Lifeboat Foundation

Blast from the past. Someone in an astrobiology group seemed to question the validity of the question in my recent story on 5 Questions For E.T. about whether the universe is artificial. Here’s my response:

In the dog days of summer, when a gush of hot air from a Fifth Avenue subway grate can feel as real as it gets, take heart that the downtown traffic nipping at your heels may just be part of a cosmic-scale computer simulation.

The idea that the cosmos and everything in it could be a super-advanced civilization’s version of Xbox first came to the fore a little over a decade ago.

Continue reading “Brainstorming New Ways To Test If Cosmos Is One Big Computer Simulation” »

But good luck breathing in the bone-crushing gravity.

Hell has an address: 55 Cancri-e is the first alien planet to have some of its surface features directly observed. And it’s no tropical paradise.

For some time 55 Cancri-e has been considered “strange.” Some felt it may be made of diamond. Others suggested it was covered in exotic fluids.

Continue reading “Science has discovered hell” »

Sounds great — as long as we don’t call it a Moon Village. That sounds inane.

The director general of ESA, Johann-Dietrich Woerner, believes that the world should collaborate to create a permanent lunar base for “science, business, tourism or even mining.” Plans to use robotics and 3D printing for building the base have been discussed.

Space tourism … and much more.

Copyright ©2016 Parabolic Arc.

We humans are doing a bang-up job of messing up our home planet. But who’s to say we can’t go on to screw things up elsewhere? Here, not listed in any particular order, are 12 unintentional ways we could do some serious damage to our Solar System, too.

3D printed heart replicas, A new type of colossal galaxy, shutting down HIV with gene editing, and more!

This Week in Science — March 20 −27, 2016.

3D printed heart replicas, A new type of colossal galaxy, shutting down HIV with gene editing, and more.

Planet 9, if indeed it’s out there, may have been stripped from one of our Sun’s stellar siblings, very early in the life of our solar system. The idea is that the Sun’s original birth cluster of at least a 1000 stars was pretty crowded and there was ample opportunity to gravitationally strip a planet from a stellar brother or sister. But guess stars don’t get jealous, eh?

A possible super-earth lying on our solar system’s outer fringes may have been captured from a star in our Sun’s original stellar birth cluster, Alexander James Mustill, an astronomer at Lund University in Sweden, tells me.

Even though Planet 9’s existence still remains up for debate, a growing body of evidence for nearly decade now indicates the presence of a planet some 10 times the mass of Earth that orbits the Sun at a distance of up to 900 astronomical units (or Earth-Sun distances).

Continue reading “Planet 9 May Hail From Sun’s Stellar Birth Cluster” »