In the Milky Way galaxy alone, there are over 300 million potentially habitable exoplanets.
This indicates that 300 million planets are likely to have the necessary conditions for life—and sophisticated life—to evolve on their surfaces. Are we the only ones in the universe?
How vast is the universe in which we live? Given our existing technology and measurement of the universe, we are unable to acquire this answer. We can make educated guesses, but we are still a long way from investigating the universe.
There must be some intelligent life out there or else it’s a terrible waste of real-estate.
The question “where is everyone?” is the crux of the Fermi Paradox. If life on Earth is not particularly special and unique, where are all the alien civilizations? Many explanations have been proposed to explain why we seem to be alone in the vast universe. None have been 100 percent convincing, and people continue to puzzle over a solution.
Russian physicist Alexander Berezin, from the National Research University of Electronic Technology (MIET), has another idea. He calls it the “First in, last out” solution of the Fermi Paradox. He suggests that once a civilization reaches the capabilities of spreading across the stars, it will inevitably wipe out all other civilizations.
The grim solution doesn’t hypothesize a necessarily evil alien race. Simply, they might not notice us, and their exponential expansion across the galaxy might be more important to them than what would happen to us.
► Subscribe: https://goo.gl/r5jd1FIf we consider our solar system is typical of billions and billions of other similar systems, then where are the extraterrestrials? The universe should be full of intelligent life by now that would create some kind of signal that is easy to detect…yet, we have seen and heard nothing. There is one possible solution to the unnerving silence of the cosmos, and it could be the most chilling answer to why we’ve heard from no one…because if an alien civilization does exist out there somewhere, they certainly know we are here…and that is something that should scare all of us. We are on social media:
Hossenfelder lists several theories that fall under her critique including Penrose’s cyclic cosmology, the ekpyrotic universe that postulates colliding membranes, and the no-boundary proposal by Jim Hartle and Stephen Hawking. Stephen Meyer also critiqued these theories in his book Return of the God Hypothesis. But Meyer came to starkly different conclusions.
Hossenfelder concludes that “we are facing the limits of science itself.” And the question of the universe’s origin “we’ll never be able to answer.” In contrast, Meyer argues that the evidence for a beginning and the required fine tuning of the universe to support life point to a mind behind our world. The fact that all alternative cosmological theories require highly specific initial conditions to explain our present life-friendly universe only reinforces the fine-tuning argument and by extension the God Hypothesis.
Since the 1990s, scientists have cataloged thousands of planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets. Some of these are massive and gaseous, while others are tiny and rocky like our home world. But a recent analysis suggests that some of these exoplanets might be more dense and have more water than previously thought, which has big implications for alien life.
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.
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.
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.
