I was moved to weigh in after reading Vice President Mike Pence's comments last week down at the Kennedy Space Center -- a speech that seemed to minimize NASA's performance in recent years (decades?) and to propose a return to a kind of Manifest Destiny way of thinking in space. The speech did not appear …
Continue reading "Has America Really Lost It’s "Lead in Space?""
This article of mine, slightly tweaked for Many Worlds, first appeared today (July 6) in Astrobiology Magazine, http://www.astrobio.net As NASA inches closer to launching new missions to the Solar System’s outer moons in search of life, scientists are renewing their focus on developing a set of universal characteristics of life that can be measured. …
I hope you will indulge me in this foray into a very different look at the many worlds in which we live. My father is being buried today. It is no tragedy; he lived to almost 97 and had a full life. But still... As all of you have no doubt experienced in one way …
Sometimes personal affairs intervene for all of us, and they have now for your Many Worlds writer and his elderly father. But rather than remain off the radar screen, I wanted to repost this column which has a new import. It turns out that versions of the instrument described below -- a miniature gene …
Continue reading "In Search of Panspermia (and Life on Icy Moons)"
Sometimes lost in the discussion of exoplanets and habitability is where the potential building blocks of life might come from and how they got there. Yes, hydrogen and water and methane and carbon and nitrogen have been found in abundance around the cosmos, but how about the larger and more esoteric compounds needed for life …
Sometimes tectonic shifts in scientific disciplines occur because of discoveries and advances in the field. But sometimes they occur for reasons entirely outside the field itself. Such appears to be case with origins-of-life studies. Nobel laureate Jack Szostak was recently in Tokyo to participate in a workshop at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the …
I remember the first time I heard about the atmospheres of distant exoplanets and how could and would let us know whether life was present below. The key was oxygen or its light-modified form, ozone. Because both oxygen and ozone molecules bond so quickly with other molecules -- think rust or iron oxide on …
Continue reading "Getting Real About the Oxygen Biosignature"
An international team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has made the first complete millimeter-wavelength image of the ring of dusty debris surrounding the young star Fomalhaut. This well-defined band of rubble and gas is likely the result of comets smashing together near the outer edges of a planetary system 25 light-years from …
Continue reading "Elegant Image of Icy Disk Around The Young Fomalhaut System"
The only time that a formally designated NASA "life detection" mission was flown to another planet or moon was when the two Viking landers headed to Mars forty years ago. The odds of finding some kind of Martian life seemed so promising at the time that there was little dispute about how much energy, money …
Continue reading "Planetary Protection is a "Wicked" Problem"
We live in a dangerous universe. We know about meteor and comets, about harmful radiation that could extinguish life without an electromagnetic shield, about major changes in climate that are both natural and man-made. There’s another risk out there that some scientists assert could cause large-scale extinctions even though it would occur scores of light-years …
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