Mars’ underground water reservoirs and looking for ETI with space-based platforms

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - By discovering the first double star where a pulsating Cepheid variable and another star pass in front of one another, an international team of astronomers has solved a decades-old mystery. The rare alignment of the orbits of the two stars in the double star system has allowed a measurement of the Cepheid mass with unprecedented accuracy. The new result shows that the prediction from stellar pulsation theory is spot on, while the prediction from stellar evolution theory is at odds with the new observations. See article.
g Abodes - An international research team led by the Planetary Science Institute has found evidence for reservoirs of liquid water on Mars at shallow crustal depths of as little as tens of meters. See article.
g Life - Giant pterosaurs - ancient reptiles that flew over the heads of dinosaurs - were at their best in gentle tropical breezes, soaring over hillsides and coastlines or floating over land and sea on thermally driven air currents, according to new research. See article.
g Message - The venerable Planetary Society hopes to take the search for extraterrestrial life to the stars with space-based platforms. See article.
g Cosmicus - NASA’s IceBite team is in Antarctica this month testing a new drill built by Honeybee Robotics for use on a possible future mission to Mars. In this blog entry, Kris Zacny writes about the first field tests of the Icebreaker drill. See article.
g Aftermath - Would ET vote? What affect will ET’s political philosophy have on ours once contact is made? See article. This article is from 2002.

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Looking for ETI in all the wrong places and how ecosystems ‘reset’ after mass extinctions

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - Supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies have phenomenal cosmic jets. So do small stellar black holes. Now a baby star – one that's still forming – has been found to rely on the same mechanism to produce its own jets. See article.
g Life - A new study demonstrates that the extinction of the dinosaurs paved the way for a dramatic increase in the size of mammals. The work provides new information about how ecosystems “reset” after mass extinctions. See article.
g Intelligence - Neuroscientists at MIT and Harvard have made the surprising discovery that the brain sees some faces as male when they appear in one area of a person's field of view, but female when they appear in a different location. See article.
g Message - In pursuit of an answer to that formidable question, scientists have for decades been searching the skies with radio waves to pick up any signs of alien life. They may be looking in the wrong place. See article. This article is from 2004.

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Oxygen found in Rhea’s atmosphere and dancing specks of dust as life

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - In an experiment to collide lead nuclei together at CERN's Large Hadron Collider physicists from the ALICE detector team including researchers from the University of Birmingham have discovered that the very early Universe was not only very hot and dense but behaved like a hot liquid. See article.
g Abodes - The Cassini-Huygens mission has captured the first direct evidence of an oxygen atmosphere on a world other than Earth. The tenuous atmosphere exists around Saturn’s moon Rhea. See article.
g Life - Could alien life exist in the form of dancing specks of dust? According to a new simulation, electrically charged dust can organize itself into DNA-like double helixes that behave in many ways like living organisms, reproducing and passing on information to one another. See article. Note: This article is from 2007.
g Cosmicus - Scientists and engineers are developing a Mars 'hopping' vehicle that could help astrobiologists explore the red planet. Robotic explorers play an essential role in the search for signs of past or present life in the solar system. See article.
g Aftermath - Though an older Web posting, “After Contact, Then What?” shows how little we’ve thought about this question.

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Alien evolution and habitability of other planets

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - What Einstein called his worst mistake, scientists are now depending on to help explain the universe. See article.
g Abodes - Science fiction lovers aren't the only ones captivated by the possibility of colonizing another planet. Scientists are engaging in numerous research projects that focus on determining how habitable other planets are for life. See article.
g Life - What can we predict about alien evolution before our interstellar explorers finally make landfall on a new world? See article.
g Cosmicus - The ever-expanding human population will continue to impact the habitability of our planet into the future. But moving humans from Earth into the final frontier carries an environmental cost as well. See article.
g Aftermath - For one futurist’s thoughts about what will happen to humanity when we make first contact with aliens, click here. I offer this site not for its scientific rigor but as an example of something all of us who care about astrobiology should consider: What are the trends in popular culture about first contact? Such thinking will greatly influence public reaction when first contact actually does occur.

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500th exoplanet discovered and cosmic dust essential

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - Astronomers find cosmic dust annoying when it blocks their view of the heavens, but without it the universe would be devoid of stars. Cosmic dust is the indispensable ingredient for making stars and for understanding how primordial diffuse gas clouds assemble themselves into full-blown galaxies. See article.
g Abodes - Less than 20 years after confirming the first planet beyond our own solar system, astronomers have bagged exoplanet No. 500. See article.
g Life - Researchers recently revived ancient bacteria trapped for thousands of years in water droplets embedded in salt crystals. See article.
g Intelligence - The combination of caffeine and glucose can improve the efficiency of brain activity, according to a recent study in which functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to identify the neural substrate for the combined effects of these two substances. See article.
g Message - For more than 80 years, we’ve been sending radio (and eventually television) transmissions into space, allowing anyone in space to hear war reports from London, “I Love Lucy” reruns and our latest election results. So wouldn’t hearing aliens be as simple as turning on the radio? Here’s why not. This article is from 2004.
g Cosmicus - Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have demonstrated quantum entanglement for a quantum state stored in four spatially distinct atomic memories. See article.
g Aftermath - How will humanity react when we receive our first interstellar phone call from ET? Though not a new piece, SETI astronomer Seth Shostak offers some intriguing thoughts. This article is from 2004.

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Searching for ETI south of the equator and Rosetta Stone for T-dwarf stars

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - An international team of astronomers have discovered a unique and exotic star system with a very cool methane-rich (or T-) dwarf star and a “dying” white dwarf stellar remnant in orbit around each other. The system is a “Rosetta Stone” for T-dwarf stars, giving scientists the first good handle on their mass and age. See article.
g Abodes - An international research team has found evidence for reservoirs of liquid water on Mars at shallow crustal depths of as little as tens of meters. See article.
g Life - Researchers have discovered bacteria and algae that have been trapped inside fluid inclusions in salt crystals for thousands of years. The study could provide direct observations of how organisms have evolved over time and reacted to climate change on the ancient Earth. See article.
g Message - What are our friends south of the equator doing in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence? After all, the Northern Hemisphere only covers half of the galaxy. See article.
g Cosmicus - Space Exploration Technologies, the California company called SpaceX for short, has received the first-ever commercial license to re-enter spaceships from Earth orbit. See article.

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ET in Earth’s outer atmosphere and cosmic leftovers

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - When certain stars collapse, they release overwhelming blasts of energy called gamma-ray bursts – the most powerful explosion in the universe. But the cosmic leftovers of these violent outbursts have been a mystery — until now. See article.
g Abodes - Life from outer space could be surviving on the outer fringes of the Earth's atmosphere, according to scientists who are to launch a mission to search for bacteria that could be living there. See article.
g Message - In 2001, a group of Russian teens from Moscow, Kaluga, Voronezh and Zheleznogorsk participated directly and via the Internet in composing a Teen-Age Message to extraterrestrial intelligence, and in the selection of target stars. Their message was transmitted in the autumn of that year, from the Evpatoria Deep Space Center. See article.
g Cosmicus - With conventional materials, light typically travels along a straight line, but with metamaterials, scientists can exploit a wealth of additional flexibility to create undetectable blind spots. By deflecting certain parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, an image can be altered or made to look like it has disappeared. See article.
g Aftermath - If some day we detect a radio signal from a distant civilization, we’ll have to make some adjustments in the way we view ourselves. After millennia of knowing of no other intelligence in the universe than humankind, we could face a considerable challenge to our terrestrial egotism. In the process, will we simply gain a little healthy humility about our place in the universe? Or would it be downright humiliating to compare our own meager accomplishments with those of more advanced extraterrestrials? See article. This article is from 2000.

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More exoplanet discoveries coming and interstellar messaging

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - A new image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer shows what looks like a glowing jellyfish floating at the bottom of a dark, speckled sea. In reality, this critter belongs to the cosmos - it's a dying star surrounded by fluorescing gas and two very unusual rings. See article.
g Abodes - Discoveries of worlds outside our solar system are increasing – and new space telescopes raise the chances of finding more. See article.
g Message - Here’s a neat Web site: “Interstellar Messaging.” You’ll find discussion, history and real-world examples of mankind's methods and ongoing attempts to communicate with extraterrestrials. See article.
g Cosmicus - The passenger-carrying suborbital SpaceShipTwo is headed for more aggressive testing — a step-by-step shakeout of the vehicle before entering commercial operation. See article.
g Aftermath - What are the societal implications of astrobiology? A NASA workshop in 1999 set out to determine what they might be. See report.

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Alien life certain to exist and detecting ETI’s messenger probes

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - Elliptical galaxies were once thought to be aging star cities whose star-making heyday was billions of years ago. See article.
g Abodes - Alien life is certain to exist on Earth-like planets, a scientists say. See article.
g Life - Orangutans threatened with extinction could be brought back from the brink with help from a Queensland University of Technology statistician. See article.
g Message - How might we detect an extraterrestrial messenger probe already in the solar system? See article. This article is from 1983.
g Cosmicus - Quote of the Day: “… this arrival of a crew on the Red Planet must have nothing to do with conquest. Nor should we turn the place into a rubbish dump. Have we lost our reverence for the universe around us?” – Brian W. Aldiss, “White Mars”

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No tracking aliens in Denver and biological activity in the deepest layer of ocean crust

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - In the local group of galaxies that also includes the Andromeda Nebula and our Milky Way, there are about 100 billion stars. According to astronomers' calculations, there should be many more. Now, physicists from the University of Bonn and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland may have found an explanation for this discrepancy. See article.
g Abodes - A comet visited by a NASA spacecraft this month is spewing jets of vaporized dry ice into space, scientists have found. See article.
g Life - The first study to ever explore biological activity in the deepest layer of ocean crust has found bacteria with a remarkable range of capabilities, including eating hydrocarbons and natural gas, and "fixing" or storing carbon. See article.
g Message - Denver Voters have turned down a proposal to set up a commission to track UFOs. article
g Cosmicus - A part of NASA's Astrobiology Small Payloads Program, the loaf-of-bread-sized O/OREOS, or Organism/Organic Exposure to Orbital Stresses nanosatellite will see how microorganisms will react to the space environment. The nanosatellite was launched on a U.S. Air Force four-stage Minotaur IV rocket out of Kodiak Island, Alaska. See article.

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Planet from another galaxy and new drill for exploring Mars

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - A huge snakelike tendril of magnetic plasma has appeared on the sun, extending hundreds of thousands of miles across the surface of our nearest star. See article.
g Abodes - Astronomers have discovered a planet orbiting a star that entered our Milky Way from another galaxy. The planet is unusual because it orbits a star nearing the end of its life. Studying the planet will provide new information about the evolution of planetary systems. See article.
g Intelligence - A sophisticated new examination of teeth from 11 Neanderthal and early human fossils shows that modern humans are slower than our ancestors to reach full maturity. The finding suggests that our characteristically slow development and long childhood are recent and unique to our own species, and may have given early humans an evolutionary advantage over Neanderthals. See article.
g Message - Since SETI first became a subject for serious scientific research, scientists have come up with many possible ways to detect the presence of other civilizations by searching our part of the galaxy for signs of artificially created signals. Using many different kinds of detection equipment and novel concepts, investigators labored away in their electronics laboratories and observatories dreaming, that one day, the signs they had been searching for would be found. See article.
g Cosmicus - NASA’s IceBite team is in Antarctica this month testing a new drill built by Honeybee Robotics for use on a possible future mission to Mars. In this blog entry, Kris Zacny writes about setting up the Icebreaker drill. See article.

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Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence and doomed binary systems

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - Researchers who found the first hypervelocity stars escaping the Milky Way announced that their search also turned up a dozen double-star systems. Half of those are merging and might explode as supernovae in the astronomically near future. See article.
g Abodes - Recent data from the Spitzer Space Telescope has helped scientist determine what the “dust tail” of Earth looks like. The finding could help astrobiologists search for Earth-like planets because similar dust tails trailing behind extrasolar planets might actually be easier to spot than the planets themselves. See article.
g Life - Tyrannosaurus rex was far from a plodding Cretaceous era scavenger whose long tail only served to counterbalance the up-front weight of its freakishly big head. See article.
g Intelligence - The language we speak may influence not only our thoughts, but our implicit preferences as well. That's the finding of a study by psychologists at Harvard University, who found that bilingual individuals' opinions of different ethnic groups were affected by the language in which they took a test examining their biases and predilections. See article.
g Message - We’ve all heard of SETI, but what about METI — “Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” or sending both scientific and artistic messages to the stars? See article. This article is from 2005.
g Cosmicus - NASA’s IceBite team is in Antarctica this month testing a new drill for a possible future mission to Mars. Team member Margarita Marinova will be writing a blog of their activities. If you have a question about the IceBite project, click the 'Ask a Scientist' button and send it to the scientists in the field. See article.

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Universal fear leads to Great Silence and New Mexico spaceport set to open next year

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Abodes - Earth is constantly manufacturing new crust, spewing molten magma up along undersea ridges at the boundaries of tectonic plates. The process is critical to the planet's metabolism, including the cycle of underwater life and the delicate balance of carbon in the ocean and atmosphere. See article.
g Life - Coral reefs suffered record losses as a consequence of high ocean temperatures in the tropical Atlantic and Caribbean in 2005 according to the most comprehensive documentation of basin-scale bleaching to date. Collaborators from 22 countries report that more than 80 percent of surveyed corals bleached and over 40 percent of the total surveyed died, making this the most severe bleaching event ever recorded in the basin. See article.
g Intelligence - In the November 12th issue of Cell, researchers at Children's Hospital Boston and their collaborators report on a novel human pain gene. People with minor variations in this gene showed clear differences in susceptibility to acute heat pain and chronic back pain. Corroborating mouse studies give some clues as to how the gene controls pain sensitivity. The gene was uncovered in a genome-wide hunt for pain genes in fruit flies, which revealed hundreds of other candidate pain genes that await further study. See article.
g Message - Will universal fear doom SETI to a continuation of the Great Silence? See David Brin’s Zoo Hypothesis argument. This article is from 1982.
g Cosmicus - Work on Spaceport America is in full swing, with the state-of-the-art space launch facility near Truth or Consequences, N.M., expected to become fully operational in 2011. See article.
g Aftermath - Many scientists believe our best chance of discovering alien life will be a human or robotic mission in our own solar system — probably to Mars — targeted at detecting extraterrestrial microbial life. But the controversy begins with the small but vociferous group of scientists who use radio telescopes to search the sky for a signal from other civilizations. See article.

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ETI’s tritium waterspout and youngest black hole observed

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - A cosmic explosion seen 31 years ago may have been the birth cry of the youngest black hole ever observed, which could help researchers understand how black holes are born and evolve. See article.
g Intelligence - Australia's first people viewed comets as portents of doom, a new study of Aboriginal astronomy has found. See article.
g Message - Advanced extraterrestrial civilizations which make extensive use of the fusion fuel resources of their local star and planetary system have numerous potentially observable characteristics. A circumstellar nuclear fuel molecular effusion cloud, the principal observable, rapidly dissociates and neutralizes to the atomic ground state, permitting the detection of hydrogen and tritium hyperfine transition radio lines at 1420 MHz and 1516 MHz, respectively. The negligible natural abundance of neutral atomic ground-state tritium suggests that its hyperfine line, the "tritium waterspout" centered in the radio SETI "waterhole" band, is ideal for interstellar communication and future SETI searches. Other possible observables of advanced civilizations include redshifted neutrino point sources, an artificial radio spectrum, anomalous blackbody radiation, fission waste absorption lines, Doppler and stellar spectral anomalies, and extraordinary magnetic fields. See article. This article is from 1985.

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Test drill for Martian ice and finding alien probes

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - New dark matter observations may yield new insights into the role of dark energy in the universe's early formative years. The result suggests that galaxy clusters may have formed earlier than expected, before the push of dark energy inhibited their growth. See article.
g Life - An international team of scientists, including a leading evolutionary biologist from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, have reset the agenda for future research in the highly diverse Amazon region by showing that the extraordinary diversity found there is much older than generally thought. See article.
g Intelligence - Dirty “kitchen” tools reveal that cavemen were grinding their own flour and preparing vegetables for meals at least 30,000 years ago, according to new research. See article.
g Message - A typical alien probe might be 1 to 10 m in size, large enough to house a microwave antenna to report back and to- survive micrometeorite impacts for millions of years, yet fight enough to fly across the interstellar abyss without consuming too much energy. Where might it be? Finding it is rather like searching a beach for one special, oddly-shaped grain of sand. See article. This article is from 1984.
g Cosmicus - Members of NASA’s IceBite team will be in Antarctica’s Dry Valleys this month testing a drill developed by Honeybee Robotics for possible use on a future mission to the arctic northern plains of Mars. The IceBreaker drill is designed to obtain samples for scientific analysis of ice and soil from as much as a meter (3 feet) below the surface. See article.
g Learning - More than three decades after concentrating in a subject that would not become the focus of his career, astronomer and astrophysics professor Adam Burrows sought to make it easier for current students to do so. See article.

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Searching for extraterrestrial probes and sending our own probes by century’s end

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - A NASA spacecraft scanning the sky has discovered a cold failed star that glows green in infrared light and has an atmosphere filled with deadly gases that would make it pretty stinky, too. See article.
g Abodes - A new study looking at fossil algae shows that variations in carbon dioxide 40 million years ago were tightly coupled to changes in global temperature. Understanding the relationship between the Earth's climate and carbon dioxide in the geological past can provide insight into the extent of future global warming expected to result from carbon dioxide emission caused by the activities of humans. See article.
g Life - New research is causing geologists to rethink the timeline of when animals appeared on the Earth. The fossil record indicates that a large number of animal species appeared during the Cambrian Explosion some 542 million years ago. Now it seems that their appearance may not have been so sudden. See article.
g Intelligence - Prehistoric people in southern Africa developed a highly skilled way of shaping stones into sharp-edged tools long before Europeans did, suggests a new study. See article.
g Message - Interstellar spacecraft are superior to electromagnetic wave propagation for extrasolar exploration and communication. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence should include a search for extraterrestrial probes. See article. This article is from 1983.
g Cosmicus - By the beginning of next century, plans will be made to see alien life forms up close. See article.

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ETI will prefer Bach and coordinating response to dangerous asteroid

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - Astronomers say it was the first stars and galaxies, rather than black holes or elemental particle decay, which gave us the universe we have today. See article.
g Life - The discovery of blocks of gravel which sank to the bottom of the sea trapped in ancient icebergs has sparked a new understanding of a bizarre group of creatures. See article.
g Intelligence - A piece of stone axe found in Australia’s Northern Territory has been dated at 35,500 years old, making it the oldest of its type in the world. See article.
g Message - Among the most important SETI work is being done at Harvard University. Here's the Harvard SETI home page.
g Cosmicus - Space agencies around the world are working to be ready to coordinate their response to any potentially harmful asteroid headed for Earth. See article.
g Learning - Science is present in all the world around us and need to be open to everyone, including children. With this goal comes the Science Week, which this year in Castilla y León reaches its eighth edition. See article.
g Aftermath - If we ever make contact with aliens, they might be more interested in learning about Van Gogh and Bach than Einstein or Newton. See article.

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Finding the 500th exoplanet and SETI radio search primer

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - Scientists may have a new tool to help them work out what sort of environment the solar system's been experiencing during its journey through our galaxy, the Milky Way. See article.
g Abodes - The number of planets that astronomers have discovered orbiting distant stars hovers right below 500. But confirming which remote flicker of light is the milestone alien world will be a tricky affair. See article.
g Life - Evidence found in ancient rocks that once lay on a Scottish lake floor show the Earth's atmosphere was able to sustain complex life 1.2 billion years ago - 400 million years earlier than previously accepted. See article.
g Intelligence - The brains of Neanderthals and humans were similar at birth but developed differently in the first year of life, according to a German study. See article.
g Message - Here’s a quick, easy primer to understand to SETI’s radio searches and the Fermi Paradox.
g Cosmicus - In a step toward solving the global energy crisis, a new plan aims to harvest the sun's energy from space with satellites then beam it down to Earth. See article.

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Martian missions to find life and searching for Dyson Shells

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - An ancient eruption of a supermassive black hole in the Milky Way may have inflated two huge bubbles of gamma rays which were just now discovered and are considered a new type of astronomical object. See article.
g Abodes - One of the reasons NASA sends so many missions to Mars is because of the planet’s potential for life. Current missions search for factors thought to be necessary for life, such as liquid water and organic molecules, but some scientists now say the search for life itself should be the highest priority for the next decade of Mars robotic probes. See article.
g Life - In theory, plants could be the ultimate "green" factories, engineered to pump out the kinds of raw materials we now obtain from petroleum-based chemicals. But in reality, getting plants to accumulate high levels of desired products has been an elusive goal. Now, in a first step toward achieving industrial-scale green production, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at Dow AgroSciences report engineering a plant that produces industrially relevant levels of compounds that could potentially be used to make plastics. See article.
g Intelligence - DNA evidence suggests that immigrants from the Ancient Near East brought farming to Europe, and spread the practice to the region's hunter-gatherer communities, according to Australian-led research. See article.
g Message - Unexplained or incompletely studied astrophysical phenomena such as odd star populations of the galaxy NGC 5907 or the asymmetry of increases and decreases in the brightness of long-period variable stars provide us with a number of locations that may be studied for signs of Dyson Shells. If we free ourselves from anthropocentric perspectives and combine the ideas of Dyson, Minsky and Suffern as well as the technological progress of recent decades, we can envision advanced civilizations at the limits of physical laws. Observations directed towards stars decreasing in visual magnitude or searching for stellar occultations by large cold dark objects, merit serious consideration as future strategies in optical SETI. See article.
g Cosmicus - Blinking numbers on a liquid-crystal display often indicate that a device's clock needs resetting. But in the laboratory of Zhong Lin Wang at Georgia Tech, the blinking number on a small LCD signals the success of a five-year effort to power conventional electronic devices with nanoscale generators that harvest mechanical energy from the environment using an array of tiny nanowires. See article.

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Ancient atmospheres of Earth and Mars and quantum communication between the stars

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - A new image of a galactic pileup shows the vivid chaos of two colliding galaxies, giving astronomers a ringside seat to watch how the cosmic mergers can influence the evolution of the universe. See article.
g Abodes - Chemists have uncovered a chemical reaction that could allow scientists to study the ancient atmospheres of Earth and Mars. The technique could yield clues about past life on Earth - and the potential for past life on Mars. See article.
g Life - A research group has shown that the closest living relatives of the tetrapods - the lungfish - are insensitive to sound pressure but sensitive to vibrations. See article.
g Intelligence - Researchers have documented species differences in the pattern of brain development after birth that are likely to contribute to cognitive differences between modern humans and Neanderthals. See article.
g Message - Would anyone deliberately beam high-powered signals into space? Can we assume that extraterrestrial societies would broadcast in ways that would mark their location as plainly as a flag on a golf green? See article. This article is from 2003
g Cosmicus - NASA has devised a new tool in the battle against massive eruptions from the sun: an early warning system to protect electrical grids on Earth from extremely powerful solar storms. See article.
g Learning - In the quaint physics laboratory of St Joseph’s College, Bangalore, every Saturday a group of youngsters can be seen nurturing its space dream and be part of India’s highly sophisticated space research program. See article.

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Ancient Martian atmosphere and technological manifestations of detectable civilizations

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - With the help of the army of volunteers working on the Galaxy Zoo 2 "citizen science" project, an international team of scientists have discovered that the bars found in many spiral galaxies could be helping to kill them off. The researchers present their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. See article.
g Abodes - Chemists have uncovered a new chemical reaction on tiny particulates in the atmosphere that could allow scientists to gain a glimpse from ancient rocks of what the atmospheres of the Earth and Mars were like hundreds of millions years ago. See article.
g Life - In October, a UFO (unidentified "floating" object) was spotted in Newport News, Virginia. The bizarre blob was not a Halloween prank, and has been identified as a “magnificient bryozoan.” This species' fossil record spans some 500 million years - but the Newport News specimen is larger than most reports of the organism. See article.
g Intelligence - Do you like to do good things for other people? If so, your genes might be responsible for this. At least, the results of a study conducted by researchers of the University of Bonn suggest this. According to the study, a minute change in a particular gene is associated with a significantly higher willingness to donate. People with this change gave twice as much money on average to a charitable cause as did other study subjects. See article.
g Message - What technological manifestations would make an advanced extraterrestrial civilization detectable? See article. Note: This paper was written in 1992.
g Cosmicus - The stars demand better of us than a fixation on quick results. Wonderful if we do get them, but budgetary and technological realities may push the definitive discovery of life around another star into an ambiguous future. See article.

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Post-Detection Taskgroup and bringing back rocks from Mars

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Abodes - Mars sample return – bringing rocks from Mars back to Earth – has been on NASA’s wish list for decades, and work is underway to develop the necessary technology. Recently a group of scientists field-tested a robotic system that can drill into rocks, collect small core samples and store them for later retrieval. See article.
g Message - If some day we decide to transmit intentional messages to the stars, rather than solely listen as current SETI programs do, what would we say? What sort of first impression would we want to give our celestial correspondents? See article. This article is from 2003.
g Cosmicus - With Republicans set to lead the House following the recent midterm elections, new doubts are rising over the state of NASA's 2011 budget. See article.
g Aftermath - For more than fifty years, an international network of astronomers has been probing the sky with sensitive radio telescopes, listening for any sign of intelligent life beyond Earth. So far, of course, there hasn’t been so much as a peep from ET, which means SETI — the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — is one of the few sciences that has to make do, at least for now, with no data. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done. A group known as the SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup, established in 2001, has been pondering what the effects of first contact might be, and what actions, if any, earthlings should take in the event that we do one day hear an unambiguous signal above the random noise of interstellar space. See article.

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Search for ETI goes global and fungi helped plants colonize land

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Life - A new study shows how Earth's first plants began to colonize the land by forming a partnership with soil fungi. The research is helping scientists better understand mechanisms behind the evolution of life. See article.
g Message - The scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence went global this weekend as observatories in 13 nations on five continents trained their telescopes on several promising star systems. See article.
g Cosmicus - The recent launch of a navigation satellite was the 12th flight of a Long March rocket in 2010, eclipsing the record for most Chinese space missions in a single year. See article.
g Learning - The California Academy of Sciences’ new planetarium show, “Life: A Cosmic Story” is an enormously ambitious undertaking. See article.
g Aftermath - Even if the public seems less than awestruck by the prospect that alien life is a bunch of microscopic bugs, astrobiologists say unequivocal discovery of microbial life beyond Earth will change human society in profound ways, some unfathomable today. See article. This article is from 2001.

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ETI synchronization schemes and snowball planets

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Abodes - The Earth has plunged into a deep freeze several times in the past, with ice covering the land and sea for millions of years. Researchers are studying how the planet eventually escaped these cold spells, and whether Earth-like planets elsewhere in the galaxy may be susceptible to the same climate catastrophe. See article.
g Message - If the signals that are being sought in SETI programs do exist but are very brief, for example because they are produced intermittently to conserve energy, then it is essential to know when these signals will arrive at the Earth. Different types of synchronization schemes are possible which vary in the relative amount of effort which is required by the transmitter and the receiver. Here the case is made for a scheme which is extremely simple for the receiver: make observations of a target when it is at maximum angular distance from the Sun (i.e. "opposition"). See paper.
g Cosmicus - NASA's EPOXI mission successfully flew by comet Hartley 2, and the spacecraft has begun returning images. Hartley 2 is the fifth comet nucleus visited by a spacecraft. See article.
g Aftermath - How would proof of extraterrestrial intelligence affect humanity’s “world” view? Astronomer Steve Dick discusses the matter in this transcribed Smithsonian Institute lecture, from 1999. See article.

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Carbon dioxide is Martian ‘water’ and modifying the Drake Equation

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - A team of astronomers has found evidence that the universe may have gone through a warming trend early in its history. They measured the temperature of the gas that lies in between galaxies, and found a clear indication that it had increased steadily over the period from when the universe was one tenth to one quarter of its current age. This cosmic climate change is most likely caused by the huge amount of energy output from young, active galaxies during this epoch. See article.
g Abodes - River-like gullies are found in various locations on Mars, and many point to these features as proof that liquid water once flowed on the planet's surface. A new study, however, says that frozen carbon dioxide piling up on Martian dunes trigger avalanches that carve out the mysterious gullies. See article.
g Life - The nature-nurture debate is a "giant step" closer to being resolved after scientists studying bees documented how environmental inputs can modify our genetic hardware. The researchers uncovered extensive molecular differences in the brains of worker bees and queen bees which develop along very different paths when put on different diets. See article.
g Intelligence - Fossil finger bones of early human ancestors suggest that Neanderthals were more promiscuous than human populations today, researchers at the universities of Liverpool and Oxford have found. See article.
g Message - Should we modify the Drake Equation to account for civilizations which actually engage in deliberate interstellar transmission? See article. This article is from 2005.
g Cosmicus - A new holographic technology being developed at the University of Arizona could eventually let us interact with lifelike images of friends living across the globe. See article.

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SETI@Home down and ‘100-Year Starship’

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - An international team of scientists led by Rutgers University astrophysicists has discovered 10 new massive galaxy clusters from a large, uniform survey of the southern sky. The survey was conducted using a breakthrough technique that detects "shadows" of galaxy clusters on the cosmic microwave background radiation, a relic of the "big bang" that gave birth to the universe. See article.
g Abodes - An asteroid crashing into the deep ocean could have dramatic worldwide environmental effects including depleting the Earth's protective ozone layer for several years, a Planetary Science Institute researcher has found. See article.
g Life - Researchers could use a novel "on-off switch" to control cell growth or death, grow new tissue or deliver doses of medication directly to diseased cells, a researcher says. See article.
g Message - The SETI@Home project is down while database servers are being remodeled. See article.
g Cosmicus - The director of NASA's Ames Research Center in California casually let slip mention of the 100-Year Starship recently, a new program funded by the super-secret government agency, DARPA. In a talk at San Francisco's Long Conversation conference, Simon “Pete” Worden said DARPA has $1M to spend, plus another $100,000 from NASA itself, for the program, which will initially develop a new kind of propulsion engine that will take us to Mars or beyond. See article.
g Learning - Some of the world's top scientists gathered at the Vatican last weekend to discuss the scientific advances of the 20th century and their compatibility with religion. See article.

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Martians may just be Earthlings and was the space station worth it?

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - The results of a high-profile Fermilab physics experiment appear to confirm strange 20-year-old findings that poke holes in the standard model, suggesting the existence of a new elementary particle: a fourth flavor of neutrino. See article.
g Abodes - New research indicates that global warming could be having devastating effects, even with small shifts in tempertaure. Even some of Earth's most reilient species may find the changes too difficult to survive. Studying the effects of climate change can help us understand life's future on Earth. See article.
g Life - If life on Mars is ever found, it may turn out to be less alien than you might expect. See article.
g Message - Book alert: In response to Enrico Fermi's famous 1950 question concerning the existence of advanced civilizations elsewhere, physicist Stephen Webb in “If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens... Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi's Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life” critically examines 50 resolutions to explain the total absence of empirical evidence for probes, starships, and communications from extraterrestrials. He focuses on our Milky Way Galaxy, which to date has yielded no objects or signals that indicate the existence of alien beings with intelligence and technology. His comprehensive analysis covers topics ranging from the Drake equation and Dyson spheres to the panspermia hypothesis and anthropic arguments. Of special interest are the discussions on the DNA molecule, the origin of life on Earth, and the threats to organic evolution on this planet (including mass extinctions). Webb himself concludes that the "great silence" in nature probably results from humankind's being the only civilization now in this galaxy, if not in the entire universe. This richly informative and very engaging book is recommended for most academic and public library science collections. See reviews.
g Cosmicus - Asking the International Space Station to justify its existence is a tall order. NASA estimates the station has cost U.S. taxpayers $50 billion since 1994 — and overall, its price tag has been pegged at $100 billion by all member nations. See article.

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When Earth almost became lifeless and building a scientifically accurate alien

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Abodes - More than 251 million years ago, Earth almost became a lifeless planet. Chemical evidence buried in rocks that formed during this major extinction indicates a devastated landscape with huge “dead zones” in the oceans and runaway greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. See article.
g Life - Researchers have discovered a new member of a gene family that has powerful influences on pigmentation and the regulation of body weight. See article.
g Cosmicus - The first extraterrestrial mining operation in human history will likely start up on the moon, thanks to its ample and relatively accessible stores of water ice, experts say. See article.
g Imagining - Many science fiction story lines involve alien life forms. From a literary prospective, aliens often serve as metaphors for something more familiar. From a practical prospective, they make stories more interesting and TV more eye-catching. But what of scientific accuracy? A professor offers his advice about “How to Build an Alien”. This presentation is from 2002.

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Looking for biomarkers on exoworlds and alien signals washing over us right now

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Abodes - The ground where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit became stuck last year holds evidence that water, perhaps as snow melt, trickled into the subsurface fairly recently and on a continuing basis. See article.
g Intelligence - The theory that later Neanderthals might have been sufficiently advanced to fashion jewellery and tools similar to those of incoming modern humans has suffered a setback. A new radiocarbon dating study, led by Oxford University, has found that an archaeological site that uniquely links Neanderthal remains to sophisticated tools and jewellery may be partially mixed. See article.
g Message - What are the chances that an alien signal has been sent our way just at the right moment to splash upon our antennas during that brief interval? If the extraterrestrials beam their broadcasts to the whole galaxy (or at least a big chunk of it), the chances are 100 percent. See article. This article is from 2006.
g Cosmicus - These are exciting times for planet hunters, with Kepler and CoRoT in the hunt, three ongoing searches for rocky worlds around Centauri A and B, and the continuing WISE mission, which may identify planet-bearing red and brown dwarfs that we haven’t spotted yet, not to mention numerous radial-velocity, transit and microlensing projects. But stepping back to get the big picture is a bit sobering. Jean Schneider did that recently in a paper looking at the far future of direct imaging, wondering where we were headed after Kepler and CoRoT. Schneider (Paris Observatory) talks about a “conceptual or knowledge horizon” that limits us to detecting biomarkers and keeps us from going much further than that for centuries. See article.

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Complex organic molecules at solar system’s edge and buckyballs everywhere

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - Astronomers have discovered bucket loads of buckyballs in space. They used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to find the little carbon spheres throughout our Milky Way galaxy - in the space between stars and around three dying stars. What's more, Spitzer detected buckyballs around a fourth dying star in a nearby galaxy in staggering quantities - the equivalent in mass to about 15 of our moons. See article.
g Abodes - New research could link the 'Snowball Earth' glacial events some 750 to 580 million years ago to the rise of early animals. The research team tracked phosphorus concentrations in the oceans through history. Phosphorus is linked to the abundance of life in the oceans, and concentrations appear to have spiked at a time corresponding to the Snowball Earth event. See article.
g Life - The reddish hue of many objects in our solar system's frigid outer reaches may be evidence of complex organic molecules, perhaps even the building blocks of life, new research suggests. See article.
g Message - Phoning home intergalactically may have one natural prerequisite if a civilization is hoping to connect: timing their precursor signal or 'ring' so that we might know that they're broadcasting. Dr. Robin Corbet, of the Universities' Space Research Association discusses his research findings on Synchronized SETI. See article. This article is from 2002.
g Cosmicus - A new space race is on among commercial companies hoping to snag a lucrative contract to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. See article.

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