The Daily Galaxy: News from Planet Earth & Beyond

Mirrors on the Moon as a Galactic Greeting Card -A Galaxy Classic

Proponents of making contact with advanced ET life forms have come up with a new way to attract their attention—mounting mirrors on the Moon and using them to signal across space. It’s sort of like a bigger version of Batman’s bat-signal to shout out, “Hello aliens! We’re here! Come on over!”

Humans Predicted to Make Contact with an Extraterrestrial Civilization Within Two Decades

"That's 500 billion planets out there, and bear in mind there are 100 billion other galaxies. To think this [the Earth] is the only place where anything interesting is happening, you have got to be really audacious to take that point of view."

Seth Shostak, SETI senior astronomer

 

Is Ice a Catalyst for Life Throughout the Universe?

The unusual properties of frozen water may have been the ticket that made life possible. Over the decades, several notable scientists have began to suspect that life on Earth did not evolve in a warm primordial soup, but in ice—at temperatures that few living things can now tolerate. The very laws of chemistry may have actually favored ice, says Jeffrey Bada, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. “We’ve been arguing for a long time,” he says, “that cold conditions make much more sense, chemically, than warm conditions.”

The Ecliptic: Scientists Narrow In On the Best Shot at ET Contact

"If those civilizations are out there – and we don't know that they are – those that inhabit star systems that lie close to the plane of the Earth's orbit around the sun will be the most motivated to send communications signals toward Earth, because those civilizations will surely have detected our annual transit across the face of the sun, telling them that Earth lies in a habitable zone, where liquid water is stable. Through spectroscopic analysis of our atmosphere, they will know that Earth likely bears life. Knowing where to look tremendously reduces the amount of radio telescope time we will need to conduct the search.”

~ Richard Conn Henry, Johns Hopkins University

Interstellar Messaging: Five Questions for a Galactic Visitor

A creative writing course, funded by the Wyoming NASA Space Grant Consortium, "Interstellar Message Composition," is the first class to enlist creative writers in a potential cosmic conversation.  The course was designed to fill a practical – if potentially theoretical – need. "We've thought a lot about how we might communicate with other worlds, but we haven't thought much about what we'd actually say," says Lockwood, a professor of natural science and humanities.

The mind-bending exercises inspired one student to sculpt an alien cellphone. Perhaps their first call should be to Steve Jobs.

The students came up with five questions for an interplanetary visitor: "If you have fear, what do you fear? What is the ultimate purpose of your species' life? How can we extend the longevity of our civilization? What makes you and your kind happy? What should we know?" Not only did students create the questions, they had to answer them as well.

Vatican's Chief Astronomer Cites Possibility of Advanced Extraterrestrial Life

The Vatican's chief astronomer says there is no conflict between believing in God and in the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations perhaps more evolved than humans.

"In my opinion this possibility exists," said the Reverend José Gabriel Funes, head of the Vatican Observatory and a scientific adviser to Pope Benedict XVI, referring to life on other planets.

'Endeavour' Astronauts Debate Extraterrestrial Life

The human race will find life elsewhere in the universe as it pushes ahead with space exploration, reported astronauts back from the latest US space mission, the space shuttle Endeavour, which returned to Earth in March completing a 16-day journey of nearly 6.6 million miles in space.

The METI Controversy: Is Detection by Alien Life a Threat to the Human Species?

Mankind has always been driven by contradictory drives.  The relentless curiosity that pushes us forward and is directly responsible for our progress from caves to  cities.  The fear of change that tells us "hang on, these caves/cities are really nice, we don't want to risk losing them."  There isn't any greater potential threat to the status quo than the discovery of extraterrestrial life, which is why some people would prefer we didn't try.

NASA Scientists Exploring Possibility of Life on Saturn's Moon, Enceladus

NASA scientists are exploring the possibility that microbial life exist inside Enceladus, where no sunlight reaches, photosynthesis is impossible and no oxygen is available.

Space Laser Created to Detect Earth-like Planets

A new laser system should make it possible to detect potentially habitable Earth-like planets for the first time by watching for their effects on the light produced by the stars they orbit.

Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have adapted a relatively young laser technology to discern the once undetectably faint gravitational influence a rocky, Earth-like planet revolving around a Sun-like star exerts on their home stars' light output.

If the Harvard technique holds up in use on actual telescopes, it could be "a huge breakthrough" in the search for Earth-like planets, which will help scientists "understand how our own Earth came to be" and search for life beyond our planet, says Sara Seager, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at MIT in an interview with the MIT Technology Review.

DIY Monolith Technology

The 2001 monolith is a science-fiction icon.  It can represent technology, God, alien influence or intense monkey violence, depending on what exactly you got out of Kubrick's masterpiece.  But will we ever see one?

The UFO Phenomena -“Religion or Science”?

Is the world’s fascination with the possibility of UFOs and  more a religion or a natural intuitive sense that life is “out there” based on current scientific research and recent planet-search discoveries?

One of the world’s preeminent astrophysicists, Carl Sagan, believed that “the interest in unidentified flying objects derives, perhaps, not so much from scientific curiosity as from unfulfilled religious needs.”

The Ultimate ET Space Probe

We currently search for signs of alien intelligence by scanning the sky with SETI and similar efforts.  It's a noble effort, but one that makes a needle in a haystack look like a five minute job.  The universe is very, very big while our current communications capability is very, very small.  Which is lucky, because it limits the volume of universe contaminated by reality TV.  Some propose the idea of using one of our greatest fears - self-replicating robots - to realise one of our greatests dreams: extra-terrestrial contact.

The Great Silence -Are We the Miss Lonely Hearts of the Milky Way?

Dennis Overbye, author of Lonely Hearts of he Cosmos wrote a brilliant essay in the Sunday New York Times about the probability of discovering intelligent, advanced technological civilization in our Galaxy. Overbye quotes Francis Drake, father of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial life, who says that to hear from ET we would "need to look at 10 million stars (there are 200 billion in our galaxy) and there is not enough time left."

Millimetron Space Observatory to Search for Astro-engineering Artifacts & Wormholes in the Universe

Russia has a new space mission in preparation that can be used for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The project Millimetron is a millimeter and sub-millimeter space observatory with a 10 meter diameter mirror, very sensitive receivers for single dish mode and will be used for orbiting VLBI (Very Long Base Interferometer). This telescope would be convenient for a very sensitive all sky survey with the possibility of constructing images of sources with a very high angular resolution. The mission will be useful for the search for astro-engineering constructions in the universe.

The Texas UFO Report: Science or Psychology?

A bizarre incident occurred last Tuesday in the Texas town of Stephenville that was witnessed by dozens of residents. For about five minutes a massive craft, described as “about as big as a walmart” hovered overhead and then disappeared faster than a “speeding bullet”.

SETI Search for ET Intensified

The SETI@Home project is not only the longest running search for radio signals from alien civilizations, but it also boasts the largest community of dedicated users of any Internet computing project. The premise is simple; instead of backlogging all the information gathered in the search for extraterrestrial life and hoping to get to it one day, distribute it out across the internet to hundreds of thousands of willing computer users.

The Great Silence & 1.8 Gigayear Interval

Are we the lone sentient life in the universe? So far, we have no evidence to the contrary, and yet the odds that not one single other planet has evolved intelligent life would appear, from a statistical standpoint, to be quite small. There are an estimated 250 billion (2.5 x 1011) stars in the Milky Way alone, and over 70 sextillion (7 x 1022) in the visible universe, and many of them are surrounded by multiple planets. The shear size of the known universe is staggeringly and inconceivably vast.

Japan's X-Files on Alien Spacecraft -Gov't Leaders Trigger Debate

Japan Probe report that Japan's chief cabinet secretary Nobutaka Machimura said UFOs are real -meaning alien spacecraft, according to a BBC report. The document revealed that Japan has not yet planned what to do should aliens arrive here.

Is Active SETI a Smart First Move or Potentially Dangerous?

"We're talking about initiating communication with other civilizations, but we know nothing of their goals, capabilities, or intent."

John Billingham, senior scientist at the private SETI Institute in Mountain View, California

Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos Revisited -A Galaxy Classic

If all goes as planned, in ten months NASA's Phoenix Mission will land on the northern plains of the Red Planet and dig three-feet into the soil and water-ice looking for evidence of microbial life.

The Phoenix mission puts a renewed, glaring spotlight on the enduring question posed by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, known today as the Fermi Paradox, if there's life elsewhere in the universe, "Where is everybody?"

Former Military Pilots & Officials Call for U.S. UFO Probe

Recently Democratic U.S. presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich was ridiculed by Tim Russert for saying he had seen a UFO, but he now has a little more company in that camp. In case you missed the story on network and cable news, former military pilots and others called on the US government earlier this week to officially reopen UFO investigations.

Presidential Politics & the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

What I found so fascinating and disturbing about the UFO flap during last week's Democratic Presidential Debate in Philadelphia aside from Tim Russert's predictable attempt to further marginalize and belittle Dennis Kucinich (especially considering Russert's past powderpuff interviews with VP Dick Cheney), was Russert's oblique mainstream-media slapdown at what is one of the dominant themes of the 21st Century: the search for extraterrestrial life -a search that the combined governments of Europe, Asia, and North America are spending hundreds of $ billions to undertake.

The ET Question: Is Mainstream Media Looking the Other Way?

"I think the significance – and they are probably exaggerating it – but the significance is that I'm the first person of cabinet rank in the G8 to have come out openly and unequivocally and said the extra-terrestrial presence is real.”

~ Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Federal Defense Minister

A new group is pushing for full government disclosure about extra-terrestrials. For some, the first instinct is to call them another band of nutty conspiracists were it not for the fact that a former Federal Defense Minister is backing them up.

Astronomers Believe Sun-like Star Best Bet Yet for 'Earth's Twin'

The most Sun-like star ever found has some astronomers very excited. They say a planetary system around such a star would be the ideal place to find intelligent life.

SciFi Friday: Could Advanced Technological Civilizations Exist at the Edge of the Milky Way?

Milan Cirkovic  of the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, and one of the world's leading authorities on astrobiology and SETI studies, thinks they might.

Cirkovic's approach is similar to the one favored by Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, who suggests searching for distant extrterrestrial artifacts of the Solar System (and other planetary systems).

'Life Detection' Kit Launched into Space

A new experiment based on technology similar to that used in pregnancy test kits, but specifically designed to search for signs of life on Mars, was successfully launched into space and is now orbiting the Earth.

The European Space Agency's experiment, called the "Life Marker Chip," recently hitched a ride into space aboard a Russian rocket, which launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. Strapped to the ESA's Foton-M3 capsule, the tiny postage stamp sized experiment carried more than 2,000 life-detecting samples that glow if they encounter life-critical compounds, such as proteins or DNA.

Interstellar Dust -A Source of Non-Organic Life?

Could be made of corkscrew-shaped particles of interstellar dust?

Echoing the recent National Research Council Report that calls for the search for non-carbon-based forms of in our Solar System and beyond, new research findings hint at the possibility that life beyond Earth may not necessarily use carbon-based molecules as its building blocks.

New Phoenix Mission Technology to Search for Life

A new spacecraft called Phoenix, parsed together largely from leftovers from one mission that failed and another that was canceled, is set for takeoff on Saturday from Cape Canaveral, and it could provide important answers to three burning questions questions: can the Martian arctic support life, what is the history of water at the landing site, and how is the Martian climate affected by polar dynamics?

"War of the Worlds" 2 or Story of the Century?

In July 1938 in a CBS Mercury Theater radio program that terrified the nation, Orson Wells broadcast a live presentation of H.G.Wells' science-fiction novel, War of the Worlds. Only later did much of the eastern seaboard realize that it was science fiction, not an actual extraterrestrial invasion.

The following day, the New York Times front page announced: "Many flee homes to Escape Gas Raid from Mars..."

Astro-Engineering Artifacts as Evidence of

The world-renowned physicist, Freeman Dyson of Princeton's Advanced Institute of Study (Einstein's former home), wrote that "Life may succeed against all odds in molding the Universe to its own purposes. And the design of the inanimate Universe may not be as detached from the potentialities of life and intelligence as scientists of the 20th century have tended to suppose."

The underlying assumption of Dyson's statement is his belief that in a universe some 14 billion years old that their are advanced technological civilizations in existence far more ancient than our 4.5 billion year-old Earth who are capable of feats of "macro-engineering" that we can hardly imagine.

"On Two Planets" & "War of the Worlds" -The Origins of Science Fiction

Two planets, Earth and Mars, and two literary geniuses, Germany’s Kurd Lasswitz and Britain’s H.G. Wells laid the foundations of modern science fiction and idea of that became an integral part of popular culture and led to ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Alien series.

Yet the themes of the two books, both published in 1897, were in stark contrast: Lasswitz’s story, On Two Planets, left a legacy of hope while Wells Martian fantasy, War of the Worlds, left one with a legacy of fear.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Genomes

If there is life on Mars, Harvard geneticist Gary Ruvkun thinks it resembles something we are already familiar with -DNA. Now, he's trying to prove it for NASA, he reported yesterday to Boston.com

With early funding from NASA, Ruvkun is working on a sensor designed to test the soil of for DNA -the first part of a project he has dubbed the "Search for Extraterrestrial Genomes," which will be a part of a lander mission in the next decade.

A Great Debate -Naming of Earth's Twin Planet 581c

We posted yesterday and last Friday about the fact that there is still much to learn about the possibility of life on new "Super-Earth" planet, 581 c, discovered last week by the European Southern Observatory's telescope team at La Silla, Chile.

We have had a heated discussion in our comments listing about the naming of this new, possible twin to planet earth. The discovery seems to have unleashed a wave of excitement and hope in the possibility that we are not alone in the Universe(as common sense should tell us!). Many of our Daily Galaxy community believe that we should honor the inhabitants of 581c, if and when they are discovered and contact is made, and adopt the name they have given to their home base.

In the interim, we think that a quite delightful solution would be a temporary selected by a worldwide contest among children eleven and under.

What do you think?

Prior posts:

Discovery of Super Earth

Earth's Twin Habitable?

A Must Read on 581c

Jupiter's Europa & the Search for

Did you know that Jupiter's moon, Europa, has a global ocean of liquid water with greater volume than Earth's oceans, and that astrobiologists consider it to be an excellent place to look for forms. The closest analogous environment on Earth is probably the hot springs in the deep ocean, which support a rich biota. The biota near Earth's ocean hot spring derive their energy from chemical processes that are, in turn, driven by heat from the Earth's interior. The primary ingredients for life are water, heat, and organic compounds obtained from comets and meteorites. Europa has had all three. Europa's water should have frozen long ago, but warming could be occurring due to the tidal tug of war with Jupiter and neighboring moons. Models of Europa's interior show that beneath a thin 3 mile crust of water ice, Europa may have oceans as deep as 30 miles or more. The visible markings on Europa could be a result of global expansion where the crust could have fractured, filled with water and froze. Source: NASA. Posted by Jason McManus.

Natural or Extraterrestrial Phenomena?

We've never seen anything like this Mexican Airforce video before. What do you think?

As you watch this video, it's interesting to note that NASA astronaut Gordon Cooper testifies to chasing UFOs in his F-86 Fighter jet in Germany, post WW II, double lenticular disc-shaped UFOs that out-performed his fighter, and another case at Edwards AFB in 1957; Astronaut Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14) walked on the moon and testifies that UFOs are real; USAF Ret Ken Storch testifies that UFOs nearly started WW III mistaken for Russian ICBMs.

Mexican Airforce Footage

Lonely Planets? A Great Debate about the Frequency of

NASA's Astrobiology Portal has published a series of six Great Debates as prominent scientists sift through the available evidence to reach what are sometimes directly opposing conclusions. The first debate will explore the factors required to make a planet habitable and the question of whether complex life like that on Earth is common or rare in our galaxy.

When the book Rare Earth was published two years ago, it raised a great deal of controversy among astrobiologists. Written by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, the book's hypothesis suggests complex life is rare in the universe, and may even be unique to Earth. If life does occur elsewhere, the authors contend, it will only be in the form of single-celled life such as bacteria.

The "Rare Earth" hypothesis is directly opposed to the cultural assumption that there are many alien civilizations, derived from the famous estimate by Frank Drake - known as the "Drake Equation" - that was later amended by Drake and Carl Sagan. They arrived at an estimate that there are perhaps a million intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy alone.

The participants in the Great Debate include Donald Brownlee and Peter Ward, co-authors of Rare Earth and professors at the University of Washington, Frank Drake, and David Grinspoon, the 2006 Carl Sagan Award winner and astrobiologist.

Great Debate Link