A recent study of Jupiter’s moon, Europa, showed that radiolytic oxidants made at the surface of its ice can travel to the ocean beneath its ice shell, according to a team of researchers led by the University of Texas at Austin. This means that the icy moon could be suitable for alien life.
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Science Fiction often shows us alien civilizations so advanced they are godlike, but how realistic are they, and what would such entities be like?
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Consciousness defines our existence. It is, in a sense, all we really have, all we really are, The nature of consciousness has been pondered in many ways, in many cultures, for many years. But we still can’t quite fathom it.
Continue reading “Consciousness is the collapse of the wave function” »
Scientists believe several of their satellite might contain the conditions for life.
Europa and Enceladus are promising candidates.
A radio message will be sent to an alien solar system this year. What should it say?And what are the pros and cons to sending interstellar messages to aliens that may or may not exist.
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If true, we started out as a “baby universe.” Cute.
Could our universe have been created in a petri dish? Avi Loeb seems to think so. The Harvard astronomer posits that a higher “class” of civilization may have conjured up our universe in a laboratory far, far away.
“Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling,” Loeb writes in an op-ed published by Scientific American last year.
Continue reading “Aliens Created Our Universe in a Lab, Scientist Suggests” »
Could SpaceX be heading to Uranus next? The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine seems to think it should. The organization has released its latest decadal survey of planetary science and astrobiology. According to a report by Teslarati published on Wednesday, the survey hints that NASA should undertake a flagship mission to Uranus on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.
The Uranus Orbiter and Probe
The mission is not entirely new. Called the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP), the proposal has been under work for several years by a team that includes scientists from NASA, the University of California, and Johns Hopkins University. Now, with SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, the researchers feel they have the technology to make their long-held dream a reality.
If an extraterrestrial civilization has a SETI project similar to our own, could they detect signals from Earth?
On April 1st this year, a team of scientists led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory posted a proposed new message to be sent to prospective intelligent extraterrestrials. The coincidence of April Fool’s Day in this case should be ignored. This actually is very real. The rationale for the message can be found in an article entitled, “A Beacon in the Galaxy: Updated Arecibo Message for Potential FAST and SETI Projects,” which has been submitted to the journal Galaxy and is currently posted on a pre-print server for review.
The article title includes the terms FAST and SETI. If you are not familiar with FAST, the acronym stands for the Five-Hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope being built in China (see picture above) that will be the largest parabolic radio telescope in the world and capable of intercepting the faintest radio signals from across the Universe. SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is far better known and was featured prominently in the science fiction movie, Contact, based on a Carl Sagan novel.
What kind of message is being sent? And how will intelligent aliens be able to decipher it? Since the first radios and television signals were broadcast, humanity has been streaming information into outer space with no thought of how the information would be perceived by an intelligent technically advanced civilization on the receiving end. And even before radios, sending a message to intelligent aliens was proposed. In the early 1800s an Austrian astronomer wanted to carve out a geometric pattern of trenches in the Sahara Desert, fill them with kerosene and then light it all up tobe a beacon for any aliens living nearby.
The brand new “Beacon in the Galaxy” is a binary message created by scientists as an update to the old Arecibo message.
The newly proposed “A Beacon in the Galaxy”, a binary message created by scientists as an update to the old Arecibo message, might actually be more dangerous for us than beneficial. It includes key information about us – our location, our DNA structure, and even an image of the naked human body.
Should we give aliens such vital details about Earth and humanity? This question has been around for ages and countless renowned scientists have expressed their concerns in the past. Even Stephen Hawking explained that a hypothetical alien civilization could be hostile.
