Pioneering scientists think we should start looking for extraterrestrials in a whole new way: by seeking out alien technology.
The search for alien life is ramping up. But what if, instead of searching for signs of biology, we looked for something more familiar: an extraterrestrial civilisation.
We speak to astrobiologist and extraterrestrial researcher Dr Douglas Vakoch about transmitting messages into the cosmos in the hope of finding intelligent extraterrestrial life.
An exploration of what Machine Civilizations might be like and whether they are the dominant form of intelligent life in the universe.
“It’s historic,” says MIT scientists.
In a significant breakthrough, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) lunchbox-sized machine has been producing oxygen from the Red Planet’s atmosphere for more than a year, giving hope of life on Mars one day.
Since April 2021, the MIT-led Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) successfully made oxygen from the Red Planet’s carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere, according to a press release published by the institute on Wednesday.
Continue reading “MIT’s MOXIE experiment reliably produces oxygen on Mars” »
Japanese and U.S. physicists have used atoms about 3 billion times colder than interstellar space to open a portal to an unexplored realm of quantum magnetism.
“Unless an alien civilization is doing experiments like these right now, anytime this experiment is running at Kyoto University it is making the coldest fermions in the universe,” said Rice University’s Kaden Hazzard, corresponding theory author of a study published today in Nature Physics. “Fermions are not rare particles. They include things like electrons and are one of two types of particles that all matter is made of.”
A Kyoto team led by study author Yoshiro Takahashi used lasers to cool its fermions, atoms of ytterbium, within about one-billionth of a degree of absolute zero, the unattainable temperature where all motion stops. That’s about 3 billion times colder than interstellar space, which is still warmed by the afterglow from the Big Bang.
In 1996, the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell was born. Named Dolly after the famous singer Dolly Parton, this sheep made headlines around the world when it was announced the following year, by demonstrating that a cloned organism could be produced from a mature cell from a specific body part, in this case, a mammary gland. Since Dolly, many other mammals including goats, rabbits, cats, and primates have been cloned. However, nearly 30 years later, no human clones have even been attempted. Today, we will discuss why, and what the future holds for human cloning.
Human cloning has been a fixture of science fiction for decades, as early as Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World. However, despite its popularity in film, television, and video games, it’s not been popular at all with lawmakers. As of 2018, around 70 nations have outright banned human cloning. In the United States, despite there not being a federal ban on it, 15 states ban reproductive cloning, and 10 states prevent cloned human embryos to be implanted for childbirth.
Over the years, there have been several people who claimed to have successfully cloned humans. One of the most infamous was from a religious group called the Raëlians, who have a core belief that human beings were created by extraterrestrials thousands of years ago using advanced technology. Soon after the unveiling of Dolly, the Raëlians established Clonaid, to fund the research and development of human cloning. After moving their base of operations from the US to the Bahamas, on the 26th of December, 2002, a team led by French chemist Brigitte Boisselier announced that the first successfully cloned human, named Eve, had been born a day before.
Space is a constant reminder of how little we truly know about our universe. A new international project is hoping to help make a little more sense of things. Next year, researchers from 13 countries will launch a balloon to, hopefully, find high-energy particles that couldn’t have come from Earth.
There are a number of constants in the basic laws of physics and initial conditions of the universe that are such that, for life to be possible, the values of those constants needed to fall in an exceedingly narrow range. Many scientists and philosophers think there must be an explanation of why, of all the values they might have had, these constants have precisely the values needed in order for life to be possible. There are deep difficulties with both of the standard explanations of this ‘fine-tuning’ of the laws of nature: theism and the multiverse hypothesis. I will argue that if one adopts a certain form of panpsychism, one can explain the fine-tuning in terms of the mental capacities of the universe, and that this constitutes a significantly less problematic and significantly more parsimonious explanation of the fine-tuning.
Philip Goff is Associate Professor in philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest (a unique and wonderful institution). His main research interest is consciousness, although he also has a sideline in political philosophy (taxation, globalisation, social justice). He recently finished his first book, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (published with Oxford University Press August 2017), which argues against materialism and defends panpsychism. He is now working on a book on these themes aimed at a general audience. He has written for The Guardian and Philosophy Now, and writes a blog at www.conscienceandconsciousness.com. www.philipgoffphilosophy.com @philip_goff
This week, scientists announced that the James Webb Space Telescope, which among its many talents can analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets, just confirmed the presence of carbon dioxide on a world orbiting a sun some 700 light-years away. It’s the first observation of CO2 in a planetary atmosphere beyond our solar system.
But that discovery, made about a world very unlike our own, is just the first taste of what Webb’s instruments may soon reveal. Astronomers are eager to focus the telescope on planets like Earth, where liquid water, a crucial ingredient for life as we know it, is abundant. In the coming months and years, they will undoubtedly get their chance.
There are a number of promising Earth-like planets Webb could study in the near future, but in a paper published recently in The Astronomical Journal, scientists from the University of Montreal argue they’ve discovered one of the best such candidates yet.
