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Extraterrestrial life

Paper at PNAS challenges universal common descent

The underlying issue may well be this: With the James Webb Space Telescope headed off to survey countless exoplanets, astrobiology (search for extraterrestrial life) is becoming cool. A strict neo-Darwinian approach, as in “All life unearth arose from a single cell” is, at best, inconvenient. At worst, a true bummer. The astrobiologist is going to be much happier with “prime candidates for developing new theory on the ‘laws of life’ that might apply to all possible biochemistries…” Life lesson: Researchers will sacrifice Darwinism pretty quickly when it is an actual impediment. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Is this idea too crazy?: There was life on the early Moon?

To the extent that the universe appears fine-tuned for life to a dramatic degree, it’s at least reasonable to think it could have survived on, say, the Moon or Mars until conditions there became prohibitive. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Former astronaut names planet he thinks most likely to have life

Chris Hadfield points to Kepler-442b as Earth-like but some researchers defend the possibility of life even on tidally locked planets, in “edge” zones. Read More ›

Isn’t the famous Drake Equation a sort of design filter for intelligence?

Whatever the fate of current ET detection projects, a Design Filter like design theorist William Dembski’s beats squabbling about the probability without collecting any data. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Will religions crumble if we find extraterrestrial life?

At Insider: "Davison also wrote in the book, which is set to be released in 2022, that the nonreligious community tended to "overestimate the challenges that religious people" might face if evidence of extraterrestrial life were discovered. " Read More ›

Present day Martian groundwater a mirage, researchers say

U Texas Austin: The researchers think their conclusion -- volcanic rock buried under ice -- is a more plausible explanation for the 2018 discovery, which was already in question after scientists calculated the unlikely conditions needed to keep water in a liquid state at Mars' cold, arid south pole. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: What if ET has morphed into what we now call the laws of nature?

Takehome: Scharf’s hypothesis highlights the genuine difficulty of accounting for a universe that comes into existence without any underlying intelligence at all. His thought experiment amounts to an intelligent design hypothesis for the universe in which the creators and the laws of nature turn out to be the same thing. It is much bolder than the usual arguments around fine-tuning of our universe. It highlights the genuine difficulty of accounting for a universe that comes into existence without any underlying intelligence at all. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Astronomer: We can’t just assume countless Earths out there

Marcelo Gleiser notes that the starting point of the Mediocrity Principle assumes countless Earths. That’s not a conclusion from evidence. It’s bad logic. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Astronomer says, ET is more likely to be AI than to be a life form

Rees and colleagues assume that artificial intelligences can be creative thinkers. But the evidence so far is against that view. It’s not necessarily a matter of just ramping up the technology. By their very nature, computers compute but creative thinking is largely non-computational. We should keep that in mind when we encounter breathless media releases claiming to have overcome the problem. Read More ›