The Great Filter theory suggests humans have already conquered the threat of extinction. I think the issue is not that life is so utterly rare, or that intelligent life is so utterly rare.
I think the issue is one of transcendence and of the mindset to achieve it. In otherwords, we're not seeing ETI blazing across the universe because its not socially acceptable for us to see ETI blazing across the universe. The Search for Aliens Is Just Getting Started. A lot of people assume we're looking for complex patterns in radio signals, like the value of pi, a list of prime numbers, or the Fibonacci [sequence].
But what we're really looking for is just any radio signal that some sort of transmitter could have made—one that's restricted to a very narrow band of frequencies. This is because the cosmos makes a lot of radio waves and other noise, but those are all over the dial, which is a sign of bad engineering, because you're wasting a lot of energy. We're looking for something that is, so to speak, carefully manicured. Absurd Creature of the Week: The Incredible Critter That's Tough Enough to Survive in Space - Wired Science. A color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph of a water bear, which is probably the only creature on Earth that looks like a cannon wearing wrinkled khakis.
Image: Eye of Science/Science Source In 1933, the owner of a New York City speakeasy and three cronies embarked on a rather unoriginal scheme to make a quick couple grand: Take out three life insurance policies on the bar’s deepest alcoholic, Mike Malloy, then kill him. First, they pumped him full of ungodly amounts of liquor. When that didn’t work, they poisoned the hooch. Mike didn’t mind. New molecular signature could help detect alien life as well as planets with water we can drink and air we can breathe. Pressure is on to launch the James Webb Space Telescope into orbit by 2018. : science. A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life. Why does life exist?
Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.” From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Silence in the sky—but why? (Phys.org) —Scientists as eminent as Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan have long believed that humans will one day colonise the universe.
Search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Screen shot of the screensaver for SETI@home, a distributed computing project in which volunteers donate idle computer power to analyze radio signals for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is the collective name for a number of activities undertaken to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life.
SETI projects use scientific methods in this search. For example, electromagnetic radiation is monitored for signs of transmissions from civilizations on other worlds.[1][2] Some of the most well-known projects are run by Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, or the SETI Institute. In 1995, the United States federal government ceased funding to SETI projects, forcing them to turn to private funding to continue the search, though in recent years, government funding of SETI has resumed at modest levels.[3] Radio experiments[edit] Microwave window as seen by a ground based system.
Early work[edit] Search for life suggests solar systems more habitable than ours. Public release date: 3-Dec-2012 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Pam Frost GorderGorder.1@osu.edu 614-292-9475Ohio State University SAN FRANCISCO—Scattered around the Milky Way are stars that resemble our own sun—but a new study is finding that any planets orbiting those stars may very well be hotter and more dynamic than Earth.
That's because the interiors of any terrestrial planets in these systems are likely warmer than Earth—up to 25 percent warmer, which would make them more geologically active and more likely to retain enough liquid water to support life, at least in its microbial form. Hunt for alien spacecraft begins, as planet-spotting scientist Geoff Marcy gets funding. Artist rendering of alien spaceship Photo: Ray Edgar In the field of planet hunting, Geoff Marcy is a star.
After all, the astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley found nearly three-quarters of the first 100 planets discovered outside our solar system. Self-replicating alien space probes could already be in our solar system, say mathematicians - Science - News. The probes, which mathematicians Duncan Forgan and Arwen Nicholson referred to in their paper 'Slingshot Dynamics for Self Replicating Probes and the Effect on Exploration Timescales', could be so hi-tech that they're invisible to human beings, the researchers said.
The two mathematicians analysed the possibility that probes could travel through space in a study published in the Journal of Astrobiology. The paper raises the question of whether alien races could have used the gravity of stars to “slingshot” probes in order to gain speed: a technique humans already use for probes, such as the Voyager. SETI Institute. SETI Search Reveals No Alien Signals from Exoplanets. Intelligent alien life is likely relatively rare throughout our Milky Way galaxy, with fewer than one in a million solar systems harboring civilizations advanced enough to send out radio signals, a new study reports.
A research team that includes famed alien hunter Jill Tarter — the model for astronomer Ellie Arroway in Carl Sagan's famous book "Contact" — surveyed dozens of planet-hosting stars for radio signals from alien civilizations. They turned up nothing. "No signals of extraterrestrial origin were found," the researchers conclude in the study, which has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. Purple bacteria on Earth could survive alien light. Public release date: 23-Jul-2013 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Annette Gallaghera.gallagher1@umiami.edu 305-284-1121University of Miami CORAL GABLES, FL (JULY 23, 2013) — Purple bacteria contain pigments that allow them to use sunlight as their source of energy, hence their color.
Small as they are, these microbes can teach us a lot about life on Earth, because they have been around longer than most other organisms on the planet. University of Miami (UM) physicist Neil Johnson, who studies purple bacteria, recently found that these organisms can also survive in the presence of extreme alien light. Amino Acids and DNA Ingredients found in Space. February 28, 2013 Contact: Dave Finley, Public Information Officer Socorro, NM (575) 835-7302 dfinley@nrao.edu. Life on other planets could be far more widespread, study finds. (Phys.org) —Earth-sized planets can support life at least ten times further away from stars than previously thought, according to academics at the University of Aberdeen.
A new paper published in Planetary and Space Science claims cold rocky planets previously considered uninhabitable may actually be able to support life beneath the surface. The team, which included academics from the University of St Andrews, challenge the traditional 'habitable zone' – i.e. the area of space around a star, or sun, which can support life – by taking into consideration life living deep below the ground. "The traditional habitable zone is also known as the Goldilocks zone," explains PhD student Sean McMahon. "A planet needs to be not too close to its sun but also not too far away for liquid water to persist, rather than boiling or freezing, on the surface. Future evidence for extraterrestrial life might come from dying stars. (Phys.org)—Even dying stars could host planets with life—and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade.
This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf's planet much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star. "In the quest for extraterrestrial biological signatures, the first stars we study should be white dwarfs," said Avi Loeb, theorist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation. When a star like the Sun dies, it puffs off its outer layers, leaving behind a hot core called a white dwarf.