The Science of Aliens, Part III: Have they overcome their savage past or might they want to eat us?
Reviewing our own species’ behavior suggests a cautious approach to contact with extraterrestrials.
In about three years, NASA plans to launch a robotic orbiter that will study Jupiter’s mysterious moon Europa.
In three years, NASA will launch an orbiter to study Jupiter’s mysterious moon Europa. It is possible that Europa harbors hydrothermal vents and even life.
5. Mars meteorite ALH 84001
These space “mushrooms” were not the first claim of alien life. On August 7, 1996, the then-President Bill Clinton stood on the White House lawn and announced the possibility that scientists had discovered the ancient, fossilized remains of micro-organisms in a meteorite that had been recovered from Antarctica in 1984.
Continue reading “Five times we thought we found aliens but probably didn’t” »
What is time? What is humankind’s role in the universe? What is the meaning of life? For much of human history, these questions have been the province of religion and philosophy. What answers can science provide?
In this talk, Sean Carroll will share what physicists know, and don’t yet know, about the nature of time. He’ll argue that while the universe might not have purpose, we can create meaning and purpose through how we approach reality, and how we live our lives.
Continue reading “The Passage of Time and the Meaning of Life | Sean Carroll” »
Don’t panic, but mysterious sources have been sending radio signals to Earth for years. Now, scientists have tracked down some of their origins — and they were surprised by what they found.
And no, it’s still not aliens.
Continue reading “NASA traces source of mysterious fast radio bursts sending signals to Earth” »
Origin of Information —“Something Very Old, Very Powerful and Very Special has Been Unleashed on Earth” | The Daily Galaxy.
“Humans are strange…We are the aliens,” observes Columbia University astrophysicist, Caleb Scharf, noting that humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. “We also have a truly outsize impact on the planetary environment without much in the way of natural attrition to trim our influence (at least not yet).
From a purely scientific frame of reference, many quantum phenomena like non-local correlations between distant entities and wave-particle duality, the wave function collapse and consistent histories, quantum entanglement and teleportation, the uncertainty principle and overall observer-dependence of reality pin down our conscious mind being intrinsic to reality. And this is the one thing the current physicalist paradigm fails to account for. Critical-mass anomalies will ultimately lead to the full paradigm shift in physics. It’s just a matter of time.
With consciousness as primary, everything remains the same and everything changes. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology are unchanged. What changes is our interpretation as to what they are describing. They are not describing the unfolding of an objective physical world, but transdimensional evolution of one’s conscious mind. There’s nothing “physical” about our physical reality except that we perceive it that way. By playing the “Game of Life” we evolved to survive not to see quantum mechanical reality. At our classical level of experiential reality we perceive ourselves as physical, at the quantum level we are a probabilistic wave function, which is pure information.
Continue reading “The Mental Universe Hypothesis: Reconnecting to Your Cosmic Self” »
Exoplanet hunting is difficult, and we are limited by our technology. But Peter Vickers believes we’re also limited by our biases.
Researchers from University of Copenhagen have investigated what happened to a specific kind of plasma—the first matter ever to be present—during the first microsecond of Big Bang. Their findings provide a piece of the puzzle to the evolution of the universe, as we know it today.
About 14 billion years ago, our universe changed from being a lot hotter and denser to expanding radically—a process that scientists have named the Big Bang.
And even though we know that this fast expansion created particles, atoms, stars, galaxies and life as we know it today, the details of how it all happened are still unknown.
