly associated with major evolutionary genomic processes. We believe this coincidence is not fortuitous but is consistent with a key prediction of H-W theory whereby major extinction-diversification evolutionary boundaries coincide with virus-bearing cometary-bolide bombardment events. A second focus is the remarkable evolution of intelligent complexity (Cephalopods) culminating in the emergence of the Octopus. A third Read More ›

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 nematodes — microscopic worms that live in soil — that have been suspended in a deep freeze since the Pleistocene. Despite being frozen for tens of thousands of years, two species of these worms were successfully revived, scientists recently reported in a new study. … Though nematodes are tiny — typically measuring about 1 millimeter in length — they are known to possess impressive abilities. Read More ›

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: “Raising the Potential for Alien Life.” He quotes Hugh Ross, Ph.D. astronomer Hugh Ross told PJ Media that these reports twisted the truth. In reality, the scientists found what could be a lake, but Ross noted that it certainly does not contain life. The peer-reviewed study published in the journal Science reported on findings from 22 planetary astronomers in Italy working on data from the Read More ›

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 discovery of a long-lasting cache of the liquid. “This is potentially a really big deal,” says planetary scientist Briony Horgan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. “It’s another type of habitat in which life could be living on Mars today.”More. and From JPL/NASA: New comprehensive mapping of the radiation pummeling Jupiter’s icy moon Europa reveals where scientists should look — and how deep they’ll Read More ›

Instead of meaningless? How exactly did we get from “Alone” to “Meaningless” via eloquence from tenured pundits? Where do we buy return tickets? A blogging neurologist asks this obvious question. From Steven Novella at The Ness: Until, however, we detect actual aliens or their signals, the rest of the factors in the equation are likely to remain a mystery. Put simply – we have a sample size of one. We don’t know how likely life is to develop intelligence, and intelligence technology, and how long such civilizations tend to last. We won’t know until we encounter evidence of aliens. And, if there are few or no other aliens out there, we will never know the full answer. We would only Read More ›

From SETI’s Seth Shostak, who surely doesn’t welcome this news, at NBC: A recent paper by three researchers at the University of Oxford is throwing shade on those who feel confident that the cosmos is thick with extraterrestrials. … If we own up to the true extent of these uncertainties and do the requisite math, the Oxford study finds that there’s at least a 53 percent chance that we’re alone in the Milky Way and at least a 40 percent chance that we’re alone in the visible universe. Homo sapiens could be the smartest thing going. This result, they claim, melts the Fermi Paradox like butter on a hot griddle — maybe no one has colonized the galaxy because no Read More ›

From Charles Q. Choi at Inside Science: When it comes to looking for alien life, scientists mostly focus on where there is water. Now researchers suggest that looking at “bioessential” elements such as phosphorus and molybdenum could help judge a world’s potential for life. But if we can’t find water, why should we consider these elements biosignatures? To see what roles such bioessential elements might play in the evolution of alien life, the researchers focused on how accessible they might be on worlds with liquid oceans underneath their frozen surfaces, much like Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. “People suspect there may be life in liquid water under the ice in Europa and Enceladus, and both NASA and ESA Read More ›

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: Based on everything we know, it seems like the conditions that make life possible are a lot more diverse and flexible than most people would expect. … Take Earth’s large moon, for example. The gravitational forces from it keep our planet rotating on the same axis over time. Our present axial tilt is 23.5 degrees, but this will vary over very long timescales between 22.1° and 24.5°. A world like Mars, on the other hand, has almost the same axial tilt as Earth: around 25°. But over tens of millions of years, this will vary by ten times as much as it does on Earth: from a minimum of 13° to a maximum of 40°. Read More ›

The reality that earth is fine-tuned for life screams out at us from stories that seem to make a point of not emphasizing the fact. From ScienceDaily: The researchers suggest that Kepler-186f’s axial tilt is very stable, much like the Earth, making it likely that it has regular seasons and a stable climate. The Georgia Tech team thinks the same is true for Kepler-62f, a super-Earth-sized planet orbiting around a star about 1,200 light-years away from us. How important is axial tilt for climate? Large variability in axial tilt could be a key reason why Mars transformed from a watery landscape billions of years ago to today’s barren desert. “Mars is in the habitable zone in our solar system, but Read More ›

Plus a bunch of useful stuff. In a month when we have been heard hearing about all things alien, from everything from it’s good news that they probably don’t exist through to they might be hoarding stars… here is a book that has it all in one place: From Sophia Centre press: An anthology of works stemming from the ninth Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena conference. Editors: Nicholas Campion & Chris Impey Series: Studies in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology, Vol. 9 Publisher: Sophia Centre Press, 2018 Format: Paperback, 352 pp. ISBN 978-1-907767-11-1 Human beings have long imagined what other worlds are like. They have imagined travelling to them, have endowed them with meaning and mystery, and have fantasised about the beings Read More ›