The initial step in the search for extraterrestrial life involves identifying the presence of liquid water. The moons of Saturn and Jupiter like Enceladus, Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto are suspected of holding oceans of liquid water beneath icy crusts. Similarly, some exoplanets beyond our solar system likely host liquid water, crucial for habitability. But detecting water, when we can’t physically access these celestial bodies, poses challenges. Ice-penetrating radar, a geophysical tool, has proven capable of detecting liquid water on Earth and beneath Mars ’ South polar cap.
Now, this instrument is aboard the JUICE spacecraft and it is on its way to Jupiter’s icy moon Ganymede and will also be aboard the Europa Clipper spacecraft, which will be launched to Europa later this year. What can we expect to learn from these missions and how can we use ice-penetrating radar for future planetary exploration? Dr Elena Pettinelli of Roma Tre University, with extensive experience in planetary exploration using ice-penetrating radar, delved into the utility of this technology in her presentation recently presented at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly EGU24.
The International Space Station has long been known as a unique — and uniquely gross — environment. But according to a new NASA study, it has stuff growing on it that is straight-up alien, too.
In a press release, NASA said that when scientists from the Jet Propulsion Lab looked at samples of the drug-resistant Enterobacter bugandensis bacteria found on the orbital outpost, they found that the strains had mutated into something that literally doesn’t exist on Earth.
“Study findings indicate that under stress, the ISS isolated strains were mutated and became genetically and functionally distinct compared to their Earth counterparts,” the press release reads. “The strains were able to viably persist in the ISS over time in significant abundances.”
Researchers have quantified a pathway for the formation of molecular oxygen from the interaction of carbon dioxide with electrons, key information for searches of life on other worlds.
So far, life is only known to exist on Earth. But that hasn’t stopped scientists from searching for signs of living creatures on other planets. Those searches intensified with the deployment of the JWST observatory, which astronomers are using to characterize the atmospheres of far-off worlds in the hope of finding the signals of molecules that signify the presence of life (see News Feature: The Skinny on Detecting Life with the JWST). But for that to work, scientists need to know all the possible sources of atmospheric molecules. Now Lucas Sigaud of the Fluminense Federal University, Brazil, and his colleagues have uncovered a pathway for forming an oxygen molecule (O2]. The detailed measurements of the pathway provide key inputs for models used in planetary-life searches.
From house plants and gardens to fields and forests, green is the color we most associate with surface life on Earth, where conditions favored the evolution of organisms that perform oxygen-producing photosynthesis using the green pigment chlorophyll a.
Are we alone? What might alien species look like? And what could we learn from them? Proudly presenting Life Beyond Remastered, a film that weaves all 3 episodes of the series together with new content and updated visuals & audio into a feature-length experience. Massive thank you to everyone who made this possible: my subscribers, patreon members, vfx collaborators, scientists, researchers, friends, family, and more. A special thank you to Protocol Labs for their sponsorship of the series and support, please check out the work they are doing: http://protocol.ai Please watch in 4K with your best audio equipment for the proper experience! High quality 4K download is coming this week, and I will link it here. Directed by Melodysheep (John D. Boswell) Narrated by Will Crowley Featuring voices of: Douglas Rain, David Christian, Michelle Thaller, Andrew Siemion, Dan Werthimer, Avi Loeb, Ellen Stofan, David Kipping, Nick Lane, Jonathan Losos, Caleb Scharf, Jack Cohen, Shawn Domagal-Goldman, Jill Tarter, and Orson Wells Additional Visual Effects by: Unknown Dino, Julius Horsthuis, Lynn Huberty, Tim Stupak, Samuel Krug, Eren Arik, CGHadi, Jack Emmens, Konstantin Kovalenko, Eren Arik, NASA, Evolve, Adrian Bobb, Igor Puskaric, Unknown Dino, and Alan Reynaud Supported by Morrison Waud, Angela Kilic-Cave, James Upsher, Matthew Brown, TabloidA, and Juan Benet http://melodysheep.com Instagram: @melodysheep_ Twitter: @musicalscience Special thanks to my $50+ Patrons: Greysen Cohen Serenelove520 Romain Gilliot Frank Buschmann Axel Vei Kimi Ushida Justin Hansemann AChillingSight Alex Cheung WJSBUTLER & CO Sebastián Soto bluetifulangel David Rovira Mackenzie Moore Robert Leiper Naomi Augustine David August Jeremiah Tims Joan Meier Michael Denny Caleb Levesque Derick Yan Brandon Sanders And thank you to my $10+ patrons! https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/yozoa8…
Is time an illusion? If not, what is time? Why does time flow forward? You are watching this video. Your brain cells are firing in anticipation. A story is unfolding. Time is moving forward. Or is it? What if I told you that nothing is happening. There is no story unfolding. The story has already been told. The video has already been uploaded and seen by others. You are just watching it one second at a time, so there is a story unfolding for you only. What if your entire life was like this video upload, like a DVD. The story of your life is already on that DVD. The only difference is that you don’t have a forward and reverse button. You are forced to experience your DVD one moment at a time. There is some strong scientific evidence that this may be the true nature of reality. If so, that could mean that everything you think you know is utterly an illusion. Einstein’s theory of relativity supports something called the block universe, which is really a four dimensional space time structure. This means that every event has its own coordinates not only in space but in time. So for example, wherever you are right now corresponds to a location in 3 dimensions, like London, England — and a location in time, 2PM on Feb 2, 2019. But just like the space 10 feet ahead of you is as real as the space 10 feet behind you, so too is the moment 10 minutes into the future and 10 minutes into the past. In other words, the past and future exist just as much as the present. MIT physicist Max Tegmark says we can view the universe as a three dimensional space where stuff happens, or four dimensional block universe where nothing happens. If it is the latter, he says, then change is really an illusion, because nothing is changing. It’s all there – past, present and future – like a DVD. A drama maybe unfolding in the movie recorded on the dvd, but nothing about the DVD is changing in any way. We may have the illusion, at any given moment, that the past already happened and the future doesn’t yet exist, and that things are changing. But the only reason we may have a past is that our brain contains memories of the past. If we did not have any memories, would we have any sense of the past, or of a sense of time at all? Is it possible that time doesn’t actually exist except through our perception of it? Physics doesn’t help us when it comes to the arrow of time – it is time-agnostic. If time was running backwards, all the equations would still be valid. So mathematically, physics does not say that time goes forward or backward. It just says that time Time can not be zero, but it can run either forward or backward without violating any laws. Time is symmetric. But this is counterintuitive. Reality seems to be telling us that time does exist, and that its arrow points in only one direction — forward. Why doesn’t the arrow of time flow backward, if physics says it is equally likely. It would have been possible if it were not for one aspect of physics, and that is the law of entropy. Entropy is a measure of the disorderliness of the universe. Things always get more disorderly. You can scramble and egg, but you can’t unscramble it. This is entropy increasing. Entropy appears to be the only reason the arrow of time is what it is. But why is Entropy always becoming higher? Why doesn’t it become lower? There doesn’t appear to be any fundamental reason for that. Alan Guth, professor at MIT, who pioneered the idea of cosmic inflation, may have solved this riddle. He argues that information and entropy are almost the same thing. In order to know your past, you have to form memories. Adding memories means adding information. Adding information increases entropy. Therefore a conscious system can only be conscious in one direction – when entropy increases, which allows information to increase. This implies that we are conscious because we live in a universe of increasing entropy. Consciousness cannot exist in a universe where entropy decreases. So if entropy has been increasing since the beginning of time, it means that the universe must have started at the lowest possible state of entropy at the beginning…at the big bang. Why then did the universe start off this way, resulting in forward time? Alan Guth says that if the universe is infinitely large, then the total potential entropy of the universe is infinite. If that is the case, then any entropy you start with is low entropy. The entropy will increase from any given starting point he says. This means that it doesn’t matter what the entropy of the big bang was, it would always be the lowest entropy, because there will always be a larger entropy number that the universe can flow to. And seemingly, we exist because time has flowed in a favorable direction for causality to occur, namely, it has flowed forward in our universe. But what about the block universe, are we living inside a DVD?…watch the video for the answer.
I found this on NewsBreak: Decoding the Mysteries of Life and the Cosmos: A Journey Through the Last Decade of Science.
By: Jason St Clair.
It’s worth reflecting on the scientific breakthroughs that have shaped our understanding of the universe and ourselves from 2010 to 2019. From the creation of synthetic life to the first glimpse of a black hole, these discoveries remind us of the indomitable human spirit and our unending quest for knowledge.
What should we look for when trying to find life beyond Earth? Should it be the familiar green and blue colors that we see thriving on our small, blue planet, or something else entirely? This is what a recent study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how identifying purple colors on other worlds, as opposed to the aforementioned green and blue on Earth, could serve as an optimal method in the search for life beyond Earth since many bacteria exhibit purple pigmentation. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand the criteria for identifying life beyond Earth, and specifically life as we don’t know it.
“Purple bacteria can thrive under a wide range of conditions, making it one of the primary contenders for life that could dominate a variety of worlds,” said Dr. Lígia Fonseca Coelho, a postdoctoral associate at the Carl Sagan Institute (CSI) and lead author of the study.
For the study, the researchers analyzed a myriad of purple sulfur and purple non-sulfur from various oxygenated and non-oxygenated environments with the goal of ascertaining how their physical properties compared with reflectance data derived from several Earth-sized exoplanets. In the end, they produced a data base that can be used to potentially locate purple-colored life on other worlds throughout the cosmos, including Earth analogs, water planets, frozen planets, and snowball planets. The goal of this data is to improve algorithms and additional search methods to identify purple colors instead of green, with the latter being the traditional search baseline.
