Beware easy answers to the question of whether life exists beyond Earth. Be they "alien" skeletons in Mexico City, interstellar probes that briefly pass through our solar system, UFOs of all sorts and claims to have found "biosignature" chemical byproducts of life around planets where many other factors say that life cannot exist -- their …
Continue reading "A Real ET Discovery With Promise, Amid Some Other Quite Questionable Claims"
The presence of life brings many unexpected consequences. On Earth, for instance, when cyanobacteria spread widely in ancient oceans more than two billion years ago, their production of increasingly large amounts of oxygen killed off much of the other anaerobic life present at the day because oxygen is a toxin, unless an organism finds ways …
NASA should begin developing a mission that can tell us whether life in the near galaxy is abundant, rare or essentially absent, The National Academy of Sciences recommended yesterday. The call for a next Grand Observatory telescope with this ambitious goal represents the first time that the Academy, in its Decadal Survey for Astronomy and …
Some time later this summer, it is predicted, the National Academy of Sciences will release its long-awaited Decadal Survey for astrophysics, which is expected to recommend the science and architecture that NASA should embrace for its next "Great Observatory." Many Worlds earlier featured one of the four concepts in the running -- LUVOIR or the …
A U.S. government report found that there was no evidence to conclude that the more than 140 unidentified flying object sightings in recent years involved extraterrestrial beings. The government was unable to determine whether the flying mysteries were atmospheric events distorting readings from sensors, confusions in judging objects in motion, spacecraft from other potential hostile …
For more than 20 years now -- even before the first detection of an extra-solar planet -- scientists have posited, defined and then debated the existence and nature of a habitable zone. It's without a doubt a central scientific concept, and the idea has caught on with the public (and the media) too. The discovery …
Continue reading "The Habitable Zone Gets Poked, Tweaked and Stretched to the Limits"
For more than 20 years now -- even before the first detection of an extra-solar planet -- scientists have posited, defined and then debated the existence and nature of a habitable zone. It's without a doubt a central scientific concept, and the idea has caught on with the public (and the media) too. The discovery …
Continue reading "The Habitable Zone Gets Poked, Tweaked and Stretched to the Limits"
Assuming for a moment that life exists on some exoplanets, how might researchers detect it? This is hardly a new question. More than ten years ago, competing teams of exo-scientists and engineers came up with proposals for a NASA flagship space observatory capable of identifying possible biosignatures on distant planets. No consensus was reached, however, …
Assuming for a moment that life exists on some exoplanets, how might researchers detect it? This is hardly a new question. More than ten years ago, competing teams of exo-scientists and engineers came up with proposals for a NASA flagship space observatory capable of identifying possible biosignatures on distant planets. No consensus was reached, however, …
Throughout the history of science, moments periodically arrive when new fields of knowledge and discovery just explode. Cosmology was a kind of dream world until Edwin Hubble established that the universe was expanding, and doing so at an ever-faster rate. A far more vibrant and scientific discipline was born. On a more practical level, it …
Many Worlds 