Conspiracy theory fans never tire of spotting rocks which look like people, crabs or bears on Mars — but NASA’s Spirit Rover might have just spotted something really important.
The cauliflower-like minerals found inside a Martian crater may have been created by aliens, researchers from Arizona State University have said.
The protrusions — which the scientists refer to as ‘micro-digitate silica protrusions’ — were spotted by NASA’s Spirit Rover in 2008.
Over the last 12,000 years or so, human civilization has noticeably reshaped the Earth’s surface. But changes on our own planet will likely pale in comparison when humans settle on other celestial bodies. While many of the changes on Earth over the centuries have been related to food production, by way of agriculture, changes on other worlds will result, not only from the need for on-site production of food, but also for all other consumables, including air.
As vital as synthetic biology will be to the early piloted missions to Mars and voyages of exploration, it will become indispensable to establish a long-term human presence off-Earth, namely colonization. That’s because we’ve evolved over billions of years to thrive specifically in the environments provides by our home planet.
Our physiology is well-suited to Earth’s gravity and its oxygen-rich atmosphere. We also depend on Earth’s magnetic field to shield us from intense space radiation in the form of charged particles. In comparison, Mars currently has no magnetic field to trap particle radiation and an atmosphere that is so thin that any shielding against other types of space radiation is negligible compared with the protection that Earth’s atmosphere affords. At the Martian surface, atmospheric pressure never gets above 7 millibars. That’s like Earth at an altitude of about 27,000 m (89,000 ft), which is almost the edge of space. And it’s not like the moon is a better option for us since it has no atmosphere at all.
With a growing number of Earth-like exoplanets discovered in recent years, it is becoming increasingly frustrating that we can’t visit them. After all, our knowledge of the planets in our own solar system would be pretty limited if it weren’t for the space probes we’d sent to explore them.
The problem is that even the nearest stars are a very long way away, and enormous engineering efforts will be required to reach them on timescales that are relevant to us. But with research in areas such as nuclear fusion and nanotechnology advancing rapidly, we may not be as far away from constructing small, fast interstellar space probes as we think.
There’s a lot at stake. If we ever found evidence suggesting that life might exist on a planet orbiting a nearby star, we would most likely need to go there to get definitive proof and learn more about its underlying biochemistry and evolutionary history. This would require transporting sophisticated scientific instruments across interstellar space.
While I AM aware that this is unlikely to end up being the work of an alien civilization, I DO believe that sooner or later (given the mindbogglingly powerful, state of the art observational instruments coming online soon, or already online, I’d DEFINITELY go with SOONER, rather than later!) we will detect an alien civilization in a similar way.
A star that made headlines due to weird brightness dips—leading to speculations of aliens building structures around it—is even weirder than we thought.
A reversal of thermodynamics could allow life to exist on planets orbiting a black hole, as seen in the film Interstellar.
Posted in alien life, engineering, habitats | Leave a Comment on Could this be humanity’s LAST century? Expert says ‘re-engineering our children’ will lead to the creation of a new species
Definitely something to ponder on.
‘We can eventually produce offspring that are as different from us as dogs are from grey wolves,’ said Seth Shostak in an opinion piece for Seti.
‘Everyone expects our progeny to establish colonies on the moon or Mars, but the better deal is to build huge, orbiting habitats in which you can live without a spacesuit.
We shall see. We shall see. wink
For three decades, humans have searched for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth, and yet we’ve only sampled a tiny drop of our vast cosmic ocean. If we’re ever to find a radio-hot, spacefaring civilization, we need to know where to point our telescopes.
But the answer may be simpler than we thought. According to a new study, there are roughly 150 brilliant patches of space that deserve our attention.
They’re called globular clusters, an evocative term for ancient, gravitationally-bound regions of space that can pack a whopping million stars per hundred cubic light years. Once thought to be uninhabitable, new research by Rosanne Di Stefano of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Alak Ray of the Tata Institute in Mumbai suggests that globular clusters may, in fact, be the ideal places for advanced civilizations to flourish.
Don’t panic.
Unless the dolphins start leaving the planet.
At that point, by all mean panic.
If you saw a fireball streaking across the skies of Georgia and other parts of the Southeast Thursday night, you’re not alone. NASA confirmed meteor sightings near Atlanta and other parts of southern states. No, it’s not Doomsday, the end of the world, and it wasn’t a UFO or signs of extraterrestrial visitors.
According to an 11 Alive story, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) said six of its ALL Sky Fireball Network cameras detected the meteor about 6:33 p.m. Reports of sightings came in from Georgia residents and motorists near Henry County.
NASA Meteoroid Environments Office spokesperson, Bill Cooke, said the meteor spotted over Georgia traveled about 50 miles above McDonough, a town located south and east of Atlanta.
If humankind successfully lands people on the surface of Mars, we could discover an important clue about the origins of life on Earth — one of the greatest scientific mysteries in human history.
A theory called panspermia, which dates back to the 5th century BC, posits that certain life forms can hop between planets, and even star systems, to fertilize them with life.
Following this theory, some scientists suspect that the first life on Earth never formed on our planet at all, but instead, hitched a ride inside planetary fragments from Mars that were flung into space after a powerful impact and eventually fell to Earth. We could be the aliens!
