Extraterrestrial life

From Derek Thompson at The Atlantic: In the seventh episode of Crazy/Genius, a new podcast from The Atlantic on tech, science, and culture, we put the question to several experts, including Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist of nasa and current director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; Adam Frank, a writer and astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; Anders Sandberg, a scientist and futurist at the University of Oxford; and Tim Urban, the science essayist at Wait But Why.More. Answers fell into three broad, predictable categories: There re no aliens. There are extraterrestrial life forms but they re not smart. And, the all-time favorite, they are out there but hiding. One wonders why there is a renewed Read More ›

From astrophysicist Ethan Siegel: No amount of fancy probabilistic analysis can justify treating guesswork and wishful thinking as having any sort of scientific weight. Applying scientific techniques to an inherently unscientific endeavor, such as inventing estimates to unknowns about the Universe, doesn’t make it any more scientific. The opposite of knowledge isn’t ignorance; it’s the illusion of knowledge. It’s still possible that life, and even intelligent life, is ubiquitous in our galaxy and the Universe. It’s also possible that one is common and one is uncommon, or that both are extraordinarily rare. Until we have more information, don’t be fooled by the headlines: these aren’t brilliant estimates or groundbreaking work. It’s guessing, in the absence of any good evidence. That’s Read More ›

The discovery of complex organic molecules on Saturn’s moon Enceladus raises the question:What about introducing organisms from Earth, even if none exist out there now? From Laurie Fickman at the University of Houston: In professor George Fox’s lab at the University of Houston, scientists are studying Earth germs that could be contaminating other planets. Despite extreme decontamination efforts, bacterial spores from Earth still manage to find their way into outer space aboard spacecraft. Fox and his team are examining how and why some spores elude decontamination. Their research is published in “BMC Microbiology.” To gain access into the uber-sanitized clean rooms at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the world’s largest clean room, or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Read More ›

From Michelle Starr at ScienceAlert: These findings bolster the hypothesis that, deep under its icy crust, Enceladus could be harbouring simple marine life, clustered around the warmth of hydrothermal vents. Previously, simple organic molecules detected on the little moon were under around 50 atomic mass units and only contained a handful of carbon atoms. “We are, yet again, blown away by Enceladus,” said geochemist and planetary scientist Christopher Glein of the Southwest Research Institute. “We’ve found organic molecules with masses above 200 atomic mass units. That’s over ten times heavier than methane. “With complex organic molecules emanating from its liquid water ocean, this moon is the only body besides Earth known to simultaneously satisfy all of the basic requirements for Read More ›

Okay, They’re not Out There. But maybe something is. Any form of extraterrestrial life could shed light on at least some questions. In that spirit, we learn from ScienceDaily of a newly published guidebook, in th form of a seriesof papers based on finds here on Earth: Some of the leading experts in the field, including a UC Riverside team of researchers, have written a major series of review papers on the past, present, and future of the search for life on other planets. Published in Astrobiology, the papers represent two years of work by the Nexus for Exoplanet Systems Science (NExSS), a NASA-coordinated research network dedicated to the study of planetary habitability, and by NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. Scientists have Read More ›

Further to researchers announcing that they have dissolved the Fermi Paradox (They can’t be Out There), physicist and science commentator Jim Al-Khalili at the Guardian: In 1950 Enrico Fermi, an Italian-born American Nobel prize-winning physicist, posed a very simple question with profound implications for one of the most important scientific puzzles: whether or not life exists beyond Earth. The story goes that during a lunchtime chat with colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the issue of flying saucers came up. The conversation was lighthearted, and it doesn’t appear that any of the scientists at that particular gathering believed in aliens. But Fermi merely wanted to know: “Where is everybody?” Indeed. It’s not as though the aliens Read More ›

The question of, if there are aliens out there, where are they? In short, they ain’t.  From Dissolving the Fermi Paradox by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler, Toby Ord: Abstract: The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe. The expectation that the universe should be teeming with intelligent life is linked to models like the Drake equation, which suggest that even if the probability of intelligent life developing at a given site is small, the sheer multitude of possible sites should nonetheless yield a large number of potentially observable civilizations. We show that this conflict arises from Read More ›

From Haley Dunning at Imperial College of London: The vast majority of life on Earth uses visible red light in the process of photosynthesis, but the new type uses near-infrared light instead. It was detected in a wide range of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) when they grow in near-infrared light, found in shaded conditions like bacterial mats in Yellowstone and in beach rock in Australia. As scientists have now discovered, it also occurs in a cupboard fitted with infrared LEDs in Imperial College London. … The standard, near-universal type of photosynthesis uses the green pigment, chlorophyll-a, both to collect light and use its energy to make useful biochemicals and oxygen. The way chlorophyll-a absorbs light means only the energy from red Read More ›

From Matt Williams at Universe Today: For decades, scientists have believed that there could be life beneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Since that time, multiple lines of evidence have emerged that suggest that it is not alone. Indeed, within the Solar System, there are many “ocean worlds” that could potentially host life, including Ceres, Ganymede, Enceladus, Titan, Dione, Triton, and maybe even Pluto. But what if the elements for life as we know it are not abundant enough on these worlds? In a new study, two researchers from the Harvard Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics (CfA) sought to determine if there could in fact be a scarcity of bioessential elements on ocean worlds. From a recent email from Read More ›

Based on Fermi’s Paradox (where are all the space aliens, if they exist?). From RT: A Russian theoretical physicist has predicted a grim future for our civilization that “is even worse than extinction.” Alexander Berezin, a highly-cited scientist from Russia’s National University of Electronic Technology Research, outlined his bleak prediction in an article entitled ‘First to enter, last to leave: a solution to Fermi’s paradox’. He thinks that the aliens will try to eradicate all competition, including us, to fuel their own expansion and be the power in the universe. While that dog-eat-dog theory may seem harsh, Berezin says total destruction of other life forms likely won’t be a conscious obliteration. “They simply [will] not realize, in the same way Read More ›

From Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, world’s richest man, at Fellowship of the Minds: From Fox News: The recently anointed richest person in the world, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, says we need to colonize the moon — and time is of the essence. … “We will have to leave this planet,” he said, according to Geek Wire. “We’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better. We’ll come and go, and the people who want to stay, will stay.” … Mr. Bezos believes it will happen in our lifetime because the human race has little alternative. “The alternative is stasis,” he said, adding that without space settlements, societies around the globe “will have to stop growing” Read More ›

Organic matter has been found on Mars in soil samples taken from 3 billion-year-old mudstone in the Gale crater by the Curiosity rover, NASA announced Thursday. The rover has also detected methane in the Martian atmosphere. It is not evidence for life as such, but methane is mostly produced on Earth by life forms. See also: Signs of life on Mars from 4 billion years ago?

From Lisa Grossman at ScienceNews: If you’re looking for starry skies, exotic plant life and extreme weather on your summer vacation, NASA’s Exoplanet Travel Bureau has just the spot. Consider a trip to Kepler 186f. This extrasolar planet is nearly 558 light-years away, so a real trip may be out of your budget — and astronomers aren’t sure if the sphere even has a life-sustaining atmosphere. But NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration website offers a virtual tour of what visiting the alien world might be like. More. Hey, don’t miss out on these artist’s impressions. The way things are going with the search for ET, humans, our domestic pets, menageries, and sanctuaries may be the first and only life these countless inhabitable Read More ›

A new book from astrophysicist Milan M. Ćirković, The Great Silence: Science and Philosophy of Fermi’s Paradox:  The Great Silence explores the multifaceted problem named after the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and his legendary 1950 lunchtime question “Where is everybody?” In many respects, Fermi’s paradox is the richest and the most challenging problem for the entire field of astrobiology and the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) studies. This book shows how Fermi’s paradox is intricately connected with many fields of learning, technology, arts, and even everyday life. It aims to establish the strongest possible version of the problem, to dispel many related confusions, obfuscations, and prejudices, as well as to offer a novel point of entry to the many Read More ›

From Steven Novella at Neurologica, replying to Ted Steele, the paper’s senior author: The claim is that examinations of meteorites have found microfossils representing single-celled life, either bacteria or even algae (eukaryotes). However, these claims are not generally accepted by the scientific community, and therefore cannot be used as a solid premise, let alone the rather arrogant claim that it reverses the burden of proof. Steele is referring to this paper by Richard Hoover (the reference to “Murchison” is to a meteorite, not a person). The paper was apparently rejected by legitimate peer-reviewed journals, and so was published in the Journal of Cosmology, which has a reputation for publishing low-quality speculation. Hoover also calls himself a doctor but his degree Read More ›