Lifeboat Foundation

Hitchhiking aliens are already traveling between planets, new research suggests. This theory, known as panspermia, suggests that life’s building blocks are widespread throughout the cosmos and can travel between different areas in space.

The panspermia hypothesis has been sparking fierce debates for centuries. Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher from the 5th century BCE, proposed the idea that life exists everywhere in the universe, coining the term panspermia to describe the concept of life traveling between planets as seeds.

Other Greek philosophers such as Anaximander and Thales also discussed the philosophical aspects of the panspermia theory.

Research has uncovered important new insights into the evolution of oxygen, carbon, and other vital elements over the entire history of Earth – and it could help assess which other planets can develop life, ranging from plants to animals and humans.

The study, published today in Nature Geoscience and led by a researcher at the University of Bristol, reveals for the first time how the build up of carbon-rich rocks has accelerated oxygen production and its release into the atmosphere.

Until now the exact nature of how the atmosphere became oxygen-rich has long eluded scientists and generated conflicting explanations.

One of the world’s foremost experts in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) believes that with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, humans are closer to discovering life outside our planet than ever before.

Lisa Kaltenegger, who directs the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell, told The Telegraph this week that because the Webb Telescope is designed to detect biosignatures — the scientific word for “signs of life,” including organism-produced methane gas — we may well find ETs very soon.

Kaltnegger, whose new book “Alien Earths: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos” was published this month, waxed enthusiastic when discussing the JWST, bragging that with its technological leaps, humanity is now in “this era of golden exploration, with thousands of other worlds on our doorstep, that we now can actually explore.”

I believe that utopian societies need to help all people.

Hakeem Oluseyi was born as James Plummer Jr. The book opens the night his parents split up (a bright, proud and decidedly urban mother and handsome, capable and “country” father). For the next few years, Oluseyi’s mom moves him and his sister to different cities and different Black neighborhoods. As Oluseyi grows older, he simultaneously becomes aware of the inherent racism of the social world around him and his own inherent, interior focus on the natural world. The first section of the book details the challenges he faces in communities that are both rich in relationship and struggling with inequality. At the same time, he faces his own struggle as his mother deals with mental illness and his father takes him into the entirely new universe of rural life in Piney Woods Mississippi.

All through these changes, Oluseyi becomes progressively aware of his own questions about the universe and his strange (to everyone else) capacities as a questioner. As a shy kid trying to steer clear of bullies, he counts things relentlessly and, in his counting, begins to find order and pattern in the world. He begins a life of experimentation, much to his mother’s chagrin, pressing burning incense cones into the shower curtain to see how long they take to make a hole. And, on a glorious night out in the country, he catches a glimpse of the dark night sky awash in stars. By his teen years, the fire of inquiry was burning hard in the young man.

Continue reading “From Poverty To Stanford, Memoir Tells A Physicist’s Remarkable Tale” »

An ancient star discovered in the Large Magellanic Cloud has revealed the chemical fingerprint of the early universe. It hints that conditions were not the same everywhere when the first stars forged the elements for life.

The initial step in the search for extraterrestrial life involves identifying the presence of liquid water. The moons of Saturn and Jupiter like Enceladus, Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto are suspected of holding oceans of liquid water beneath icy crusts. Similarly, some exoplanets beyond our solar system likely host liquid water, crucial for habitability. But detecting water, when we can’t physically access these celestial bodies, poses challenges. Ice-penetrating radar, a geophysical tool, has proven capable of detecting liquid water on Earth and beneath Mars ’ South polar cap.

Now, this instrument is aboard the JUICE spacecraft and it is on its way to Jupiter’s icy moon Ganymede and will also be aboard the Europa Clipper spacecraft, which will be launched to Europa later this year. What can we expect to learn from these missions and how can we use ice-penetrating radar for future planetary exploration? Dr Elena Pettinelli of Roma Tre University, with extensive experience in planetary exploration using ice-penetrating radar, delved into the utility of this technology in her presentation recently presented at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly EGU24.

The International Space Station has long been known as a unique — and uniquely gross — environment. But according to a new NASA study, it has stuff growing on it that is straight-up alien, too.

In a press release, NASA said that when scientists from the Jet Propulsion Lab looked at samples of the drug-resistant Enterobacter bugandensis bacteria found on the orbital outpost, they found that the strains had mutated into something that literally doesn’t exist on Earth.

“Study findings indicate that under stress, the ISS isolated strains were mutated and became genetically and functionally distinct compared to their Earth counterparts,” the press release reads. “The strains were able to viably persist in the ISS over time in significant abundances.”

Researchers have quantified a pathway for the formation of molecular oxygen from the interaction of carbon dioxide with electrons, key information for searches of life on other worlds.

So far, life is only known to exist on Earth. But that hasn’t stopped scientists from searching for signs of living creatures on other planets. Those searches intensified with the deployment of the JWST observatory, which astronomers are using to characterize the atmospheres of far-off worlds in the hope of finding the signals of molecules that signify the presence of life (see News Feature: The Skinny on Detecting Life with the JWST). But for that to work, scientists need to know all the possible sources of atmospheric molecules. Now Lucas Sigaud of the Fluminense Federal University, Brazil, and his colleagues have uncovered a pathway for forming an oxygen molecule (O2]. The detailed measurements of the pathway provide key inputs for models used in planetary-life searches.

Many of these are freely available to read online!