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Category: alien life

A new study released by NASA on Tuesday shows that oceans on Europa, one of Jupiter’s 67 known moons, might have a lot in common with our own oceans, including a chemical balance capable of harboring life.

Scientists have been eyeing the mysterious water world as one of the most promising places to find alien life for a while now, and this study suggests they’re on the right track.

The moon, which is only a quarter the size of Earth, is covered in a thick shell of ice. But there is strong evidence that there could be a salty ocean deep beneath its surface.

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Friends have been asking me to write something on space exploration and my campaign policy on it, so here it is just out on TechCrunch:

When people think about rocket ships and space exploration, they often imagine traveling across the Milky Way, landing on mysterious planets and even meeting alien life forms.

In reality, humans’ drive to get off Planet Earth has led to tremendous technological advances in our mundane daily lives — ones we use right here at home on terra firma.

I recently walked through Boston’s Logan International Airport; a NASA display reminded me that GPS navigation, anti-icing systems, memory foam and LED lights were all originally created for space travel. Other inventions NASA science has created include the pacemaker, scratch-resistant lenses and the solar panel.

These types of advancements are one of the most important reasons I am hoping our next U.S. president will try to jump-start the American space program — both privately and publicly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear any of them are talking about the issue. But they should be. As we enter the transhumanist age — the era of bionic limbs, brain implants and artificial intelligence — space exploration might once again dramatically lead us forward in discovering the most our species can become.

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WASHINGTON — Space is vast, but it may not be so lonely after all: A study finds the Milky Way is teeming with billions of planets that are about the size of Earth, orbit stars just like our sun, and exist in the Goldilocks zone — not too hot and not too cold for life.

Astronomers using NASA data have calculated for the first time that in our galaxy alone, there are at least 8.8 billion stars with Earth-size planets in the habitable temperature zone.

The study was published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Interesting approach to the topic.

Do aliens exist? Carlo Rovelli, a founder of loop quantum gravity theory and author of the best-selling book “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics,” says it’s an easy question.

“There is so much space up there that it is childish to think that in a peripheral corner of an ordinary galaxy there should be something uniquely special,” he writes. “Life on Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe.”

Humans do have a long history of thinking they are special, though we’re gradually learning otherwise.

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If aliens sent you an encrypted binary message, could you answer? René Heller, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, wants to hear from you.

Last month, Heller posed a hypothetical question as part of the #SETIDecryptChallenge: “Suppose a telescope on Earth receives a series of pulses from a fixed, unresolved source beyond the solar system,” he wrote. “It turns out the pulses carry a message.”

The encrypted message is a vast sea of 0’s and 1’s. You can see it here, but here’s a GIF for your convenience.

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Deep Space Industries and the Luxembourg Government announce partnership to commercialize space resources.

Asteroid mining company Deep Space Industries, together with the Luxembourg Government and the Société Nationale de Crédit et d’Investissement (SNCI), the national banking institution in Luxembourg, have signed an agreement formalizing their partnership to explore, use, and commercialize space resources as part of Luxembourg’s spaceresources.lu initiative.

The Luxembourg Government will work with Deep Space Industries to co-fund relevant R&D projects that help further develop the technology needed to mine asteroids and build a supply chain of valuable resources in space.

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An international team of astronomers has discovered three Earth-sized exoplanets, all orbiting the same star just 40 light-years from us, the 16-nation intergovernmental research organization ESO reported on Monday.

The scientists have deemed all three planets potentially habitable, an exciting turn in the hunt for “exoplanets,” a term for planets that orbit a star other than our sun.

And it could bring us closer to finding extraterrestrial life.

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