Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected].
How do we know the age of the planets and stars? – Swara D., age 13, Thane, India
Measuring the ages of planets and stars helps scientists understand when they formed and how they change – and, in the case of planets, if life has had time to have evolved on them.
A collection of the first 20 Shorts from SFIA, covering a wide range of topics in science & space.
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Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a… Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/15839… eddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Isaac_A_Arthur on Twitter and RT our future content. SFIA Discord Server: https://discord.gg/53GAShE Credits: Science & Futurism Shorts Compilation #1: 1–20 Episode 414a, October 1, 2023 Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur Music Courtesy of: Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator 00:00 Intro 00:30 Quasar Cannon 1:30 Birch Planets: Galaxy-Sized Worlds 2:30 Aliens Beyond the Galactic Rim 3:30 BWC Megastructures & Artificial Planets 4:29 Hegemonizing Swarms 5:29 Solar Moths & Solar Sails 6:27 Fusion Candles 7:12 Non-Equatorial Space Elevators 8:10 Building Artificial Planets 9:10 Computronium 10:13 Deciphering Alien Codes 11:12 Astrochickens & Von Neumann Probes 12:12 Could Dinosaurs have Been killed by Aliens? 13:11 Will Humans In Space Be Taller? 14:02 The Stanford Torus 15:02 Could Technology Bring You Back to Life? 16:02 Is our galaxy going to Collide with Andromeda? 16:58 The Bernal Sphere 17:55 Nuclear Lightbulb Spaceship Drive 18:55 Von Braun Space Station 19:54 Close.
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Credits: Science & Futurism Shorts Compilation #1: 1–20
Episode 414a, October 1, 2023
Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
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Ultimately, the researchers discovered 270 different cycles of autocatalytic reactions. “Autocatalysis may not be that rare, but instead it might be a general feature of many different environments, even those that are really different from Earth,” Kaçar said.
Related: NASA may have unknowingly found and killed alien life on Mars 50 years ago, scientist claims
Most of the 270 cycles did not employ organic compounds. Some centered around elements that are absent or exceedingly rare in life on Earth, such as mercury, or the radioactive metal thorium. A number of cycles likely only happen under extremely high or low temperatures or pressures.
“Due to their ability to produce oxygen and function as bio-factories, this biotechnology could significantly enhance future space missions and human space exploration efforts,” Nicol Caplin, an astrobiologist at the European Space Agency (ESA), said in a statement.
Related: Scientists Send Kombucha to Space in Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Kombucha cultures, which are multi-species mélanges of bacteria and yeast, are key to creating the beverage. Add one such culture to room-temperature sweetened tea and, as long as the tea has plenty of sugar, microbes within will consume those nutrients, multiply and ferment the tea.
Self-sustaining chemical reactions that could support biology radically different from life as we know it might exist on many different planets using a variety of elements beyond the carbon upon which Earth’s life is based, a new study finds.
On Earth, life is based on organic compounds. These molecules are composed of carbon and often include other elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur.
In a new study, self-sustaining chemical reactions were discovered which carry the potential to support alien life, which is very different from the elements present on Earth.
The biology of Earth hinges on organic compounds which comprise carbon along with elements like phosphorus, sulphur, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen. Scientists believe that alternative chemical frameworks can lead to the existence of alien life forms.
For long, scientists have wondered if alien life might evolve on the basis of significantly different chemistry. Researchers have speculated if silicon may work as a backbone for biology.
The search for definitive biosignatures—unambiguous markers of past or present life—is a central goal of paleobiology and astrobiology. We used pyrolysis–gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry to analyze chemically disparate samples, including living cells, geologically processed fossil organic material, carbon-rich meteorites, and laboratory-synthesized organic compounds and mixtures. Data from each sample were employed as training and test subsets for machine-learning methods, which resulted in a model that can identify the biogenicity of both contemporary and ancient geologically processed samples with ~90% accuracy. These machine-learning methods do not rely on precise compound identification: Rather, the relational aspects of chromatographic and mass peaks provide the needed information, which underscores this method’s utility for detecting alien biology.
An exploration of The AI Farm Hypothesis and what it might mean for alien life and the Fermi Paradox.
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A book-length thought experiment uses math to investigate some of life’s big questions.
The universe is bigger than you think.
This means any deep-space future awaiting humanity outside our solar system will remain beyond the span of a single life until we develop a means of propulsion that outclasses conventional rockets. And, when three studies rocked the world earlier this year, it felt like a dream come true: Warp drive was no longer science fiction, potentially unlocking a theoretical basis to build faster-than-light warp drive engines that could cut a trip to Mars down to minutes.
However, a recent study shared in a preprint journal cast doubt on the theory, pointing to a gap in the math that could put the viability of a physical warp drive back into the realm of speculation.
