Laboratory tests aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander’s robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.

“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.”

{ NASA | Continue reading }

previously { Consider the implications of discovering that life had evolved independently on Mars. That discovery would suggest that the emergence of life is not very improbable. }

photo { Neilsonnn }

During the final week of August 1835, a long article appeared in serial form on the front page of the New York Sun. It bore the headline: GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES LATELY MADE BY SIR JOHN HERSCHEL.

The article began by triumphantly listing a series of stunning astronomical breakthroughs that the famous British astronomer, Sir John Herschel, had apparently made “by means of a telescope of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle.” (…) Then the article revealed Herschel’s final, stunning achievement: he had discovered life on the moon!

The article continued on and offered an elaborate account of the fantastic sights viewed by Herschel during his telescopic observation of the moon. It described a lunar topography that included vast forests, inland seas, and lilac-hued quartz pyramids. Readers learned that herds of bison wandered across the plains of the moon; that blue unicorns perched on its hilltops; and that spherical, amphibious creatures rolled across its beaches. The highpoint of the narrative came when it revealed that Herschel had found evidence of intelligent life on the moon. (…)

The article, of course, was an elaborate hoax. Herschel had not really observed life on the moon, nor had he accomplished any of the other astronomical breakthroughs credited to him in the article. In fact, Herschel was not even aware until much later that such discoveries had been attributed to him. (…)

Despite the intense public speculation about the moon story, the Sun never publicly conceded that it was a hoax. On September 16, 1835 the Sun did publish a column in which it discussed the possibility that the story was a hoax, but it never confessed to anything.

{ Museum of Hoaxes | Continue reading }

image { Vari-Vue postcard, 1970s }

{ Jupiter-Shaped Planetarium, from Sega Toys }

related { Sega, Hasbro unveil new dancing robot }

Are we aliens? This question has come up due to a new result from studying meteorites. (…)

Some meteorites have been found to contain some relatively complicated organic compounds, including molecules that are components of amino acids, the building blocks of life. For example, the Murchison meteorite, which fell on Australia in 1969, has been found to contain purines and pyrimidines, which are crucial to a large number of biological molecules like DNA, RNA, and ATP (adenosine triphosophate, a chemical our cells use for fuel).

Now, you have to be careful. A meteorite might have had these molecules in it before it slammed into the Earth, or it may have absorbed them from the ground after impact. One way to tell the difference is to look at isotopes of the elements. (…)

Now the good part: scientists studying the Murchison meteorite have determined that the purines and pyrimidines have a non-terrestrial origin. In other words, the molecules in this meteorite, so crucial for life, were actually formed in outer space and fell to Earth.

{ Bad Astronomy | Continue reading }

The moon has been in plain view for all of human history, but it’s only within the past few decades that it’s been possible to travel there. And for just about as long as the moon has been within reach, people have been arguing about lunar property rights: Can astronauts claim the moon for king and country, as in the Age of Discovery? Are corporations allowed to expropriate its natural resources, and individuals to own its real estate? (…)

Property rights on the moon are still the subject of international discussion. But would anyone buy lunar land? And what would it take to establish good title?

Lots of people would buy lunar land—and, in fact, lots of people have, sort of. Dennis Hope, owner of Lunar Embassy, says he’s sold 500 million acres as “novelties.” Each parcel is about the size of a football field and costs $16 to $20. Buyers choose the location—except for the Sea of Tranquility and the Apollo landing sites, which Hope has placed off-limits.

To convey good title, Hope essentially wrote the U.N. to say he was going to begin selling lunar property. When the U.N. didn’t respond with an objection, he asserted that this allowed him to proceed. Although I regard his claim to good title as dubious, his customers have created a constituency to recognize his position.

{ Popular Mechanics | Continue reading }

Each time the space shuttle rises from its launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Fla., an Air Force officer waits anxiously for the first 2 minutes to pass safely. If the spaceship were to veer off course and endanger a populated area, this range safety officer would bear the terrible responsibility of flipping a pair of switches under a stenciled panel reading “Flight Termination.” The first switch arms explosives on the shuttle’s two solid rocket boosters. Flipping the second switch would detonate them, destroying the shuttle and crew.

{ Popular Mechanics | Continue reading }

UFO spotters, Raëlian cultists, and self-­certified alien abductees notwithstanding, humans have, to date, seen no sign of any extraterrestrial civilization. We have not received any visitors from space, nor have our radio telescopes detected any signals transmitted by any extraterrestrial civilization. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been going for nearly half a century, employing increasingly powerful telescopes and data-­mining techniques; so far, it has consistently corroborated the null hypothesis. As best we have been able to determine, the night sky is empty and silent. (…)

Here is another fact: the observable universe contains on the order of 100 billion galaxies, and there are on the order of 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone. In the last couple of decades, we have learned that many of these stars have planets circling them; several hundred such “exoplanets” have been discovered to date. Most of these are gigantic, since it is very difficult to detect smaller exoplanets using current methods. (In most cases, the planets cannot be directly observed. Their existence is inferred from their gravitational influence on their parent suns, which wobble slightly when pulled toward large orbiting planets, or from slight fluctuations in luminosity when the planets partially eclipse their suns.) We have every reason to believe that the observable universe contains vast numbers of solar systems, including many with planets that are Earth-like, at least in the sense of having masses and temperatures similar to those of our own orb. We also know that many of these solar systems are older than ours.

From these two facts it follows that the evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a “Great Filter,” which can be thought of as a probability barrier. The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful–which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable–that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

Now, just where might this Great Filter be located? There are two possibilities: It might be behind us, somewhere in our distant past. Or it might be ahead of us, somewhere in the decades, centuries, or millennia to come. Let us ponder these possibilities in turn.

If the filter is in our past, there must be some extremely improbable step in the sequence of events whereby an Earth-like planet gives rise to an intelligent species comparable in its technological sophistication to our contemporary human civilization. Some people seem to take the evolution of intelligent life on Earth for granted: a lengthy process, yes; ­complicated, sure; yet ultimately inevitable, or nearly so. But this view might well be completely mistaken. There is, at any rate, hardly any evidence to support it. Evolutionary biology, at the moment, does not enable us to calculate from first principles how probable or improbable the emergence of intelligent life on Earth was. Moreover, if we look back at our evolutionary history, we can identify a number of transitions any one of which could plausibly be the Great Filter.

For example, perhaps it is very improbable that even ­simple self-replicators should emerge on any Earth-like planet. Attempts to create life in the laboratory by mixing water with gases believed to have been present in the Earth’s early atmosphere have failed to get much beyond the synthesis of a few simple amino acids. No instance of abiogenesis (the spontaneous emergence of life from nonlife) has ever been observed. (…)

The other possibility is that the Great Filter is still ahead of us. This would mean that some great improbability prevents almost all civilizations at our current stage of technological development from progressing to the point where they engage in large-scale space colonization. For example, it might be that any sufficiently advanced civilization discovers some tech­nology–perhaps some very powerful weapons tech­nology–that causes its extinction. (…) …a nuclear war fought with arms stockpiles much larger than today’s (perhaps resulting from future arms races); a genetically engineered superbug; environmental disaster; an asteroid impact; wars or terrorist acts committed with powerful future weapons; super­intelligent general artificial intelligence with destructive goals; or high-energy physics experiments. (…)

So where is the Great Filter? Behind us, or not behind us?

If the Great Filter is ahead of us, we have still to confront it. If it is true that almost all intelligent species go extinct before they master the technology for space colonization, then we must expect that our own species will, too, since we have no reason to think that we will be any luckier than other species. (…)

What has all this got to do with finding life on Mars? Consider the implications of discovering that life had evolved independently on Mars (or some other planet in our solar system). That discovery would suggest that the emergence of life is not very improbable. If it happened independently twice here in our own backyard, it must surely have happened millions of times across the galaxy. This would mean that the Great Filter is less likely to be confronted during the early life of planets and therefore, for us, more likely still to come.

{ MIT Technology Review | Continue reading }

photo { Julian Meijer }

If there is life on other planets, why haven’t they contacted us?

You paraphrase Fermi’s Paradox, first posed by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 over lunch with some colleagues. During the same lunch, he also disproved the existence of UFOs, Sasquatch, fairies, God, and love. After that, he generally ate alone. But Fermi’s apparent logic overlooked two important probabilities: (1) the aliens are very far away and don’t believe we exist, and (2) Enrico Fermi was himself probably a space alien. I mean: Look at him.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

related { 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Aliens }

{ Since Sputnik in 1957 and the start of this year we’ve put around 6,000 satellites into orbit. Only 800 are still operational. | Nature | more }

{ John A. Wheeler, physicist who coined the term ‘Black Hole,’ is dead at 96 }

{ Simulated view of a black hole in front of the Milky Way | To gain insight into the most mysterious objects in the universe, astronomers shine a light at the chaotic core of our own Milky Way | full story }

Nearly half a century ago, Frank Drake, a young radio astronomer with extraterrestrials on his mind, stepped up to a blackboard in Green Bank, W.Va., and scribbled a string of symbols intended to bring some clarity to the question of just how alone humanity is in the cosmos.

The dozen wise men (there were no women) in the room were an elite group. Among them were Carl Sagan of Cornell University, as yet relatively unknown; the biochemist Melvin Calvin, who would learn during the meeting that he had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry; Barney Oliver, the research chief of Hewlett-Packard; and John Lilly, the dolphin expert, in whose honor the group dubbed themselves the Order of the Dolphin.

They sifted the variables in the light of what was then known or guessed, did the math, and concluded that there could be from less than a thousand to a billion other civilizations in the galaxy.

The Drake Equation, as it is known, has served as the bones of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and for the hopeful field of astrobiology ever since.

Since that meeting, in 1961, spacecraft have surveyed all the major bodies of the solar system, (…) so far in vain. (…)

At the same time, scientists discovered that life on Earth was tougher and more versatile than scientists had thought, thriving in weird places like boiling undersea vents. (…) How often does intelligent and technological life actually emerge from such environments? Some evolutionists, like Stephen Jay Gould, who died in 2002, have argued that intelligence is not inevitable. The dinosaurs did just fine for 150 million years without getting appreciably brainier.

The advantages intelligence and technology confer, moreover, might also be outweighed by their dangers.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

previously { The Voyager program | Voyager 1 and 2 both carry with them a golden record that contains pictures and sounds of Earth, along with symbolic directions for playing the record and data detailing the location of Earth. The record is intended as a combination time capsule and interstellar message to any civilization, alien or far-future human, that recovers either of the Voyager craft. }

Embryo space colonization is a proposal for colonizing space using embryos raised by robots.

It involves sending a robotic mission to a habitable terrestrial planet transporting frozen early-stage human embryos or the technological or biological means to create human embryos.

In contrast to both a sleeper ship (in which the crew spends the journey in some form of hibernation) and a generation ship (in which the occupants might either grow old or die during the journey and leave their descendants to continue traveling) the resources needed to build a spacecraft for an embryonic space colonization effort are considerably lower in terms of pure mass and complexity of the spacecraft.

Embryo space colonization concepts involve various concepts of delivering the embryos from Earth to another extrasolar planet around another star system.

• The most straightforward concept is to make use of frozen embryos. Modern medicine has made it possible to store frozen embryos in various low-development stages (up to several weeks in the development of the embryo).

• The technologically more challenging but more flexible scenario calls for just carrying the biological means to create embryos, that is various samples of donated sperm and egg cells.

• Going a step further, the spacecraft “cargo” could be limited just to the genetic information of humans stored in digital form. In this case, sperm and egg cells would need to be recreated by a biosequencer at the target planet (this proposal is currently not technologically feasible).

Regardless of the “cargo” used in any embryo space colonization scenario, the basic concept is that upon arrival of the embryo-carrying spacecraft (EIS) at the target planet, fully autonomous robots would build the first settlement on the planet and start growing crops. More ambitiously, the planet may be terraformed first. Thereafter the first embryos could be unfrozen (or created using biosequenced or natural sperm and egg cells).

In any event, one of the technologies needed for the proposal are artificial uteri. The embryos would need to develop in such artificial uteri until a large enough population existed to procreate by natural biological means.

Proposals of sleeper ships and generation ships require very large spacecrafts to transport humans, life support systems and other equipment or food as well as an even larger propulsion system for a long period in time. In contrast an EIS would have feasible small dimensions in the range of today’s spacecraft, as the most important “cargo” would not need much space or would not weigh very much.

While sleeper ships and generation ships would deliver to a prospective colony world a population that has undergone some degree of education, training, and socialization in areas reconcilable with those of the sponsor culture (e.g. historical, scientific, and technical education, language acquisition, an understanding of the original mission and broader cultural norms), individuals who are born into colony worlds through embryo space colonization would lack this education.

Major difficulties with the idea being implemented include needed advances in various technological areas:

• Artificial Uterus: Artificial wombs are not available today. However, scientists are working on this technology.

• Robotics: Whether it will be possible to develop fully autonomous robots that can build the first settlement on the target planet and raise the first humans, is unclear.

• Long-duration computers: Computer hardware would need to function reliably over long periods of time, in the range of several thousand of years.

• Power: Small and more efficient power systems have to be developed. Spacecraft traveling past the orbit of Mars (like Voyager and Pioneer) derive their electrical power from onboard nuclear batteries (solar panel systems sometimes double the weight of the spacecraft). With nuclear power (radioisotope thermoelectric generators/RTG), weight and volume are far less of a concern. Pioneer 11 was launched in 1973 to investigate Jupiter and the outer solar system. The spacecraft contained two (RTGs), which generated 144 W at Jupiter, but decreased to 100 W by the time it reached Saturn. Pioneer 11’s RTG power supply is now dead. Its last communication with Earth was in November 1995.

• A propulsion system would be required that could accelerate the EIS to a high speed and slow it down again upon nearing the destination. Even assuming a speed one hundred times faster than any of today’s spaceprobes and a target planet within a couple of hundred light years would lead to a journey lasting several thousand years.

• Exoplanet: Spotting an exoplanet qualifying for colonization within a reachable distance, preferably unoccupied (intelligent life could already occupy the planet, and might not allow us to settle it).

• Ultimate Meaning: Some would argue that there is no point to such a mission, as the humans eventually born from such a mission would have no idea of their significance, and even if educated about it somehow by the robots, would have no way to return information to earth’s inhabitants. Some would accuse it of being an empty, purely symbolic gesture at best.

{ Wikipedia/nswd }

Astronomers have discovered more than 150 planets outside our solar system, ranging from 100 to 1,000 times Earth’s mass. In 2005, they announced the 155th exoplanet discovery, much hotter than Earth (400º to 750º Fahrenheit (244º to 398º Celsius)). Astronomers believe these conditions could not support life, but have not ruled out the existence of water — the hot conditions also make it likely that the planet has not retained much gas, making the planet solid.

In 2007, they discovered Gliese 581 c, the most earthlike planet outside our solar system to date, with a radius only 50% larger than the Earth and possibly having liquid water on its surface. Liquid water is a key ingredient for life as we know it. The newfound planet is located at the “Goldilocks” distance-not too close and not too far from its star to keep water on its surface from freezing or vaporizing away.

{ Space.com | Astronomy.com }