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Category: alien life – Page 68

https://youtube.com/watch?v=P_GO2IS_yBQ&feature=share

A great overview of the current state of the space industry and where it is headed in the near future.

A revolution in the history of space travel took off on 20 July 2021. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos flew in his rocket 106 kilometers into outer space. It may have only lasted around 10 minutes, but the trip was the precursor to commercial passenger flights into space.

The Bezos flight, as well as the one billionaire Richard Branson took just a few days earlier, herald a new era of space travel. This looks to be just the beginning of a rekindled space race. Observers suspect it could open up a lucrative market for space tourism. They’re also convinced that the next step will be inevitable: the establishment of human colonies in space. At some point, the day may come when the first person is born in space — or perhaps when humans reach Mars.

The film explores the fluctuations in space technology and the hype around commercial space flights — a topic that’s of great interest to Tesla founder Elon Musk, who founded the aerospace company SpaceX. Predicting the outcome of these developments is tricky. Musk has, in any case, announced plans to make humanity “multiplanetary. According to him, that involves colonizing Mars and enabling life on other planets. Branson and Bezos, on the other hand, are “more interested in how we can use space to help Earth.

Billionaires going on trips into space — is this really progress? Or is it all just about spending lots and lots money? These are questions we’re not yet able to answer.

Continue reading “A new era of space travel | DW Documentary” | >

Call them the Firstborn. Though they were not remotely human, they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the deeps of space, they felt awe, and wonder— and loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they began to seek for fellowship among the stars.

In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms, and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night.

And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped.

And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.

The great dinosaurs had long since passed away, their morning promise annihilated by a random hammerblow from space, when the survey ship entered the Solar System after a voyage that had already lasted a thousand years. It swept past the frozen outer planets, paused briefly above the deserts of dying Mars, and presently looked down on Earth.

Spread out beneath them, the explorers saw a world swarming with life. For years they studied, collected, catalogued. When they had learned all that they could, they began to modify. They tinkered with the destiny of many species, on land and in the seas. But which of their experiments would bear fruit, they could not know for at least a million years.

Continue reading “3001 The Final Odyssey- Prologue” | >

The word “intriguing” is being used to describe Perseverance results coming from sedimentary rocks on Mars that are of the same type known for preserving fossils and evidence of life here on Earth.

When NASA landed the Perseverance rover on Mars complete with an instrument package capable of identifying organic molecules, the Agency chose the Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient water-formed delta dating back 3.5 billion Earth years. The goal was to look for signs of ancient Martians, not the Martians of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” but rather microorganisms like the ones that killed off the Martians after they arrived.

Onboard Perseverance is an instrumentation package that goes by the acronym SHERLOC which stands for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals. Using SHERLOC, Perseverance has been sampling sedimentary rocks laid down by the water that flowed on the Martian surface earlier in its history.

What does the presence of organic molecules in samples tell us about the existence of past or present life on Mars? Although organic molecules may form from chemical processes where life is not present, it usually is a good sign of its existence. And Perseverance isn’t the first Martian lander or rover to discover organic molecules. The Viking landers, and now defunct rovers, Spirit, and Opportunity, have all indicated that Mars could or did harbour life in the past. Curiosity, the other active Martian rover in the Gale Crater has made similar discoveries. The difference between the two rovers, however, is one of both quantity and quality when looking at the Perseverance samples. Perseverance has found far more organic molecules than its sister rover and is caching the samples for a future mission to find, gather and return to Earth for study.

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What’s our position in the universe? Some astronomers believe that the relative emptiness in our location in space may be why we haven’t found other intelligent life yet. It may even go beyond that. One theory states that our universe is actually trapped inside a giant black hole, which itself is part of a much larger cosmos.

It all centers on a very different theory of what exactly a black hole is. The usual general understanding is nothing can escape a black hole’s intense gravity, not even light. Called the black hole information paradox, it’s thought that even the information about an object that gets sucked in vanishes into oblivion. But therein lies a problem.

This understanding violates a certain rule in quantum mechanics known as “unitarity,” which states that information can never be completely lost. Some trace of it will always remain. So how can scientists get over the hump?

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Four meteorites in northwest Africa were found to contain mysterious hexagonal diamonds that don’t naturally occur on Earth. Essentially, scientists exploring the contents of the space rocks discovered extraterrestrial materials, if you will, alien diamonds. According to Alan Salek, a member of the team that discovered the materials, “some people in the field doubted the existence of this material.” As with regular diamonds, hexagonal diamonds are made of carbon, but their atoms are arranged hexagonally rather than cubically.

The first hexagonal diamonds were recorded in meteorites in the United States and India in the 1960s and were dubbed lonsdaleite. The previously discovered crystals, however, were so small – only nanometres wide – that their hexagonality could not be confirmed. A powerful electron microscope was used by Salek and his colleagues to examine 18 meteorite samples in search of larger crystals. One of them was from Australia, and the other three were from northwestern Africa. It was found that four of the African meteorites contained hexagonal diamonds, some measuring up to a micrometer – about 1,000 times larger than anything previously discovered.

In this way, the team was able to confirm the hexagonal structure’s unusual characteristics. Salek says that now that they have larger crystals, they can get a better understanding of how they form and maybe replicate that process. Scientists are interested in Lonsdaleite since it might have even more industrial potential as a result of its theoretical hardness being stronger than a regular diamond. High-end saw blades, for instance, already contain regular diamonds.

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The universe works for us because of deep physical laws. But if the values of these laws change much, then all we see and know could not exist. If small changes to the laws of physics would make life impossible, does fine-tuning require an explanation? Featuring interviews with Bernard Carr, David Deutsch, Richard Swinburne, Rodney Holder, and Christopher Isham.

Season 12, Episode 8 — #CloserToTruth.

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Continue reading “Does Cosmic Fine-Tuning Demand Explanation? | Episode 1208 | Closer To Truth” | >

An international team of scientists announced on Wednesday that they have discovered two new “super-Earth” planets just 100 light-years away. Both of them are significantly larger than our own planet — and one of them may even be suitable for life.

Super-Earths are a unique class of exoplanet in the solar system that are more massive than our planet but lighter than the ice giants, according to NASA. They are made by some combination of gas and rock and can get up to 10 times the size of Earth’s mass.

The findings, discovered with NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the University of Liège’s Search for Habitable Planets Eclipsing Ultra-Cool Stars (SPECULOOS), will be published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

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An exploration of the technological singularity and whether it will happen and what implications it has on astrobiology and solving the Fermi Paradox.

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Continue reading “Fermi Paradox: The Singularity and Dormant Civilizations” | >

Work is afoot to build the necessary instruments to do so.

ETH Zurich, the Swiss federal institute, recently opened its new Center for the Origin and Prevalence of Life, an interdisciplinary institute to analyze the current and future observations of the Earth and the universe. During the opening ceremony, astrophysicist Sasha Quanz said that we might be able to detect the presence of life outside our solar system in the next 25 years, Space.com.

IStock/oorka.

The claim might sound too ambitious, especially when, after years of work, we are still not sure if planets inside the solar system can support life. However, Quanz recollected that it was only the year 1995 that we had discovered the first planet outside our solar system. In less than three decades, we now have a potential list of 100 billion exoplanets to be discovered in the Milky Way galaxy alone.

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