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Category: alien life – Page 21

I found this on NewsBreak: Decoding the Mysteries of Life and the Cosmos: A Journey Through the Last Decade of Science.

By: Jason St Clair.

It’s worth reflecting on the scientific breakthroughs that have shaped our understanding of the universe and ourselves from 2010 to 2019. From the creation of synthetic life to the first glimpse of a black hole, these discoveries remind us of the indomitable human spirit and our unending quest for knowledge.

In 2010, scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute played the role of cosmic composers, creating the first living organism with a completely synthetic genome. This milestone marked the first step in producing artificial life, a symphony of genetic notes designed in a computer, assembled in a lab, and brought to life in a donor cell. It was a testament to our growing mastery over the building blocks of life itself.

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What should we look for when trying to find life beyond Earth? Should it be the familiar green and blue colors that we see thriving on our small, blue planet, or something else entirely? This is what a recent study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how identifying purple colors on other worlds, as opposed to the aforementioned green and blue on Earth, could serve as an optimal method in the search for life beyond Earth since many bacteria exhibit purple pigmentation. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand the criteria for identifying life beyond Earth, and specifically life as we don’t know it.

“Purple bacteria can thrive under a wide range of conditions, making it one of the primary contenders for life that could dominate a variety of worlds,” said Dr. Lígia Fonseca Coelho, a postdoctoral associate at the Carl Sagan Institute (CSI) and lead author of the study.

For the study, the researchers analyzed a myriad of purple sulfur and purple non-sulfur from various oxygenated and non-oxygenated environments with the goal of ascertaining how their physical properties compared with reflectance data derived from several Earth-sized exoplanets. In the end, they produced a data base that can be used to potentially locate purple-colored life on other worlds throughout the cosmos, including Earth analogs, water planets, frozen planets, and snowball planets. The goal of this data is to improve algorithms and additional search methods to identify purple colors instead of green, with the latter being the traditional search baseline.

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A new study is shaking up what scientists thought they knew about distant objects in the far reaches of the solar system, starting with an object called the space snowman.

Researchers from Brown University and the SETI Institute found that the double-lobed object, which is officially named Kuiper Belt Object 486,958 Arrokoth and resembles a snowman, may have ancient ices stored deep within it from when the object first formed billions of years ago. But that’s just the beginning of their findings.

Using a new model they developed to study how comets evolve, the researchers suggest this feat of perseverance isn’t unique to Arrokoth but that many objects from the Kuiper Belt—which lies at the outermost regions of the solar system and dates back to the early formation of the solar system around 4.6 billion years ago—may also contain the ancient ices they formed with.

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How optimistic.

First, a little background. With 200 billion trillion (ish) stars in the universe and 13.7 billion years that have elapsed since it all began, you might be wondering where all the alien civilizations are at. This is the basic question behind the Fermi paradox, the tension between our suspicions of the potential for life in the universe (given planets found in habitable zones, etc) and the fact that we have only found one planet with an intelligent (ish) species inhabiting it.

One solution, or at least a way of thinking about the problem, is known as the Great Filter. Proposed by Robin Hanson of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, the argument goes that given the lack of observed technologically advanced alien civilizations, there must be a great barrier to the development of life or civilization that prevents them from getting to a stage where they are making big, detectable impacts on their environment that we can witness from Earth.

There could be other reasons why we haven’t heard from aliens yet, ranging from us simply not listening for long enough (or not searching for the right signals from aliens, due to our technological immaturity) to aliens deliberately keeping us in a galactic zoo. But if the Great Filter idea is correct, we don’t know what point we are at along it.

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If the deep laws of the universe had been ever so slightly different human beings wouldn’t, and couldn’t, exist. All explanations of this exquisite fine-tuning, obvious and not-so-obvious, have problems or complexities. Natural or supernatural, that is the question.

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Lee Smolin is an American theoretical physicist, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo. He is best known for his work in loop quantum gravity.

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Could life be found in frozen sea spray from moons orbiting Saturn or Jupiter? New research finds that life can be detected in a single ice grain containing one bacterial cell or portions of a cell. The results suggest that if life similar to that on Earth exists on these planetary bodies, that this life should be detectable by instruments launching in the fall.

The ice-encrusted oceans of some of the moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter are leading candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life. A new lab-based study led by the University of Washington in Seattle and the Freie Universität Berlin shows that individual ice grains ejected from these planetary bodies may contain enough material for instruments headed there in the fall to detect signs of life, if such life exists.

“For the first time we have shown that even a tiny fraction of cellular material could be identified by a mass spectrometer onboard a spacecraft,” said lead author Fabian Klenner, a UW postdoctoral researcher in Earth and space sciences. “Our results give us more confidence that using upcoming instruments, we will be able to detect lifeforms similar to those on Earth, which we increasingly believe could be present on ocean-bearing moons.”

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Artificial Intelligence is making its presence felt in thousands of different ways. It helps scientists make sense of vast troves of data; it helps detect financial fraud; it drives our cars; it feeds us music suggestions; its chatbots drive us crazy. And it’s only getting started.

Are we capable of understanding how quickly AI will continue to develop? And if the answer is no, does that constitute the Great Filter?

The Fermi Paradox is the discrepancy between the apparent high likelihood of advanced civilizations existing and the total lack of evidence that they do exist. Many solutions have been proposed for why the discrepancy exists. One of the ideas is the ‘Great Filter.’

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