Lifeboat Foundation

Is there intelligent life somewhere in the cosmos? People have been debating this issue for centuries, if not millennia. However, with programs like SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) employing radio telescopes to actively listen for radio messages from alien civilizations, we’ve only recently had a real chance of finding out.

Should these searches be successful, what should we anticipate finding? I made this assumption during a talk at a conference for the SETI project Breakthrough Listen: it is highly unlikely to be little green men.

The find, simulated with computer modeling, might explain what happens to liquid water across the universe.

“Water is really important for life,” said Eryn Cangi, co-author and a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, in a press release. “We need to understand the conditions that support liquid water in the universe, and that may have produced the very dry state of Venus today.”

At one point, Venus might have hosted seas like Earth. So, what happened? The study’s scientists suspect that Venus underwent a powerful greenhouse event that raised temperatures to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. After this happened, all the planet’s water evaporated, leaving some droplets behind. Even the few drops that were left over might have vanished because of an ion, HCO+, in the planet’s atmosphere.

“Water is really important for life,” said Dr. Eryn Cangi. “We need to understand the conditions that support liquid water in the universe, and that may have produced the very dry state of Venus today.”

How did the planet Venus lose its water? This debate has rage on for some time and something a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB) and the University of Arizona (UoA) as they have potentially conducted a groundbreaking study that could help explain the processes responsible for making Venus the hellish world it is today, whereas scientists have long hypothesized that the second planet from the Sun was much more hospitable billions of years ago.

“Water is really important for life,” said Dr. Eryn Cangi, who is a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at UCB and a co-author of the study. “We need to understand the conditions that support liquid water in the universe, and that may have produced the very dry state of Venus today.”

Continue reading “Venus Unveiled: The Mystery of Water Loss Revealed” »

The Sun emitted a strong solar flare, peaking at 10:22 p.m. ET on May 2, 2024. NASA ’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the Sun constantly, captured an image of the event.

Solar flares are intense bursts of radiation emanating from the release of magnetic energy associated with sunspots. These flares are among the biggest explosive events in our solar system, visible primarily in the ultraviolet range.

Flares impact Earth in a variety of ways: they can disrupt the ionosphere and interfere with GPS navigation and radio communications. They are also responsible for auroras, the beautiful natural light displays often seen in high-latitude skies.

A team of four volunteers are embarking on a 45-day mission as part of NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) program, simulating life on Mars.

Increasing complexity could provide insights into future advancements and the potential for encountering extraterrestrial intelligence.

Astronomer Frederick Walter has proposed a theory that suggests alien civilizations may have been destroyed by gamma-ray bursts, explaining why humans have not made contact with them. This theory, while morbid, offers a potential explanation for the lack of communication with extraterrestrial life.

Is there life on…K2-18b?Professor Nikku Madhusudhan believes he has discovered alien life on an exoplanet 120 light years away from Earth. Speaking to Tom S…

Hitchhiking aliens are already traveling between planets, new research suggests. This theory, known as panspermia, suggests that life’s building blocks are widespread throughout the cosmos and can travel between different areas in space.

The panspermia hypothesis has been sparking fierce debates for centuries. Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher from the 5th century BCE, proposed the idea that life exists everywhere in the universe, coining the term panspermia to describe the concept of life traveling between planets as seeds.

Other Greek philosophers such as Anaximander and Thales also discussed the philosophical aspects of the panspermia theory.