Lifeboat Foundation

The search for extraterrestrial life has profound physical, mental and spiritual implications, says Nathalie Cabrol in The Secret Life of the Universe —and it belongs to everyone.

By Zane Wolf

Planetary Science Innovation For All Humanity — Professor Dr. Dan Blumberg Ph.D. — Vice-President for Regional and Industrial Development — Ben-Gurion University of the Negev — Chair, Israel Space Agency.

Professor Dr. Dan Blumberg, Ph.D. is the Vice-President for Regional and Industrial Development at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU — https://www.blumberg.bgu.ac.il/), an elected Member of the International Academy of Astronautics, and Chair of the Israel Space Agency (https://www.space.gov.il/en), a position he was appointed to by the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology (https://www.gov.il/en/departments/min…) in 2022.

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Related: These nearby star systems could be good targets in the search for alien life (video)

“Both TOI-1408 b and TOI-1408 c are incredibly close to their parent star compared to the planets in our solar system,” research lead author Judith Korth of Lund University told Space.com. “Imagine our solar system, but instead, Jupiter is orbiting very close to the sun nearly every four days, one-twentieth of the period of Mercury.

This is already very close to the star, and still, we detected another planet even closer to the star that interacts strongly with its big neighbor, causing their orbits to wobble in ways we’ve never seen before.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Most of his stories, however, are less philosophically explicit. Lovecraft’s thought is often obscured in his tales, and must be pieced together from various sources, including his poetry, essays and, most importantly, his letters. Lovecraft wrote an estimated 100,000 during his life, of which around 10,000 have survived. Within this substantial non-fictional output, the volume of which dwarfs his fictional writing, Lovecraft expounded the philosophical concerns – whether metaphysical, ethical, political or aesthetic – which he claimed underpinned his weird fiction. These tales, he wrote, were based on one fundamental cosmic premise: ‘that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large’

In H P Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (1990), the scholar S T Joshi analysed many of those letters and essays to create an image of ‘Lovecraft the philosopher’. Joshi claimed that Lovecraft’s identity as a philosopher is a direct outcome of the genre he mastered: weird fiction. This genre, Joshi writes, is inherently philosophical because ‘it forces the reader to confront directly such issues as the nature of the universe and mankind’s place in it.’ Not everyone has agreed that Lovecraft’s thought should be so elevated. The Austrian literary critic Franz Rottensteiner, in a review of Joshi’s book, attacked the idea of Lovecraft as a philosopher: ‘The point is, of course, that Lovecraft as a thinker just wasn’t of any importance,’ he wrote ‘whether as a materialist, an aestheticist, or a moral philosopher.’

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The Fermi Paradox is an estimate that says: Given all we currently know about the universe, we should have found extraterrestrial life already. So why haven’t we? In a paper that just appeared two weeks ago, a physicist has now put forward the idea that aliens use quantum communication. How does that solve the Fermi Paradox? I’ve had a look.

Continue reading “Fermi Paradox Explained by Quantum Communication” »

Interest in Earth-like planets orbiting within the habitable zone of their host stars has surged, driven by the quest to discover life beyond our solar system. But the habitability of such planets, known as exoplanets, is influenced by more than just their distance from the star.

A new study by Rice University’s David Alexander and Anthony Atkinson extends the definition of a habitable zone for planets to include their star’s magnetic field. This factor, well studied in our solar system, can have significant implications for life on other planets, according to the research published in The Astrophysical Journal on July 9.

The presence and strength of a planet’s magnetic field and its interaction with the host star’s magnetic field are pivotal factors in a planet’s ability to support life. An exoplanet needs a strong magnetic field to protect it from stellar activity, and it must orbit far enough from its star to avoid a direct and potentially catastrophic magnetic connection.

Abstract: In ecological systems, be it a garden or a galaxy, populations evolve from some initial value (say zero) up to a steady state equilibrium, when the mean number of births and deaths per unit time are equal. This equilibrium point is a function of the birth and death rates, as well as the carrying capacity of the ecological system itself. The growth curve is S-shaped, saturating at the carrying capacity for large birth-to-death rate ratios and tending to zero at the other end. We argue that our astronomical observations appear inconsistent with a cosmos saturated with ETIs, and thus SETI optimists are left presuming that the true population is somewhere along the transitional part of this S-curve. Since the birth and death rates are a-priori unbounded, we argue that this presents a fine-tuning problem. Further, we show that if the birth-to-death rate ratio is assumed to have a log-uniform prior distribution, then the probability distribution of the ecological filling fraction is bi-modal — peaking at zero and unity. Indeed, the resulting distribution is formally the classic Haldane prior, conceived to describe the prior expectation of a Bernoulli experiment, such as a technological intelligence developing (or not) on a given world. Our results formally connect the Drake Equation to the birth-death formalism, the treatment of ecological carrying capacity and their connection to the Haldane perspective.

From: David Kipping [view email].

Columbia researchers discovered that bacteria can create free-floating, temporary genes outside their chromosomes, challenging the long-held belief that all genetic instructions are contained within the genome. This finding opens the possibility that similar genes could exist in humans, potentially revolutionizing our understanding of genetics and gene editing.

Since the genetic code was first deciphered in the 1960s, our genes have appeared like an open book. By interpreting our chromosomes as linear sequences of letters, akin to sentences in a novel, we can identify the genes within our genome and understand how changes in a gene’s code influence health.

This linear rule of life was thought to govern all forms of life—from humans down to bacteria.

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We often wonder where all the vast and ancient alien civilizations are, but could it be that they’ve migrated far away in space or time, or even journeyed beyond our cosmos?

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Continue reading “The Fermi Paradox: Migration” »