Lifeboat Foundation

In the last decades of his life, Albert Einstein hoped to unite his description of gravity with existing models of electromagnetism under a single master theory.

It’s a quest that continues to vex theoretical physicists to this day. Two of our best models of reality – Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the laws of quantum mechanics – are as immiscible as oil and water.

Whatever a combination of the two looks like, it will almost certainly reveal foundations to the Universe quite unlike anything we can visualize.

A harsh sun shines down through a cloudless sky, across a vast and unforgiving landscape. It’s covered in gray rock, giant ice sculptures and expansive fields of spiky, yellow and orange bushes. In the distance, intimidating mountain peaks dominate the desolate scene, many miles from the nearest town. Yet alpacas roam freely and flamingos seek out scarce water, both unexpected sights in this wild world.

The extreme environment resembles something from a sci-fi film or another planet, but it’s right here on Earth, on the flanks of the world’s highest active volcano, 22,615-foot Ojos del Salado. Here, on the border of Argentina and Chile, a team of CU Boulder scientists seek to discover how tiny organisms persist at one of the driest and highest points on the planet.

This first-of-its-kind project may ultimately help inform the search for existing and extinct life on other planets.

Pioneer 10 was ahead of its time.

A mere fifty years ago, Pioneer 10 launched and became the first unmanned mission to Jupiter. The mission revealed new details about the Solar System — and sent a message to aliens.

Ceres, the only inner solar system dwarf planet, has brines that could keep a liquid water ocean stable somewhere under its surface.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=4TCg4vsz6Ac

How many Dyson Spheres, a hypothetical energy source, could be built around stars in the Milky Way?

Researchers calculated the maximum amount of Dyson Spheres in the Milky Way in order to know what it is they did not find.

In a way, it could mean climate change is linked to an “immature technosphere”.

It’s called an epiphenomenon.

Continue reading “Can a planet ‘think’? The bold idea gets new backing” »

The ExplOrigins early career group invites you to join the 2022 Exploration and Origins Colloquium on February 17th–18th, 2022! The live broadcast portion of this colloquium will begin at 10am ET on February 18th.

We are thrilled to have Dr. Amy Mainzer as our plenary speaker. Dr. Mainzer is a professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, principal investigator of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission, and lead of NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission. She also has achieved excellence in science communication, serving as the science curriculum consultant, on-camera host, and executive producer of the PBS Kids series Ready Jet Go! and as the science consultant for the Netflix movie Don’t Look Up.

Continue reading “Exploration & Origins Colloquium 2022: Space Exploration, Origins, & Astrobiology” »

Do organics found on Mars indicate past life or are there nonbiological explanations? When will we definitively know that alien life exists?

Stephen Hawking made terrifying predictions of the future. Based on science, the late British physicists predicted several things that could happen on Earth, from the rise of powerful Artificial intelligence to fearful robots poised to destroy humankind. Hawking also spoke about how it was dangerous to search for aliens and how global warming could destroy Earth as we know it.

However, Stephen Hawking also spoke about how abrupt advances in genetic science could lead to creating a future generation of superhumans that could eventually destroy humanity as we know it.

In recently published papers, Prof. Hawking predicted that an elite class of physically altered, intellectually powerful humans could come into existence from rich people choosing to edit their existing DNA and manipulate future generations’ genetic markup.