Lifeboat Foundation

Dirk Schulze-Makuch, Ph.D., P.G. is Professor at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Washington State University.

98 posts by Dirk Schulze-Makuch

• The Dark Side of Alien Contact – October 31, 2024
• Follow The Salt to Find Life on Mars – October 2, 2024
• Finding Caves on the Moon is Great. On Mars? Even Better – August 14, 2024
• Extreme Dormancy as a Way to Survive on Earth and (Possibly) on Alien Planets – July 1, 2024
• How China’s Moon mission could reveal the origins of life on Earth – June 26, 2024
• China’s Moon Mission Could Reveal the Origins of Life on Earth – June 17, 2024
• Why The “Goldilocks” Zone of Habitable Planets is Outdated When Searching for Life – May 17, 2024
• Should We Send Messages to Aliens? – April 15, 2024
• Could our First Alien Contact be with Intelligent Spiders? – April 10, 2024
• How to get Mars Exploration Back on Track – February 12, 2024
• A New Take on the Fermi Paradox: Where are the Aliens? – January 24, 2024
• Using AI to Search for Extraterrestrial Life – October 27, 2023
• How to Prove an Alien is Alien? – October 9, 2023
• Detecting a “Living Pulse” in Microbes is a First Step Toward Discovering a Universal Biosignature – August 29, 2023
• Could Life Use Magnetic Fields as an Energy Source? – July 12, 2023
• We Might Have Accidentally Killed The Only Life We Ever Found on Mars Nearly 50 Years Ago – June 27, 2023
• A New Earth-Sized, Volcanic Planet is a Good Candidate for Harboring Life – June 9, 2023
• Is There a Planet Out There Even Better than Earth? – May 24, 2023
• Humanity’s Long-Term Survival Requires Space Colonization – May 23, 2023
• The Hunt for Life in the Alpha Centauri System – May 4, 2023
• Why Aliens are Likely to be AI – April 21, 2023
• Adapting to Alien Places may not be a Big Problem for Life. Ask Any of These Strange Creatures! – March 17, 2023
• How Will The World End? – March 14, 2023
• How False Positives Impact the Search for Extraterrestrial Life – February 21, 2023
• Is There Life on the Icy Moons of our Solar System? – February 13, 2023
• A New Hope for Solving the Fermi Paradox? – January 20, 2023
• Io, an Overlooked Target for Astrobiology – January 14, 2023
• Was there an intelligent civilization before humans existed? – December 30, 2022
• What Sort of Ethics Would Aliens Practice? – December 20, 2022
• How to Make Alien Life Come Out of Hiding – December 15, 2022
• Why We Need a Human Base on the Moon – November 17, 2022
• Who — or What — Would Survive an All-Out Nuclear War? – November 3, 2022
• Were Organic Molecules on Mars Made by Life? – October 26, 2022
• Why Technologically Advanced Aliens Would Have to be Social Creatures – October 14, 2022
• Mysterious Aerial Sightings Can Now Be Investigated Scientifically—And They Should Be! – September 20, 2022
• This Private Space Mission Aims to Discover Alien Life on Venus – September 8, 2022
• To Find Advanced Alien Life We Need to Detect both Biosignatures and Technosignatures – August 19, 2022
• The Overview Effect: Why We Should Speed Up Space Exploration – August 2, 2022
• Can Humanity Handle Alien Contact and its Consequences? – July 15, 2022
• On The Possibility of Silicon-Based Life – July 2, 2022
• Preparing for the Discovery of Alien Life – June 24, 2022
• Death from Outer Space – June 15, 2022
• Follow the Salt if You Want to Find Life on Mars – June 3, 2022
• Could We All Be Martians? – June 2, 2022
• How Common is Life in the Universe? – May 31, 2022
• Were Humans the First and Only Intelligent Species on Earth? – May 14, 2022
• A Recent Discovery Could Unravel the Mystery of Martian Methane – May 11, 2022
• Alien Message to be Sent into Space – April 29, 2022
• Three Myths of Planetary Protection – April 28, 2022
• What Do Aliens Look Like? – April 13, 2022
• A Promising Method for Life-Detection – April 8, 2022
• Alien Life: What Would Constitute “Smoking Gun” Evidence? – March 29, 2022
• News from The German SETI Workshop – March 24, 2022
• Science of Aliens, Part 11 – March 17, 2022
• After a Nuclear War – March 11, 2022
• Life on the Early Moon? – March 3, 2022
• Habitable Conditions in the Martian Subsurface – February 17, 2022
• The Science of Aliens, Part 10: Will an Alien Biosphere be Toxic? – February 10, 2022
• The Evidence for Life on Mars Is Getting Stronger and Stronger – January 27, 2022
• Science of Aliens, Part 9: Was Humanity Visited in Ancient History? – January 20, 2022
• The Science of Aliens, Part 8: The Search for Artifacts – December 30, 2021
• Returning Samples Collected by the Perseverance Rover from Mars to Earth – December 22, 2021
• The Science of Aliens, Part 7: How Would WE React to Discovering Alien Life – December 9, 2021
• How Science Can Help Us to Understand the Past but also Tackle Earth´s Future Challenges – November 25, 2021
• Planetary Protection Rules for Mars Could be Relaxed – October 22, 2021
• Highlights from the German Astrobiological Society Meeting – September 30, 2021
• The Science of Aliens, Part V: How Would They Communicate? – September 13, 2021
• The Astrobiological Potential of Rogue Planets – August 24, 2021
• The Science of Aliens, Part 4: What Color Would Their Blood Be? – July 23, 2021
• Methane Detected at Enceladus May Be of Biological Origin – July 9, 2021
• Aliens May Already Have Discovered Us – June 23, 2021
• Life May Have Been More Likely to Originate on Mars Than on Earth – June 18, 2021
• The Science of Aliens, Part 3: Have They Overcome Their Savage Past, or Might They Want to Eat Us? – June 7, 2021
• Living Creatures Need Water. But Could They Make Do With Sulfuric Acid? – May 27, 2021
• Martian Life May Be Hiding in Islands of Habitability – May 20, 2021
• The Science of Aliens, Part 2: What Kind of Genetic Code Would Extraterrestrials Have? – May 10, 2021
• Could We Really All Be Martians? – April 30, 2021
• The Fuss Over Phosphorus – April 22, 2021
• All Eyes on Alpha Centauri – April 14, 2021
• The Science of Aliens, Part I: Would They Be Friendly, or Threatening? – April 6, 2021
• The Case (or Not) for Life in the Venusian Clouds – March 20, 2021
• We May Never Find Life on Mars—And That Could Be a Good Thing – March 12, 2021
• This Intriguing Signal From Alpha Centauri May (or May Not) Be a Planet – February 17, 2021
• Crows Are Even Smarter Than We Thought – February 10, 2021
• Arsenic and (Very) Old Life – January 29, 2021
• Artificial Intelligence: Cure for What Ails Us, or Looming Threat to the World? – January 19, 2021
• The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth? – January 5, 2021
• Astrobiology’s Biggest Stories of 2020 – December 18, 2020
• Early Earth Was No Inviting Blue Planet—It Was More Like Venus – December 11, 2020
• How Salt Water Could Fuel a Mars Mission – December 3, 2020
• A New Place to Look for Life on Mars – November 23, 2020
• The Most Hellish Planet Yet – November 13, 2020
• When Asteroid Impacts Are a Good Thing – October 14, 2020
• Two Dozen Exoplanets that Might be More Habitable than Earth – October 5, 2020
• More Lakes Found Under the Martian Ice – September 28, 2020
• The Likelihood of Life on Venus Just Increased Dramatically – September 14, 2020
• A New Tool to Detect Alien Biochemistry – September 1, 2020
• The Astrobiology of Alien Worlds – August 26, 2020