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Traveling far distances in space is difficult, but advances in jet propulsion and genetics are making it possible. Trace is joined by Dr. Kiki Sanford to discuss how by altering the genes in our own bodies, we can make ourselves more fit to survive on other planets!

Follow Kiki on Twitter: https://twitter.com/drkiki.
Check out her website: http://www.about.me/drkiki/

The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog.
http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog.

First Synthetic Yeast Chromosome Revealed.
http://www.nature.com/news/first-synthetic-yeast-chromosome-revealed-1.14941
“It took geneticist Craig Venter 15 years and US $40 million to synthesize the genome of a bacterial parasite. Today, an academic team made up mostly of undergraduate students reports the next leap in synthetic life: the redesign and production of a fully functional chromosome from the baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.”

Reworking the Human Genome So People Can Colonize Other Planets.
http://phys.org/news/2014-03-reworking-human-genome-people-colonize.html.
“If you haven’t thought about reworking the human genome so people can colonize other planets, don’t worry. Plenty of people are on it.”

Genes and Galaxies.

Life (as we know it) is based on carbon. Despite its ubiquity, this important element still holds plenty of secrets, on earth and in the heavens above us. For example, astrophysicists like Columbia’s Daniel Wolf Savin who study interstellar clouds want to understand how the chemicals, including carbon, swirling within these nebulous aggregations of gas and dust form the stars and planets that dot our universe and give rise to organic life.

China’s first Mars mission will search for pockets of water beneath the surface that could host life.


As China’s first Mars mission, is uniquely ambitious. No nation had ever attempted to send an orbiter and rover to Mars on the first try. But China succeeded, making a historic victory.

Tianwen-1 arrived in Mars orbit as a single spacecraft. Once on Mars, the landing platform extended a ramp, allowing the Zhurong rover to roll gently onto the surface—similar to the way China’s Chang’e Moon rovers are deployed.

When did the Zhurong rover land on Mars?

Zhurong successfully landed on the Red Planet on May 14. The rover touched down on Utopia Planitia—the vast Martian plain where NASA’s Viking 2 spacecraft landed in the 1970s, and the site of a shipbuilding yard in the Star Trek universe.

The possibility also remains that if aliens are sending us, or unintentionally leaking, signals across the vast expanse of the cosmos, they may not be encoded in radio waves, but in ways that we haven’t yet developed the technology to understand.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if we were on the wrong track. If you look at the history of SETI, the original ideas proposed around 200 years ago were things like ‘let’s build some big fires on Earth’; ‘let’s have some big mirrors that reflect sunlight to the Martians’ or ‘let’s build some mile-long right-angled triangles to show aliens we know about Pythagorean Theorem,’ and now we look back and say those guys were idiots,” Werthimer said. “So, what’s to say that 200 years from now people won’t look back at us and ask why we didn’t use tachyons or subspace communication? But you’ve got to do what you know how to do.”

Despite the dispiriting likelihood that these signals have an Earthbound source, SETI astronomers are still fairly confident that we’re not alone in the universe. And that one day, we may dig up something real amid all of our own backchatter.

This sci-fi megastructure has captivated big thinkers for decades. A leading expert in astrobiology tells us how to construct one.


The paper focused more on theory than engineering, and Dyson provided scant details on what such a megastructure might look like or how we might build one. He described his sphere only as a “habitable shell” encircling a star. But that was enough to captivate and inspire astrophysicists, scientists, and sci-fi writers. In some depictions, the Dyson Sphere, as it became known, appears as a massive ring encircling a star and reaching nearly to Earth. In others, the Sphere completely encases the sun, a hulking megastructure capturing every bit of that star’s energy. In addition to scientific works, Dyson Spheres have appeared in novels, movies, and TV shows—including Star Trek —as a home for advanced civilizations.

Dyson himself understood the challenges of constructing such a massive structure, and he was skeptical that it might ever happen. Nonetheless, his Sphere has stirred ambitious ideas about the future of our civilization, and it continues to be offered as a solution to some of humanity’s most dire dilemmas. Harnessing the total energy of our sun—or any star—would solve our immediate and long-term energy crisis, but when civilization gains access to the complete energy output of a star, meeting our terrestrial energy needs is just the beginning.

With so much energy available, we could direct high-powered laser pulses toward exoplanets that we think may contain life, immeasurably expanding our chances of communicating with distant civilizations. These Dyson-powered beams could travel farther into the universe than anything currently possible, penetrating the higher-density areas of space, such as dust clouds, which decay the signals we send now.

The narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by Sky Eye — the world’s largest radio telescope — differ from previous ones captured and the team is further investigating them, the report said, citing Zhang Tonjie, chief scientist of an extraterrestrial civilization search team co-founded by Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley.

It isn’t clear why the report was apparently removed from the website of the Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China’s science and technology ministry, though the news had already started trending on social network Weibo and was picked up by other media outlets, including state-run ones.

In September 2020, Sky Eye, which is located in China’s southwestern Guizhou province and has a diameter of 500 meters (1,640 feet), officially launched a search for extraterrestrial life. The team detected two sets of suspicious signals in 2020 while processing data collected in 2019, and found another suspicious signal in 2022 from observation data of exoplanet targets, Zhang said, according to the report.


China said its giant Sky Eye telescope may have picked up signs of alien civilizations, according to a report by the state-backed Science and Technology Daily, which then appeared to have deleted the report and posts about the discovery.

In 1977, the Big Ear Radio Telescope at Ohio State University picked up a strong narrowband signal from space. The signal was a continuous radio wave that was very strong in intensity and frequency and had many expected characteristics of an extraterrestrial transmission. This event would come to be known as the Wow! Signal, and it remains the strongest candidate for a message sent by an extraterrestrial civilization. Unfortunately, all attempts to pinpoint the source of the signal (or detect it again) have failed.

This led many astronomers and theorists to speculate as to the origin of the signal and what type of civilization may have sent it. In a recent series of papers, amateur astronomer and science communicator Alberto Caballero offered some fresh insights into the Wow! Signal and extraterrestrial intelligence in our cosmic neighborhood. In the first paper, he surveyed nearby Sun-like stars to identify a possible source for the signal. In the second, he estimates the prevalence of hostile extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy and the likelihood that they’ll invade us.

Almost fifty years after it was detected, the Wow! Signal continues to tantalize and defy explanation. In recent years, attempts have been made to attribute it to comets at the edge of our Solar System, an explanation that the astronomical community has since rejected. In 2020, interest in this candidate ETI signal was revitalized when Cabellaro identified a Sun-like star in the vicinity of the sky where the Wow! Signal was detected. If the analysis is correct, this famous signal may have come from a Sun-like star located 1,800 light-years away.