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Category: alien life – Page 65

The word “intriguing” is being used to describe Perseverance results coming from sedimentary rocks on Mars that are of the same type known for preserving fossils and evidence of life here on Earth.

When NASA landed the Perseverance rover on Mars complete with an instrument package capable of identifying organic molecules, the Agency chose the Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient water-formed delta dating back 3.5 billion Earth years. The goal was to look for signs of ancient Martians, not the Martians of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” but rather microorganisms like the ones that killed off the Martians after they arrived.

Onboard Perseverance is an instrumentation package that goes by the acronym SHERLOC which stands for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals. Using SHERLOC, Perseverance has been sampling sedimentary rocks laid down by the water that flowed on the Martian surface earlier in its history.

What does the presence of organic molecules in samples tell us about the existence of past or present life on Mars? Although organic molecules may form from chemical processes where life is not present, it usually is a good sign of its existence. And Perseverance isn’t the first Martian lander or rover to discover organic molecules. The Viking landers, and now defunct rovers, Spirit, and Opportunity, have all indicated that Mars could or did harbour life in the past. Curiosity, the other active Martian rover in the Gale Crater has made similar discoveries. The difference between the two rovers, however, is one of both quantity and quality when looking at the Perseverance samples. Perseverance has found far more organic molecules than its sister rover and is caching the samples for a future mission to find, gather and return to Earth for study.

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What’s our position in the universe? Some astronomers believe that the relative emptiness in our location in space may be why we haven’t found other intelligent life yet. It may even go beyond that. One theory states that our universe is actually trapped inside a giant black hole, which itself is part of a much larger cosmos.

It all centers on a very different theory of what exactly a black hole is. The usual general understanding is nothing can escape a black hole’s intense gravity, not even light. Called the black hole information paradox, it’s thought that even the information about an object that gets sucked in vanishes into oblivion. But therein lies a problem.

This understanding violates a certain rule in quantum mechanics known as “unitarity,” which states that information can never be completely lost. Some trace of it will always remain. So how can scientists get over the hump?

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Four meteorites in northwest Africa were found to contain mysterious hexagonal diamonds that don’t naturally occur on Earth. Essentially, scientists exploring the contents of the space rocks discovered extraterrestrial materials, if you will, alien diamonds. According to Alan Salek, a member of the team that discovered the materials, “some people in the field doubted the existence of this material.” As with regular diamonds, hexagonal diamonds are made of carbon, but their atoms are arranged hexagonally rather than cubically.

The first hexagonal diamonds were recorded in meteorites in the United States and India in the 1960s and were dubbed lonsdaleite. The previously discovered crystals, however, were so small – only nanometres wide – that their hexagonality could not be confirmed. A powerful electron microscope was used by Salek and his colleagues to examine 18 meteorite samples in search of larger crystals. One of them was from Australia, and the other three were from northwestern Africa. It was found that four of the African meteorites contained hexagonal diamonds, some measuring up to a micrometer – about 1,000 times larger than anything previously discovered.

In this way, the team was able to confirm the hexagonal structure’s unusual characteristics. Salek says that now that they have larger crystals, they can get a better understanding of how they form and maybe replicate that process. Scientists are interested in Lonsdaleite since it might have even more industrial potential as a result of its theoretical hardness being stronger than a regular diamond. High-end saw blades, for instance, already contain regular diamonds.

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The universe works for us because of deep physical laws. But if the values of these laws change much, then all we see and know could not exist. If small changes to the laws of physics would make life impossible, does fine-tuning require an explanation? Featuring interviews with Bernard Carr, David Deutsch, Richard Swinburne, Rodney Holder, and Christopher Isham.

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An international team of scientists announced on Wednesday that they have discovered two new “super-Earth” planets just 100 light-years away. Both of them are significantly larger than our own planet — and one of them may even be suitable for life.

Super-Earths are a unique class of exoplanet in the solar system that are more massive than our planet but lighter than the ice giants, according to NASA. They are made by some combination of gas and rock and can get up to 10 times the size of Earth’s mass.

The findings, discovered with NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the University of Liège’s Search for Habitable Planets Eclipsing Ultra-Cool Stars (SPECULOOS), will be published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

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An exploration of the technological singularity and whether it will happen and what implications it has on astrobiology and solving the Fermi Paradox.

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Continue reading “Fermi Paradox: The Singularity and Dormant Civilizations” | >

Work is afoot to build the necessary instruments to do so.

ETH Zurich, the Swiss federal institute, recently opened its new Center for the Origin and Prevalence of Life, an interdisciplinary institute to analyze the current and future observations of the Earth and the universe. During the opening ceremony, astrophysicist Sasha Quanz said that we might be able to detect the presence of life outside our solar system in the next 25 years, Space.com.

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The claim might sound too ambitious, especially when, after years of work, we are still not sure if planets inside the solar system can support life. However, Quanz recollected that it was only the year 1995 that we had discovered the first planet outside our solar system. In less than three decades, we now have a potential list of 100 billion exoplanets to be discovered in the Milky Way galaxy alone.

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This places Drake in the company of towering physicists with equations named after them, including James Clerk Maxwell and Erwin Schrödinger. Unlike those, Drake’s equation does not encapsulate a law of nature. Instead, it combines some poorly known probabilities into an informed estimate.

Whatever reasonable values you feed into the equation (see image below), it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we shouldn’t be alone in the galaxy. Drake remained a proponent and a supporter of the search for extraterrestrial life throughout his days, but has his equation taught us anything?

Drake’s equation may look complicated, but its principles are rather simple. It states that in a galaxy as old as ours, the number of civilizations that are detectable by virtue of them broadcasting their presence must equate to the rate at which they arise, multiplied by their average lifetime.

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Why does our universe appear so exquisitely tuned to create the conditions necessary for life? This is a question that has troubled cosmologists and physicists for decades.

Brian Greene explains how the mind-boggling idea of a multiverse may hold the answer to the puzzle. According to Greene, if there are infinitely many universes, it shouldn’t be too surprising that one ended up with the right conditions for life.

We may seriously underestimate life’s natural tendency to behave in a particular way under different laws, constants, and boundary conditions because we are biased to assume that all possible kinds of life will resemble life as we know it.

Scientists are constantly pushing the boundaries of our knowledge. However, the multiverse theories have drawn criticism from some scientists, who warn of the danger of speculation beyond what observations can tell us.

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Continue reading “Did God Create The Universe? Brian Greene on The Multiverse & The Fine Tuning Argument” | >