Lifeboat Foundation

For as long as she can remember, she’s puzzled over what’s out there. As a kid drifting off to sleep on a trampoline outside her family’s home near Portland, Ore., she would track the International Space Station. She remembers cobbling together a preteen version of the Drake Equation on those nights and realizing that the likelihood of intelligent alien life was something greater than zero. Star Trek marathons with her father catalyzed her cosmic thinking, as did her mother’s unexpected death when Bailey was 8. The house lost some of its order—some of its gravity—which led to more nights gazing skyward on the trampoline.

In college, Bailey got a hard-won paid internship at the now-merged aerospace giant Hamilton Sundstrand and joined a team repairing turbine engines. She hated it. “It was the opposite of pushing the envelope,” she says. “Nothing new ever went into that building. Nothing new ever left that building.”

By the time she set off to get a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Duke University, the idea of logging 30 years at a place like Boeing Cor NASA had lost all appeal. She tried her hand at finance and later law, and was unlucky enough to excel at both. “I made it pretty far down that path, but then I thought, Wait, if I become a lawyer, then I’m a lawyer and that’s what I do,” she recalls. “What if I don’t want to do that on Tuesdays?”

Continue reading “Ion Engine Startup Wants to Change the Economics of Earth Orbit” »

Aliens might be out there. Or, perhaps, they might not.

For nearly a century, humans have been searching for alien life. Scientists have come up with theories for why we have not yet succeeded. Here are six of the most popular explanations.

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Interstellar travel one of the most moral projects? “one of the most moral projects might be to prepare for interstellar travel. After all, if the Earth becomes inhabitable—whether in 200 years or in 200,000 years—the only known civilization in the history of the solar system will suddenly go extinct. But if the human species has already spread to other planets, we will escape this permanent eradication, thus saving millions—possibly trillions—of lives that can come into existence after the demise of our first planet.”

The Red Planet is a freezing, faraway, uninhabitable desert. But protecting the human species from the end of life on Earth could save trillions of lives.

Life on Mars will continue after all. After three seasons on cable television, the Syfy space war drama The Expanse was given the axe on May 10. Since then, support from the show’s fans has helped it find new life: The series has officially been renewed by Amazon for Season 4, which will be streamable. That’s right — not only will the sci-fi favorite return, but it is now marathon material. So, when is The Expanse Season 4? A premiere date has not yet been announced, but one thing is for sure — fans and The Expanse cast members alike can’t get enough of the show’s revival.

The Expanse, based on the New York Times bestselling eight-part book series co-written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck under the pen name James S. A. Corey, is set in a fully colonized solar system on the brink of war. There are three main parties that make up this narrative — Earth, Mars, and the asteroid belt — and their biggest mission is universal peace. Just like Rome wasn’t built in a day, though, universal peace wasn’t achieved in three seasons, so it only makes sense that Amazon picked up the story for continuation on a new platform.

It helps that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a big fan of the books on which the show is based, according to the Hollywood Reporter, and he wasn’t ready to see the TV series go. He made the public announcement on May 25 at a National Space Society panel where the show’s cast and crew were in attendance.

Continue reading “Why Fans Might Have To Wait For Season 4 Of ‘The Expanse’ After The Sci-Fi Drama’s Amazon Revival” »

When a massive saltwater ocean was found hidden beneath the icy crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus back in 2015, astronomers were cautiously optimistic that this watery world could have just the right conditions to host life. Now, thanks to a new study, Enceladus’ stock has gone up — way up.

Using data from a dead spacecraft, an international team of astronomers has for the first time discovered complex organic (carbon-containing) molecules — the building blocks of life — spewing from Enceladus. The new finding, described in a paper published online June 27 in the journal Nature, makes the small icy moon the most promising place beyond Earth to find life in the solar system.

“Enceladus’ subsurface ocean is a habitable place. The big question is if it is inhabited,” Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and the study’s lead author, told NBC News MACH in an email.

Continue reading “Saturn’s moon Enceladus is now the likeliest place to find alien life” »

We come in peace.

Deep in the rocky earth, in the liquid-filled cracks created by fracking, lives a community of highly interactive microbes—one that could at once have serious implications for energy companies, human health and scientists investigating the potential for life on Mars.

New research has uncovered the genetic details of microbes found in fracking wells. Not only do a wide array of bacteria and viruses thrive in these crevices created by hydraulic fracturing—they also have the power to produce methane, according to a study led by scientists at The Ohio State University and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

That means it’s possible that the tiny life forms could create more energy—and from a different source—than the fracking companies are going after in the first place.

Continue reading “Methane-producing microbial communities found in fracking wells” »

If intelligent life is so likely to exist elsewhere in the universe, why haven’t we found it? Well, the chances of us coming across extraterrestrials are not looking good, according to a new study.

Scientists from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University have revealed that we are probably the only advanced civilization out there, although they can’t say for sure. The team came to their conclusion after realizing that Fermi’s paradox and its supporting theories are somewhat flawed. The paradox is the conflict between the probability that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe and the lack of evidence of such.