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Category: alien life – Page 71

“It’s historic,” says MIT scientists.

In a significant breakthrough, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) lunchbox-sized machine has been producing oxygen from the Red Planet’s atmosphere for more than a year, giving hope of life on Mars one day.

Since April 2021, the MIT-led Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) successfully made oxygen from the Red Planet’s carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere, according to a press release published by the institute on Wednesday.

“It’s historic,” said MOXIE’s deputy principal investigator Jeffrey Hoffman, a professor of the practice in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

MIT’s MOXIE experiment has now produced oxygen on Mars. It is the first demonstration of in-situ resource utilization on the Red Planet, and a key step in the goal of sending humans on a Martian mission.

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Japanese and U.S. physicists have used atoms about 3 billion times colder than interstellar space to open a portal to an unexplored realm of quantum magnetism.

“Unless an alien civilization is doing experiments like these right now, anytime this experiment is running at Kyoto University it is making the coldest fermions in the universe,” said Rice University’s Kaden Hazzard, corresponding theory author of a study published today in Nature Physics. “Fermions are not rare particles. They include things like electrons and are one of two types of particles that all matter is made of.”

A Kyoto team led by study author Yoshiro Takahashi used lasers to cool its fermions, atoms of ytterbium, within about one-billionth of a degree of , the unattainable temperature where all motion stops. That’s about 3 billion times colder than , which is still warmed by the afterglow from the Big Bang.

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In 1996, the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell was born. Named Dolly after the famous singer Dolly Parton, this sheep made headlines around the world when it was announced the following year, by demonstrating that a cloned organism could be produced from a mature cell from a specific body part, in this case, a mammary gland. Since Dolly, many other mammals including goats, rabbits, cats, and primates have been cloned. However, nearly 30 years later, no human clones have even been attempted. Today, we will discuss why, and what the future holds for human cloning.

Human cloning has been a fixture of science fiction for decades, as early as Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World. However, despite its popularity in film, television, and video games, it’s not been popular at all with lawmakers. As of 2018, around 70 nations have outright banned human cloning. In the United States, despite there not being a federal ban on it, 15 states ban reproductive cloning, and 10 states prevent cloned human embryos to be implanted for childbirth.

Over the years, there have been several people who claimed to have successfully cloned humans. One of the most infamous was from a religious group called the Raëlians, who have a core belief that human beings were created by extraterrestrials thousands of years ago using advanced technology. Soon after the unveiling of Dolly, the Raëlians established Clonaid, to fund the research and development of human cloning. After moving their base of operations from the US to the Bahamas, on the 26th of December, 2002, a team led by French chemist Brigitte Boisselier announced that the first successfully cloned human, named Eve, had been born a day before.

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There are a number of constants in the basic laws of physics and initial conditions of the universe that are such that, for life to be possible, the values of those constants needed to fall in an exceedingly narrow range. Many scientists and philosophers think there must be an explanation of why, of all the values they might have had, these constants have precisely the values needed in order for life to be possible. There are deep difficulties with both of the standard explanations of this ‘fine-tuning’ of the laws of nature: theism and the multiverse hypothesis. I will argue that if one adopts a certain form of panpsychism, one can explain the fine-tuning in terms of the mental capacities of the universe, and that this constitutes a significantly less problematic and significantly more parsimonious explanation of the fine-tuning.

Philip Goff is Associate Professor in philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest (a unique and wonderful institution). His main research interest is consciousness, although he also has a sideline in political philosophy (taxation, globalisation, social justice). He recently finished his first book, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (published with Oxford University Press August 2017), which argues against materialism and defends panpsychism. He is now working on a book on these themes aimed at a general audience. He has written for The Guardian and Philosophy Now, and writes a blog at www.conscienceandconsciousness.com. www.philipgoffphilosophy.com @philip_goff

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This week, scientists announced that the James Webb Space Telescope, which among its many talents can analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets, just confirmed the presence of carbon dioxide on a world orbiting a sun some 700 light-years away. It’s the first observation of CO2 in a planetary atmosphere beyond our solar system.

But that discovery, made about a world very unlike our own, is just the first taste of what Webb’s instruments may soon reveal. Astronomers are eager to focus the telescope on planets like Earth, where liquid water, a crucial ingredient for life as we know it, is abundant. In the coming months and years, they will undoubtedly get their chance.

There are a number of promising Earth-like planets Webb could study in the near future, but in a paper published recently in The Astronomical Journal, scientists from the University of Montreal argue they’ve discovered one of the best such candidates yet.

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Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and science journalist. His work can be found in publications including The Atlantic, the New York Times, Scientific American, and BBC Future. He has also authored academic papers for prestigious peer-reviewed journals, such as Human Brain Mapping and Cognition & Emotion.

Below, Bobby shares 5 key insights from his new book, Listen to the audio version—read by Bobby himself—in the Next Big Idea App.

If you’re listening to this then congratulations, you’re lucky enough to be alive during the most exciting time in history. We are on the verge of a paradigm shift of unparalleled magnitude. Such a shift occurs when new science forces us to adopt a different overall framework and perspective.

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Circa 2021 face_with_colon_three

Researchers have found a new way to convert methane into rocket fuel on Mars — adding crucial flexibility to future astronaut missions to the Red Planet, according to a recent blog post on the University of California, Irvine’s (UCI’s) official website.

RELATED: LIFE ON MARS: SCIENTISTS ARE A LITTLE CLOSER TO SOLVING THE METHANE MYSTERY ON MARS

Scientists create new way to convert methane into rocket fuel on Mars

Elon Musk and other engineers at SpaceX theorized such a method while searching for ways to combine water from ice on Mars with carbon dioxide to procure enough carbon and hydrogen for methane production.

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Why we should be performing interstellar archaeology and how Avi Loeb and his team at the Galileo Project plan to recover an interstellar object at the bottom of the ocean.

“Any chemically-propelled spacecraft sent by past civilizations into interstellar space, like the five we had sent so far (Voyager 1 & 2, Pioneer 10 & 11, and New Horizons), remained gravitationally bound to the Milky Way long after these civilizations died. Their characteristic speed of tens of kilometers per second is an order of magnitude smaller than the escape speed out of the Milky Way. These rockets would populate the Milky Way disk and move around at similar speeds to the stars in it.

This realization calls for a new research frontier of “interstellar archaeology”, in the spirit of searching our backyard of the Solar system for objects that came from the cosmic street surrounding it. The interstellar objects could potentially look different than the familiar asteroids or comets which are natural relics or Lego pieces from the construction project of the Solar system planets. The traditional field of archaeology on Earth finds relics left behind of cultures which are not around anymore. We can do the same in space.“
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/

The goal of the Galileo Project is to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs) from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research. This project is complementary to traditional SETI, in that it searches for physical objects, and not electromagnetic signals, associated with extraterrestrial technological equipment.

Within this overarching goal, the Galileo Project has defined two specific goals, correlating to our two related areas of study:

To examine the possibility of extraterrestrial origin for unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), by making observations of objects in and near Earth’s atmosphere, filtering out identifiable objects using AI deep learning algorithms trained on rigorous classification of known objects, and then examining the nature of the remaining data for anomalous characteristics.

Continue reading “Why a Group of Scientists Plan to Search for Alien Technology with Avi Loeb” | >