Lifeboat Foundation

It’s one of the most fascinating aspects of the natural world: shapes repeat over and over. The branches of a tree extending into the sky look much the same as blood vessels extending through a human lung, if upside-down. The largest mammal, the whale, is a scaled-up version of the smallest, the shrew. Recent research even suggests the structure of the human brain resembles that of the entire universe. It’s everywhere you look, really. Nature reuses its most successful shapes.

Theoretical physicist Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico is concerned with fundamental questions in physics, and there are few more fundamental than this one: why does nature continually reuse the same non-linear shapes and structures from the smallest scale to the very largest? In a new Big Think video (see above), West explains that the scaling laws at work are nothing less than “the generic universal mathematical and physical properties of the multiple networks that make an organism viable and allow it to develop and grow.”

Continue reading “Could a pill that lowers our body temperature make us live longer?” »

An international team of space researchers working with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has found previously unknown organic molecules on Mars using a new experiment aboard the Curiosity rover. The results are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

To date, NASA has sent nine orbiters and six rovers to Mars, in part to learn more about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. To that end, the planet has been photographed with various types of cameras. More recently, rovers have dug down into the Martian soil to collect samples for analysis. The goal of such work is to learn more about the chemicals in the soil on or near the surface, but more specifically, to see if it contains organic molecules. If so, they could be evidence of life or prior life on the planet. The rovers have found organic molecules, but samples were not sufficient to claim they were produced or used by a living organism. Thus, the search continues. In this new effort, after the Curiosity rover’s drill stopped working in 2,017 the control team chose to conduct a type of experiment that had not been done by the rover before.

Curiosity carries an instrument called the Sample Analysis at Mars, an array of cups that hold samples of soil as they are being analyzed. The array has 74 cups—all but nine of them are empty most of the time. The other nine hold chemicals that are used to conduct other kinds of experiments. Because of the drill malfunction, the team at NASA chose to drop soil samples into the cups containing the chemicals and then to analyze the chemicals released due to reactions. The researchers found organic molecules in the soil that had never been seen on Mars before. While the new experiment did not find evidence of life, it did show that there are other novel ways to test for it on Mars and other planets.

An exploration of SETI and the possibility of detecting alien von Neumann probes at focal points of stellar gravitational lensing.

http://www.patreon.com/johnmichaelgodier.

Continue reading “Detecting Alien Von Neumann Probes” »

A huge gas giant’s yield of water and carbon dioxide could one day help us understand the atmospheres of planets closer to the size of Earth, scientists say.

Telescopic observations of a “hot Jupiter” gas giant, which is a huge planet hugging in close to its parent star, revealed the first-ever direct measurements of water and carbon monoxide in an exoplanet.

The planet is too close to its star to host life as we know it, and far too large besides. But you can think of this study as a practice round, as measuring gas abundance in a larger planet will help with figuring out how to do so with much smaller planets that are potentially habitable — those that are closer to Earth’s size and potentially able to host water on their surfaces.

After heated debates and disappointments over past candidates of Martian life, NASA scientists have a new rubric for scoring signs of extraterrestrial life.

Dune Stillsuits — technology review.

How Stillsuits compares to the life-support and recycling solutions on the ISS, and challenges we may face in other planets and moons. A new video I released to Sci and SciFi channel.

Continue reading “Dune — Stillsuits — can our space technologies match?” »

It’s Time to welcome our Space Brothers.

Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? It’s a question that has been debated for centuries, if not millenia. But it is only recently that we’ve had an actual chance of finding out, with initiatives such as Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) using radio telescopes to actively listen for radio messages from alien civilisations.

What should we expect to detect if these searches succeed? My suspicion is that it is very unlikely to be little green men—something I speculated about at a talk at a Breakthrough Listen (a Seti project) conference.

Continue reading “Why extraterrestrial intelligence is more likely to be artificial than biological” »

Even swarms of self-replicating robots.

If alien civilizations exist, they may have opened a Pandora’s box.

Continue reading “China’s New FAST Telescope Could Detect Alien Probes in Our Solar System” »

“Where is everybody?”

The Fermi Paradox has perplexed scientists for years. We examine the possibility that we haven’t heard from any aliens is because no one is transmitting.