Extraterrestrial life

Fox news reports that an armchair astronomer, David Martine, claims that he’s discovered evidence of intelligent life on Mars. In this YouTube video Martine speculates that it could be a bio lab, or a dwelling or garage (he hope’s its not a weapon. NASA is investigating. So, is this evidence of intelligent design? Is it a natural phenomenon of some sort? Or is it a hoax (albeit an intelligently designed one)? And how might one go about making the determination? Thoughts anyone?

How does NASA’s repurposing affect the search for life (of any kind, assuming reasonable expectations) on other planets? Here, Mark Baisley is CEO of Slipglass, a defense-intelligence contractor specializing in information security, comments on “whither NASA?”, Read More ›

Sorry for judging delay. The contest, you’ll recall, riffed off New Scientist’s offer of a Mars rock: Tell New Scientist what the first person to set foot on Mars should say. The winner gets a copy of The Nature of Nature , where Guillermo Gonzalez discusses the constraints of the galactic habitable zone.

(Note: That New Scientist contest is still open until June 15. )

There were lots of good, fun entries. The winner is:

14 MedsRex
“hold on, i’ll start collecting bacterium samples in a bit…let my update my, facebook status first!” Read More ›

In “Mars ‘remains in embryonic state’”( BBC News, 27 May 2011), Jennifer Carpenter floats an interesting idea about Mars:

Mars formed in record time, growing to its present size in a mere three million years, more quickly than scientists previously thought.Its rapid formation could explain why the Red Planet is about one tenth the mass of Earth. Read More ›

According to David Shiga (New Scientist 18 May 2011), they’ve been repurposed after the recent shutdown* when state funds dried up: “Alien-hunters focus in on habitable planets”:

Astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, the SETI Institute of California, and the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory are listening for alien signals from dozens of planets in the so-called “habitable zone” of their stars, the first time a targeted search of this kind has been undertaken.

“We’ve honed the list to the really exciting exoplanets,” says team member Dan Werthimer of UC Berkeley

Essentially, they are looking for planets in habitable zones. Read More ›

Here’s Lee Billings at New Scientist coming to the point with admirable swiftness:

Two decades of searching have failed to turn up another planetary system like ours. Should we be worried?- “No place like home: Our lonesome solar system” (11 May 2011)

He answers his own question, in part:

It was clear we had ignored a fundamental rule of science. “We had been judging the cosmic diversity of planetary systems based on a sample size of one,” says Marcy.

If these were the first hints that our solar system was not normal, they were not the last. Other planets were soon caught breaking all sorts of rules: orbiting in the opposite direction to their star’s spin, coming packed in close orbits like sardines in a can, or revolving on wildly tilted orbits far away from their star’s equator.

Soon “theorists began to supply the necessary creation stories.”

Billings brings us up to date on how planets are detected, then comes the punch line:

All this makes the status of our solar system increasingly clear. “Our system is a rarity, there’s no longer a question about that,” says Marcy. “The only question that remains is, just how rare is it?”

Expelled ID guy Guillermo Gonzalez predicted this state of affairs. Here, for example, in 2001: Read More ›

In New Scientist, Ken Croswell tells us that “Alien life may huddle under hydrogen blankets” (12 May 2011): OUR planet seems to be in just the right spot to sport a mild climate. Not too near the sun’s heat, not too far from its warmth, in a narrow habitable zone in which water is liquid and life can thrive. But Earth could still support life even if it were as far from the sun as Saturn, claim two scientists in the US, as long as the air abounded with hydrogen. If they are right, then billions of life-bearing planets may exist much further from their host stars than astronomers had thought possible.  Not everyone agrees, of course: “It’s a clever Read More ›

Interesting discussion at “Don’t defund SETI, science broadcaster pleads.” Could SETI just merge with ID and study evidence of intelligence in signals along those lines? Otherwise, it could merge with astrobiology units at various universities and restrict itself to looking for evidence of bacterial life in outer space. SETI has always been handicapped by the Saganesque silliness about space aliens, which made it vulnerable to any politician looking for a program he can trim or cut, by making it sound ridiculous. Put another way, the unemployed don’t care if there are space aliens or not. But that would cut the heart out of the mission of a project that, through SETI@home, has assembled vast volunteer computational resources. What a waste. Read More ›

Bob McDonald, the science guy  at Canada’s government broadcaster, CBC, critiques (April 28, 2011) the spending on the Royal Wedding, contrasting it with the small amount required to keep the recently defunded, 50-year-old Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program going: … Until recently, their efforts had been hampered by the fact that they had to beg for borrowed time on telescopes, when they weren’t being used for other research. But thanks, in part, to the generosity of Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, the Institute finally got its own instrument — an array of 40 telescopes, each six metres in diameter, set in the desert 300 kilometres north of San Francisco. But building a telescope is only the first part of Read More ›

At MSNBC’s Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle tells us “How tycoons will fuel space flight” (April 22, 2011):

With the shuttle program winding down, the future of American spaceflight may well depend on how starry-eyed tycoons spend their money — and some of NASA’s money as well. Read More ›

Here.

(CNN) — Interstellar radio has lost one of its most avid and high-profile listeners.A collection of sophisticated radio telescopes in California that scan the heavens for extraterrestrial signals has suspended operations because of lack of funding, a spokeswoman said Monday.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute operates the Allen Telescope Array, the field of dish-like scopes some 300 miles north of San Francisco. The telescopes are a joint effort of SETI and University of California-Berkeley’s Radio Astronomy Lab and have been funded largely by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who donated more than $25 million to the project.

Comments? Read More ›

  Maybe: ScienceDaily (Apr. 16, 2011) – A sky with two suns is a favourite image for science fiction films, but how would a binary star system affect life  evolving on an orbiting planet? Jack O’Malley-James of the University of St Andrews has studied what plants might be like on an Earth-like  planet with two or three suns and found that they may appear black or grey. [ … ] “If a planet were found in a system with two or more stars, there would potentially be multiple sources of energy available to drive photosynthesis. The temperature of a star determines its colour and, hence, the colour of light used for photosynthesis. Depending on the colours of their star-light, plants Read More ›

Mark Buchanan suggests (08 April 2011) at New Scientist that the “Aliens who hide, survive”. Attempting to explain why, if there are really so many space aliens, none of them have ever contacted us to pick up their legacies or their mail, he offers that – as always – natural selection is the answer: In order to explain the Fermi paradox, Kent turns to natural selection – and suggests that it may favour quiet aliens.He argues that it’s plausible that there is a competition for resources on a cosmic scale, driving an evolutionary process between alien species on different planets. Advanced species, for example, might want to exploit other planets for their own purposes. If so, the universe would be Read More ›

It was the best of times, and the worst of times. NASA was making new discoveries every day, discoveries that would change the course of science forever, and yet, they could not publish them for fear that it would destroy their government mandate, their public image. The discovery of microfossils on comets that made the news a month ago cannot be told without understanding the history of extra-terrestrials (ET) and NASA. It is a curious tale, with Darwinists embarassed and Designers triumphant except when the press show up, and it may still have even more twists to come, but the saga needs to be told for the sake of our children, and their children’s children who may look up through Read More ›

Here are the edited conference proceedings (.pdf) of a roundtable discussion among leading astrobiologists, to relate atrobiology goals to planning in planetary sciences: “The Next Phase in Our Search for Life: An Expert Discussion”:

Moderator: Christopher P. McKayParticipants: Dirk Schulze-Makuch, Penelope Jane Boston, Inge L. ten Kate, Alfonso F. Davila, and Everett Shock

Some interesting stuff here:

PJB: I served for about three years on the National Research Council (NRC) Complex Panel and just about everybriefng we received from anyone within the planetary programs always included the life question, because it is something that’s on everyone’s mind, whether they do this kind of science or not.

This question is one that I have struggled with a lot. To scope out the physical and chemical environment is really inextricably bound to the search for life, and it is true that we have focused a great deal on that because, truthfully, it is a lot easier to measure a physical parameter on Mars than it is to, ‘‘search for life,’’ because that latter question is so open-ended. We have a very poor constraint set on what we actually mean by the term ‘‘life,’’ and searching for biochemistry and macromolecules that look just like those on Earth is not an efficient approach. It is much more challenging to imagine how we would actually design a real life detection mission.

So people are tempted to shy away from coming to grips with that very difficult epistemological question, which is: Read More ›