Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: space – Page 13

4.6-Billion-Year-Old Meteorite Reveals a Surprisingly Strong Primordial Magnetic Field

Ancient meteorite minerals reveal a surprisingly strong magnetic field from the solar system’s first 200,000 years.

About 4.6 billion years ago, before the Sun and planets existed in their familiar forms, the solar system was a vast cloud of gas and dust. Within a few million years, this “solar nebula” collapsed and flattened into a disk, setting the stage for matter to gather into the Sun and the planets that orbit it.

Gravity has long been considered the main force behind this transformation. New evidence from some of the oldest known meteorite material, however, suggests that magnetism was also involved.

Scientists May Have Cracked the Mystery of the Moon’s Unequal Hemispheres

Chang’e-6 samples suggest the Moon’s two very different sides may have formed when uneven heating drove magma from one hemisphere to the other.

The Moon presents two dramatically different faces. Its Earth-facing hemisphere is rich in dark volcanic plains, while the farside is dominated by older highlands and a much thicker crust. New analyses of material returned by Chang’e-6 (CE6) suggest that this contrast may trace back to enormous flows within the Moon’s early magma ocean after it became tidally locked to Earth.

Led by Professor Hejiu Hui of Nanjing University, the research team carried out detailed geochemical analyses of anorthosites, Mg-suite rocks, and mare basalts collected from the lunar farside. They then compared those samples with material from the nearside returned by the Apollo and Chang’e-5 missions.

Two golden silk orb weavers lived on the ISS for two months; most space-built webs became nearly symmetric, but under light the spiders used brightness as a new sense of up

A groundbreaking study reveals how golden orb spiders adapted their web-building techniques in microgravity aboard the ISS, using light as a new sense of orientation.

HumAInity Is Genius, But Where’s the Wisdom?

Alfred North Whitehead wrote that civilization advances by increasing the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.

He meant that as a compliment.

We have since built a technology whose whole purpose is to extend that list, for everyone, at once, permanently. Which raises a question I rarely see asked:

What happens when #ArtificialIntelligence finishes the list?

Human genius is not the bottleneck here. It never was. Genius sent our machines to Mars. Genius also shows up in the biographies of history’s most gifted scientists, artists, and founders, most of whom made a spectacular mess of their own lives. Talent and character are not the same currency, and having a pile of one tells you nothing about the other.

So the question in this piece is not whether we are clever enough to build something godlike. We obviously are. It is whether we are wise enough to survive it.

Rumi turns up. So does Marcus Aurelius. So do the Greek and Norse gods, who wielded power that makes our data centers look modest, and destroyed themselves with it anyway.

Continue reading “HumAInity Is Genius, But Where’s the Wisdom?” | >

Astronomers Watch a Dead Star’s Remains Dissolve Into Space

A new image of the Helix Nebula reveals how dying stars return material to the galaxy.

The Helix Nebula offers a rare look at what happens after a dying star releases its outer layers into space. New observations show fragments of that material colliding with surrounding gas, breaking apart, and beginning their return to the galaxy.

By tracing those structures, an international team that includes Northwestern University astrophysicists followed the debris as it is stripped down and mixed into interstellar space. Over time, some of that material could become incorporated into new clouds, stars, and perhaps planets.

Earth May Not Be a Cosmic Fluke, New Simulations Suggest

Solar system simulations starting from varied initial conditions suggest that Earth-like planets can emerge naturally from planet formation.

Computer simulations of planetary systems can now begin from thousands of different starting conditions, allowing researchers to explore how worlds might emerge without assuming the final outcome. Over the past three decades, these models have advanced from relatively simple approximations to far more sophisticated simulations.

At the recent Origins 2026 conference in Paris, Nader Haghighipour presented simulations designed to reconstruct how our solar system may have formed without building its familiar planetary arrangement into the model from the outset.