Scientists zapped mold spores in a laboratory and concluded that two types of fungus could survive a journey to the moon or Mars.
There are both positive and negative implications about this news, according to a recent statement by the American Geophysical Union (AGU). AGU coordinated the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference in Seattle, where lead researcher microbiologist Marta Cortesão, a doctoral student at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), will present her research on the mold today (June 28).
Any Xenomorph-fearing ‘Alien’ fan will tell you that sound doesn’t exist in space. The thing is, that’s not completely true.
Back in May, during black hole week, NASA released an eerie sound clip of a black hole showing that space does make a lot of noise, depending on where you look, and how you process it.
“The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a ~vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we’ve picked up actual sound. Here it’s amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole!”
The private space firm hopes to send a small probe to Venus by 2023.
Rocket Lab is self-funding a mission to go to Venus in search of signs of extraterrestrial life, a report from *Ars Technica* reveals.
Venus’s surface is a hellish landscape with crushing pressures and temperatures that make it completely uninhabitable. However, some scientists believe the clouds above Venus’ surface may have conditions that are conducive to some forms of microbial life.
Jupiter’s icy moon Europa is an ocean world encased beneath a thick crust of ice — a place where snow floats upward.
The underwater snow forms in the global ocean and travels up though the water to attach to submerged ravines and inverted ice peaks, according to new research. This same phenomenon takes place below ice shelves on Earth — and it may be how Europa builds its ice shell.
The finding, published Monday in the journal Astrobiology, suggested Europa’s ice shell may not be as salty as scientists first thought. Understanding the salt content of the ice crust is crucial as engineers work on assembling NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, which is preparing to launch to Europa in October 2024.
In this second portion of a talk at the Dallas Conference on Science and Faith (2021), philosopher Steve Meyer discusses the ways in which groundbreaking astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) dealt with the fact that the universe seems fine-tuned for life. Hoyle’s widely cited comment on the subject was “A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” That was an unsettling idea for Hoyle, who was a well-known atheist, and he certainly sought ways around it. How did he fare?
Visit https://brilliant.org/isaacarthur/ to get started learning STEM for free, and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium subscription. We often wonder where all the aliens are out in the galaxy, but could it be that the technologies needed to get to space and travel the stars lead to inevitable catastrophe?
Credits: The Fermi Paradox: Technological Timebombs. Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur. Episode 355, August 11, 2022 Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur.
Alien communication could utilize quantum physics, so SETI needs a new way to listen.
The Fermi paradox, the “where is everybody?” puzzle, is a persistent question in the search for life in the universe. It asks why, if life is not exceedingly rare in the cosmos, it hasn’t shown up on our doorstep. Equally we might ask why we haven’t even heard from alien life, through radio signals or any other means. A part of the answer could be that our present work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is actually very limited. Estimates show that we’ve only examined the equivalent of a hot tub of water compared to all the world’s oceans in our combing through the electromagnetic information that rolls in from the cosmos.1
If you’re a glass-half-full kind of person you’ll see this as an opportunity, but the problem is that we don’t actually know what might be filling the glass in the first place. The vast majority of SETI studies look for structure in electromagnetic radiation, whether in amplitude or frequency modulations of radio waves, or regularity in pulses of light, or in multi-wavelength correlations. In other words, we assume that information might be sailing past us in representations built using classical physics. But what if that’s just wrong?
In recent years a small cadre of physicists and astrophysicists have examined the possibilities for communication across the universe that uses the quantum properties of matter and radiation.2 Here on Earth quantum mechanics is perhaps the greatest triumph and the greatest headache of 20th-century physics. As theories go it has repeatedly validated itself through some of the most exquisite measurements we’ve ever made about the world, yet it remains profoundly challenging because of its counterintuitive rules and contentious interpretations. Even the “simple stuff” is hard, including the basic mathematical tools needed to describe how matter and radiation futz around in weird states of uncertain superposition (think Schrödinger’s cat) or mind-bending entanglement, where properties are linked across space and time, yet never definite until interactions occur.
We have always wondered whether other intelligent life exists in this galaxy, but for the first time we have the technology to help answer that question. With artificial intelligence, researchers have renewed the hunt for alien life in space and also begun to wonder if an entirely new life form has been born on earth.
The Age of A.I. is a 8 part documentary series hosted by Robert Downey Jr. covering the ways Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Neural Networks will change the world.
0:00 Looking For Alien Life. 4:23 SETI 10:52 Time Traveling. 15:25 Inner Life. 21:21 A-I-A-I-O 25:13 Ethical Challenges. 27:52 Alien Pulses. 32:12 What’s Next
