Lifeboat Foundation

An international team of researchers has discovered 1.2-billion-year-old groundwater deep in a gold-and uranium-producing mine in Moab Khotsong, South Africa, shedding more light on how life is sustained below the Earth’s surface and how it may thrive on other planets.

The findings were published earlier this week in the journal Nature Communications.

“For the first time, we have insight into how energy stored deep in the Earth’s subsurface can be released and distributed more broadly through its crust over time,” says Oliver Warr, research associate in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto and lead author of the study. “Think of it as a Pandora’s Box of helium-and-hydrogen-producing power, one that we can learn how to harness for the benefit of the deep biosphere on a global scale.”

In this podcast we meet the CEO and co-founder of First Light Fusion.

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The Fermi Paradox contemplates the weirdness of our galaxy seemingly being devoid of intelligent alien life, but Many Worlds Theory, Multiverses, Parallel Universe, and Alternate Realities may radically alter our thinking on Aliens & SETI.

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Continue reading “The Fermi Paradox: Multiverse” »

Here’s an intriguing idea. What if you were informed that everything in your life was pre-planned? Even crazier, what if your history, present, and future are all taking place right now?

An incredible new theory established as the “block universe” theory asserts that time does not actually “flow like a river”; rather, everything is ever-present.

Dr. Bradford Skow, a philosophy professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposes that if we “look down” on the cosmos as if it were a piece of paper, we would see time stretched out in all directions, just as we perceive space at any given time.

While we haven’t found any evidence of alien life yet, that doesn’t mean it’s not out there, beyond our reach. Now, a team of researchers has put together a mathematical model showing aliens could potentially be communicating across space – via quantum physics.

Efforts are well underway to make quantum communications a reality here on Earth. The idea is that quantum mechanics provide certain properties that would make information transfer inherently faster and more secure than regular systems… if we can get it to work.

One of the major hurdles to overcome before quantum networks can be established is that they’re very fragile and susceptible to interference. According to this latest study, such networks could fly across space without breaking up.

Meet Daniela de Paulis, the newest member of the SETI Institute’s Artist in Residence program. Daniela is a media artist who is also a licensed radio operator and radio telescope operator at the Dwingeloo radio telescope in the Netherlands. Fusing radio technologies, neuroscience, and space research, Daniela creates pioneering art-science projects that include live performances, virtual reality (VR), electroencephalograms (EEG), and audience participation. During this SETI Live chat with SETI AIR Director Bettina Forget, Daniela will discuss her recent works COGITO in Space and OPTICKS, and give us a sneak peek of the project she has planned to complete during her time at the AIR program.

Now, as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – the monster proton smasher at the European particle laboratory, Cern – gears up to start its third period of data collection on Tuesday, experts are hoping to unpick further secrets of the fundamental building blocks of the universe.

Bortoletto, now head of particle physics at the University of Oxford and part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson, said her main memory of the events a decade ago was the moment two weeks before the announcement when the researchers unblinded their analysis of the data and saw unambiguous signs of the boson.

“I still, thinking [about] that moment, get the butterflies in my stomach,” she said. “It was unbelievable. It’s really a unique moment in the life of the scientist.”

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The big question of why life exists has challenged minds for countless centuries, but what does science have to say on this matter? Could life arise on other worlds and in other Universes, and what is the reason for it?

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Continue reading “Why Life Exists” »

View pictures in App save up to 80% data. An illustration of tiny wedge-shaped robots – collectively known as Sensing With Independent Micro-Swimmers (SWIM) – deployed into the ocean miles below a lander on the frozen surface of an ocean world data-image-width=982 data-image-height=726 An illustration of tiny wedge-shaped robots – collectively known as Sensing With Independent Micro-Swimmers (SWIM) – deployed into the ocean miles below a lander on the frozen surface of an ocean world NASA has unveiled a plan to unleash swarms of cellphone-sized robots to hunt for alien life on other planets.