Extraterrestrial life

Rob Sheldon is our physics color commentator, and he offers some thoughts on the claims made in A SETI hypothesis: We are Them: a) The paper is a sequel to this one: “The WoW! signal of the terrestrial genetic code” In that original paper, the same authors argue that the mapping between nucleotides and amino acids shows peculiar arrangements of high Shannon information, and is therefore a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence. As you might guess, the authors took a lot of flak for saying this. This paper is the response. b) This paper tries to argue the opposite direction, that if you were a supremely intelligent person designing the mapping from DNA–>amino acids, how would you go about putting information Read More ›

A friend sends this from the International Journal of Astrobiology (Cambridge): Maxim A. Makukov (a1) and Vladimir I. shCherbak (a2) Published online: 10 July 2017 After it was proposed that life on Earth might descend from seeding by an earlier extraterrestrial civilization motivated to secure and spread life, some authors noted that this alternative offers a testable implication: microbial seeds could be intentionally supplied with a durable signature that might be found in extant organisms. In particular, it was suggested that the optimal location for such an artefact is the genetic code, as the least evolving part of cells. However, as the mainstream view goes, this scenario is too speculative and cannot be meaningfully tested because encoding/decoding a signature within Read More ›

From Mike Wall at Space.com: Ultraviolet (UV) radiation streaming from the sun “activates” chlorine compounds in the Red Planet’s soil, turning them into potent microbe-killers, a new study suggests. These compounds, known as perchlorates, seem to be widespread in the Martian dirt; several NASA missions have detected them at a variety of locations. Perchlorates have some characteristics that would appear to boost the Red Planet’s habitability. They drastically lower the freezing point of water, for example, and they offer a potential energy source for microorganisms, scientists have said. But the new study, by Jennifer Wadsworth and Charles Cockell — both of the U.K. Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland — paints perchlorates in a different light. Read More ›

From Mike Wall at Space.com: NASA is not preparing to drop an alien-life bombshell, despite what you may have heard. Last week, the hacking group Anonymous posted a video on YouTube suggesting that the space agency is about to announce the discovery of life beyond Earth. The video has made a big splash online — so big that NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen addressed the rumor today (June 26). “Contrary to some reports, there’s no pending announcement from NASA regarding extraterrestrial life,” Zurbuchen said via Twitter, where he posts as @Dr_ThomasZ. More. Aw, it’s nice day. Go back to the pool. See also: How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there?

As in: NASA said Monday it has found new evidence of 219 planets outside our Solar System. Ten of those exoplanets appear to be similar to the size of the Earth and orbit their stars in the habitable zone. From our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon The Kepler telescope had a glitch in 2013 that prevented it from taking any more data. This press release records the final batch of data analysis and the completion of the Kepler planet-finding mission. Most of these 2000 candidates have yet to be verified by other telescopes, so they remain “candidates” or KOI (Kepler Objects of Interest). Filtering the data for Earth-sized planets circling Sun-like stars, came up with a list of about 10. Read More ›

From Ross Pomeroy at Space.com: 10. Nobody is transmitting. Instead, everybody may be listening. That’s basically how it is here on Earth. Apart from a few paltry efforts to broadcast strong signals over a narrow frequency band towards the stars above, we’ve barely made our presence known in the universe. In fact, if aliens have radio telescopes similar to what we have on Earth, our television and radio broadcasts would only be detectable up to 0.3 light-years away. That distance doesn’t even transcend the farthest reaches of our solar system. 11. Earth is deliberately not being contacted. On Earth, we have policies about contacting indigenous peoples; it’s possible that the same thing could be happening with us. Just like in Read More ›

From Leonard David at LiveScience: The idea is that mathematics is as much a part of our humanity as music and art. And it is mathematics that might be understandable — even familiar — to extraterrestrial civilizations, allowing us to strike up star-speak repartee. Carl DeVito, an emeritus faculty in the mathematics department at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has proposed a language based on plausibly universal scientific concepts. He recently detailed his work at the Astrobiology Science Conference 2017, held from April 24 to April 28 in Mesa, Arizona. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life] Designing a signal that attracts attention and, on examination, is “clearly” the work of intelligence, is a complex problem, DeVito told Space.com. Read More ›

Readers may recall that NASA wonders how world religions would react if alien life were found. But Kirk Durston wonders at ENV whether atheism would survive. The probability of life spontaneously self-assembling anywhere in this universe is mind-staggeringly unlikely; essentially zero. If you are so unquestioningly naïve as to believe we just got incredibly lucky, then bless your soul. If we were to discover extraterrestrial life, however, then we would have had to get mind-staggeringly lucky two times! Like the forensic detectives at the lotteries commission, a thinking person would have to start operating on the well-founded suspicion that “something is going on.” On the other hand, the existence of life and beauty elsewhere in the universe is not at Read More ›

From Jeanna Bryner at LiveScience: Bigelow noted during the interview May 28 that his grandparents spotted a UFO on a canyon road outside Las Vegas: “It really sped up and came right into their face and filled up the entire windshield of the car. And it took off at a right angle and shot off into the distance,” he told “60 Minutes” reporter Lara Logan. “Do you believe in aliens?” Logan asked. “I’m absolutely convinced and that’s all there is to it,” said Bigelow, founder and CEO of the commercial space company Bigelow Aerospace. “There has been and there is an existing presence, an E.T. presence.” When asked if he expects to see forms of intelligent life as humans explore Read More ›

Huh? In a field where one must avoid getting “bought,” we hacks rarely run into people who are not sending us tons of mail/pix/vids. But this just in: From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post: German theologian Ulrike Auga’s space images advisory role for NASA seems particularly suspect not just because it smacks of Leni Riefenstahl-style manipulation but because some weeks ago (February 8) Auga abruptly cancelled an interview with me about her work on the nearly $3M NASA/Templeton/Center of Theological Inquiry investigation (2015-2017) into how the religious community would respond to the discovery of life in outer space plus we have not seen any report in the US from Auga about her US publicly funded advisory activity for NASA. Auga Read More ›

From Denise Chow, the list includes Hillary Clinton Hillary Clinton has a long political history advocating for children and families, gender equality and health care reform, but in 2016, during her bid to secure the Democratic nomination for president, Clinton turned her attention to the paranormal. In a radio interview and then later on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Clinton said she wants to review files about UFOs and the mysterious Area 51 site in Nevada and make them public. “I would like us to go into those files and hopefully make as much of that public as possible,” she told Kimmel. “If there’s nothing there, let’s tell people there’s nothing there.” Area 51, located about 80 miles (130 kilometers) northwest of Read More ›

From Mindy Weinberger, interviewing SETIs Seth Shostak at LiveScience: “The search should continue, simply because it’s a very interesting question,” he said. “Is Earth special? Is it the only place around with intelligent life? That would be remarkable — but it’s just as remarkable to find you’re not the only kid on the block. That’s something that would change our view of ourselves forever,” he said. More. But how or why would their discovery “change our view of ourselves forever”? Wouldn’t we still be the same? See also: But surely we can’t conjure an entire advanced civilization? and How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Bob Holmes at New Scientist: How can we search for life on other planets when we don’t know what it might look like? One chemist thinks he has found an easy answer: just look for sophisticated molecular structures, no matter what they’re made of. The strategy could provide a simple way for upcoming space missions to broaden the hunt. Until now, the search for traces of life, or biosignatures, on other planets has tended to focus mostly on molecules like those used by earthly life. Thus, Mars missions look for organic molecules, and future missions to Europa may look for amino acids, unequal proportions of mirror-image molecules, and unusual ratios of carbon isotopes, all of which are signatures of Read More ›

Yesterday, we heard from the people who think they know why we might never hear from alien civilizations. Today’s turn goes to Santhosh Mathew at the Guardian, who wonders if religion will survive if we do hear from them: The interaction with alien life is not just being discussed in the domain of philosophy any more, it has entered into the traditional scientific realm. Realising this possibility, Nasa, in 2014, gave $1.1m to the Center of Theological Inquiry, an independent institution, to support an initiative to study “the societal implications of astrobiology”. Nasa was criticised by some for providing money to an organisation rooted in Christian theology. Yes. That’s because it sounds to many of us like a solution in Read More ›

Still another reason? From Leah Crane at New Scientist: Grimaldi assumed that signals from an extraterrestrial emitter might get weaker or be blocked as they travel, so they would only cover a certain volume of space. It’s relatively simple to calculate the probability that Earth is within that space and so able to detect the signal. “Not all signals can be visible at the same time – only those that intersect with the Earth,” says Grimaldi. He found that even if half of our galaxy was full of alien noise, the average number of signals that we would be able to detect from Earth is less than one (Scientific Reports, doi.org/b562). This implies that, even if there are lots of Read More ›