Extraterrestrial life

From Leah Crane at New Scientist: NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Emission) spacecraft found layers of atmospheric metal ions that defy models based loosely on Earth’s atmosphere. … The space between planets is full of metallic dust and rocks. As they are drawn into a planet’s atmosphere, they burn up, leaving behind metal particles like iron and magnesium. On Earth, the behaviour of those particles is mostly controlled by the planet’s strong magnetic field. They use magnetic fields as a sort of highway, and stream along the magnetic field lines to form thin layers throughout the atmosphere. But Mars has no such field. The planet does have small regions with weak magnetic fields in its southern hemisphere, but without Read More ›

A literary essay from David Randall at First Things: Yet three notable works of science fiction do address themselves to the power of that old promise against the secular infinitudes of time and space: Cordwainer Smith’s “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” (1964), John Morressy’s The Mansions of Space (1983), and R. A. Lafferty’s Past Master (1968). These novels share a Christian preoccupation—a theological preoccupation—with the survival of faith threatened sometimes by oblivion, sometimes by annihilation, and sometimes indeed by the gates of hell. The three fables vary on an important particular. The survival of faith may or may not be identical with the survival of the Church—and the difference between broadly Christian and specifically Catholic science fiction may be Read More ›

A Wow! signal is definite evidence for extraterrestrial life. We missed this from 2013: The SETI hypothesis of an intelligent signal in the genetic code is tested. The code is shown to possess an ensemble of same-style precision-type patterns. The patterns are shown to match the criteria of an intelligent signal. It’s apparently still legal to say that. From ScienceDirect at Icarus: Abstract: It has been repeatedly proposed to expand the scope for SETI, and one of the suggested alternatives to radio is the biological media. Genomic DNA is already used on Earth to store non-biological information. Though smaller in capacity, but stronger in noise immunity is the genetic code. The code is a flexible mapping between codons and amino acids, Read More ›

In a survey article of centuries of views, Jon Garvey offers at Hump of the Camel: God might indeed decide to make life on earth a unique case, and the vastness of a cosmos uninhabited by other physical beings a matter for himself alone. Indeed, one of the intriguing aspects of cosmic fine tuning is the realisation that a vast universe is necessary to enable the conditions a tiny inhabited world like ours requires. God’s prodigality in doing so much for us would make as plausible, and inconclusive, a case. Yet Chalmers once more shows that extraterrestrial life poses no inherent problem whatsoever for Christianity. Neither, though, does a universe in which life is unique to the earth – a Read More ›

The other day, we noted that NASA has been spending money on the question of how world religions would view the discovery of life on other planets. (Meanwhile, Stephen Hawking insists that we must colonize other planets to avoid extinction (he gives us 1000 years) and that world government is needed to stop technology destroying us, which will sound to most people like a choice of methods of execution. 😉 ) From Siobhan Lyons at MercatorNet: Numerous writers and film-makers have turned their attention to the question of what it means for humanity to be annihilated. In Nevil Shute’s critically acclaimed On the Beach (1957), a hallmark Nuclear Age sci-fi work alongside Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959), a cloud of radiation slowly drifts from the Northern Read More ›

I would hardly trust anyone but Suzan Mazur, author of Public Evolution Summit, to get to the bottom of this one, at Huffington Post: A Chat w/ NASA-funded Italian Jesuit Andrea Vicini Andrea Vicini was one of two dozen religious scholars who between 2015 and 2017 shared nearly $3M awarded jointly by NASA and the John Templeton Foundation (administered by the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton) to investigate how the religious community would respond to the discovery of life in outer space. As I’ve already reported, informants at NASA tell me we will not find life anywhere else in the solar system. So why blow 5% of the NASA Astrobiology Institute budget on such a project? I spoke recently by Read More ›

From Eric Berger at Ars Technica: Thanks to the ominous warning in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, 2010: Odyssey Two, much of the science and technical community shares Culberson’s fascination with Europa. But for the general public, the icy moon remains largely an unknown. Eight billion dollars to peck at the ice on some moon around Jupiter? What is the sense of that? As he works on his peers in Congress, Culberson will eventually have to convince Joe the Plumber, Ken Bone, and the rest of America about the relevance of Europa, too. For this mission, he has a secret weapon. During the briefings at JPL, Culberson brought a friend with him, the famed Director James Cameron. The two men share Read More ›

But what are they? From Charles Cockell at Physics Today: Look at the menagerie of life—for example, as depicted by Jan Brueghel the Elder in the painting to the left. The casual viewer could easily conclude that life is limitless in its scope, that its forms and shapes are constrained only by the imagination. But however trite the observation may be, life must conform to the laws of physics. Science still does not know how many possible solutions there are to building a self-replicating system within those laws, however, or to what extent physics constrains the products of the evolutionary process. At the scale of organisms, physical laws certainly do limit the engineering solutions to life’s problems. For example, consider locomotion. Read More ›

The original Nature article is here. From Sarah Lewin at LiveScience: Winston Churchill was known for his leadership during World War II, but a newfound essay on alien life reveals another side of him, one that was deeply curious about the universe. “I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilization here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures,” he wrote in the newly uncovered essay, “or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.” More. Churchill’s opinions sound cogent, though not a history-making Read More ›

From Keith Cooper at Space.com: Venus has long been a focus of Russian planetary science, which has the proud legacy of the record-breaking Venera space probes that landed on the Venusian surface in the late 1970s and early 1980s. [Mysterious Venus: 10 Weird Facts] Time to bone up on Venus; probes are under developent. With many questions remaining unanswered, the joint mission of Roscosmos and NASA, if approved, would see an orbiter launch toward Venus in 2025 with the aim to make remote-sensing observations of the planet and its atmosphere; deploy a lander on the surface; and search for future landing sites. Now, the “life” hope is dark streaks in Venus’s clouds. Finding life at high altitude in the atmosphere Read More ›

Taking issue wth paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch writes at Air and Space Smithsonian: Since we doubtlessly did originate from animal ancestors, the gap between us and them must have been bridged at some point in time. Perhaps it was not a jump, but a continuous evolution. Were the mental abilities of the cavewoman or caveman really as advanced as today’s humans? How much ability for abstraction and appreciation of complex numbers did they have? Since modern humans are the evidence that bridging the gap is possible, we might ask why it wasn’t bridged earlier, perhaps by an intelligent octopus, a smart dinosaur, a dolphin, or another ape? They’ve had millions more years to evolve than we have, Read More ›

For example, Life on Mars: New focus on deciding where to look vs. The aliens went extinct before we found them— there, that’s the answer! But now, consider all the other theses about why the aliens, they never write, they never phone Astrobiology is, as has been famously said, at present a discipline without a subject. And, one would add, philosophy of science hobby where hidden theology rules, in the absence of evidence. You know the sort of thing: What kind of a God would/wouldn’t …? What warm pillows for an academic grantsman when we actually don’t know what is going on out there. Either we can’t know about extraterrestrial life, in which case we should just forget about it. Read More ›

In the fact of changes at NASA. Release your inner adult. From Debra Werner at SpaceNews: “You are leaders in your community, please be a source of signal, not a source of noise,” Zurbuchen said Dec. 12 during the annual Earth Science Town Hall meeting at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. The names of two key new figures, NASA administrator and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy are not yet announced. Funding for NASA’s Earth science program has traditionally waxed and waned with changing administrations. Funding as a percent of NASA’s overall budget declined sharply from 2001 to 2006, the early years of the George W. Bush presidency, dipping from about 11 Read More ›

From Jeff Foust at Space.com: Ellen Stofan, NASA’s Chief Scientist, Departs Space Agency She served three years. In the NASA interview, Stofan cited a range of “fun challenges” she worked on while chief scientist, including helping develop NASA’s long-term strategy for human Mars exploration. That effort, she said, is a key part of a broader scientific theme of searching for evidence of life beyond Earth … Institutionally, she said one of the achievements she was most proud of as chief scientist was getting the agency to voluntarily request demographic information in grant proposals submitted by scientists. That information, she said, is important to understanding any biases in how the agency awards those grants. “Implicit or unconscious bias is all around Read More ›

We get round to this every eighteen months or so. From Noelle Dahm at Nautilus: Absent signs of life, astronomers are starting to look for extraterrestrial nuclear wars and pandemics. The aliens may have found their grave. As we sweep the radio frequencies, we hear only noise; as we slew our telescopes, we see barren pixel after pixel. Is that because our fellow inhabitants of the galaxy have done themselves in, reducing their home planets to cinders? Is the night sky a charnel house hidden under a veil of tranquility? Last year Jack O’Malley-James, an astrobiologist at Cornell University, and his colleagues Adam Stevens and Duncan Forgan published their analysis of this macabre possibility. Just as astrobiologists have started to Read More ›