Thoughts about ET

The search for alien life beyond our planet, even beyond our own galaxy, has been in the news quite often of late:

• a scientist has seriously suggested at a recent meeting of world scientists that we should be looking for alien life on our own planet.  He believes that quite possibly life has landed here from outer space – possibly on the tale of a comet – more than once.  If so, it might still be pulsing away in some unexpected corners of and crevices of Earth.
• both water and methane have been found on Mars.  Water is an essential ingredient of any form of life as we know it;  methane is produced by many forms of life.  So there could be life on Mars even now.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7829315.stm
• scientists estimate that there may be as many as 100 billion Earth-like planets in our own Milky Way galaxy.  What would an Earth-like planet, capable of supporting life as we know it, be like?  First, it would be rocky, not gaseous.  It would have water, and be close enough to its sun that water doesn’t freeze, but far enough away that it doesn’t boil.  A moon would be helpful, because the moon creates tides and helps ruffle up the surface of the earth, mixing chemicals and organisms in the oceans’ waters, which encourages small organisms to grow and provides food for larger life forms.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7891132.stm
• earlier this month, Nasa launched the Kepler Space Telescope to look for Earth-like planets outside our galaxy.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7918497.stm
• and then there is the mysterious signal from outer space received in 1977 that  lasted 37 seconds and had the characteristics predicted for an alien signal.  No one has yet been able to explain it. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5797028.ece?token=null&offset=12&page=2  

The question is, if we did find ExtraTerrestrial life, how would we respond?  Would we try to kill it?

The birth, the life, and the death of a star

I’m not sure which I find more astonishing – that we can actually describe the life of our sun, both past and to come, or the fact that anybody in the world who has access to the internet can watch a six-minute U-tube video of the life cycle of a star similar to our sun.

Our own sun is the source of all our energy on earth, so when it finally burns out, life – at least life resembling anything we have thus far remotely  imagined – will disappear completely.  

That may be something to worry about, but one can take some consolation in the fact that the sun still has another two billion years to run.

In the meantime, here’s a preview of what it will be like:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd1kBjJPPlU

Further than the eye can see

Anyone who looks at the universe in awe and amazement, might find it interesting to check this out.  Scientists are trying to analyze and categorize millions of images that are being sent back to Earth from outer space.  There are images of galaxies,  and strange unidentified and mysterious objects, some older, some bigger, some smaller than our own Milky Way Galaxy.

The task is so big that anyone with a computer and a good eye is invited to participate in the ongoing research by helping to categorize the shapes and various characteristics of the galaxies.  

There is even a chance to discover something completely new.  If you do, it gets named after the finder.

https://www.galaxyzoo.org/how_to_take_part

Aliens may have already reached Earth

When most of us think about alien life, the images we conjure up are often suggested by the media is productions like Star Trek or Dr. Who.  But these ideas almost always are simply a slight change from the life forms with which we are familiar.  Perhaps aliens have pointy ears or wear vaguely medieval clothes, but they are not truly alien.

This week, however, a serious scientific suggestion has been made that alien life already exists on Earth.  We just don’t recognize it.  In fact, we haven’t even really looked for it.

Alien life, physicist Paul Davies suggests, is quite possibly living in Earth’s most alien environments – under conditions of extreme heat or cold, intense pressure, or surrounded in what life as we know it would find toxic.  It may not even be based on the carbon/hydrogen/oxygen combination which characterizes all life with which we are acquainted.

Would any of this matter in any practical sense?  Professor Davies says that what he believes may have happened is that life may have arrived colonized Earth on at least two separated occasions.  It may have arrived on a rock from Mars or on the tail of a comet from some place else.  But if life arrived and thrived on this single planet twice in Earth’s five billion year existence, then almost certainly the Universe is teeming with life.

And we are not alone.

Professor Davies is looking.  

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7893414.stm

Milky Way on collision course

It’s not as if the credit crunch and the multi-trillion dollar black hole in the middle of the world’s economies isn’t enough.  Now scientists have just announced that

• the solar system is orbiting the centre of the Milky Way at 600,000 mph, 20% faster than previous estimates
• the mass of the Milky Way is about twice as big as scientists thought
• so that the liklihood of the Milky Way colliding with another galaxy is much greater and will probably happen much sooner than scientists have been estimating.

On the other hand, a collision is not likely to happen for several billion years at the earliest.

So there’s probably still time for breakfast tomorrow.

http://www.silobreaker.com/DocumentClusterReader.aspx?Item=16_944313863

Not only strange…

The Hubble Telescope has been sending us photographs from almost as far away as it is possible to go.  Space and what’s out there is not only “deeply strange,” but also almost “impossibly beautiful.”

If you haven’t seen them already, here are a few worth marvelling at.  In fact, they are marvellous even if you’ve seen them a dozen times already.

Hubble telescope’s top ten greatest space photographs

The Sombrero Galaxy – 28 million light years from Earth – was voted best picture taken by the Hubble telescope. The dimensions of the galaxy, officially called M104, are as spectacular as its appearance. It has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years across.

The Ant Nebula, a cloud of dust and gas whose technical name is Mz3, resembles an ant when observed using ground-based telescopes. The nebula lies within our galaxy between 3,000 and 6,000 light years from Earth.

In third place is Nebula NGC 2392, called Eskimo because it looks like a face surrounded by a furry hood. The hood is, in fact, a ring of comet-shaped objects flying away from a dying star. Eskimo is 5,000 light years from Earth.

At four is the Cat’s Eye Nebula

The Hourglass Nebula, 8,000 light years away, has a pinched-in-the-middle look because the winds that shape it are weaker at the centre.

In sixth place is the Cone Nebula. The part pictured here is 2.5 light years in length (the equivalent of 23 million return trips to the Moon)

The Perfect Storm, a small region in the Swan Nebula, 5,500 light years away, described as ‘a bubbly ocean of hydrogen and small amounts of oxygen, sulphur and other elements’.

Starry Night, so named because it reminded astronomers of the Van Gogh painting. It is a halo of light around a star in the Milky Way.

The glowering eyes from 114 million light years away are the swirling cores of two merging galaxies called NGC 2207 and IC 2163 in the distant Canis Major constellation.

The Trifid Nebula. A ’stellar nursery’, 9,000 light years from here, it is where new stars are being born.

What would happen if we met ET?

Many people think that there is intelligent life beyond Earth, and as the interest (even belief) in UFOs suggest, many people think Extraterrestrial Life (ET) has already landed on our planet.  If it has, then either

• ET came but didn’t stay
• ET is how life started on this planet in the first place, in which case, ET is us
• ET is among us but we don’t recognize it/him/her.

Any of the above might be true, if at this point unprovable either way.  An equally provocative question about ET, though, is not whether he (or she or it) has already landed on Earth, but how we would respond if ET made contact.  I don’t think the prognosis is particularly encouraging.

• Would we recognize an intelligent life form if it arrived from outer space?  If our ability to recognize intelligence in each other or in other forms of life with whom we are already sharing this planet, the chances are that we will not.  We not only don’t understand much of the intelligent behavior in other species.  It was as late as the 15th century when Spanish colonialsts in Latin America asked the Pope in Rome to rule whether the native peoples were actually humans or whether they were more akin to monkeys.  We even often think other members of our own species lack intelligence because they do not speak the same language.  It was as late as the 20th century that U.S. Immigration was testing the intelligence of newly-arrived immigrants in English, even if they were barely able to understand the questions.
• Which gets us to my second concern.  If we did recognize ET as an intelligent life form, would we be able to understand its communication system?  It might be as different from our own as the communication systems of dolphins or of ant colonies, in which case we are apt to understand very little.
• The biggest question of all is how we would respond if we were to meet an ET being close-up?  In the movies, humans gyrate between being friendly and deadly.  I think we would be frightened, and would tend to respond by trying to kill it/him/her.  We already kill beings as small and inferior as mice and spiders because we are afraid they will bite.  And if we do not lash out in mindless terror, the chances are that we will attempt to conqueor ET.  Just as humans have attempted for thousands of years to conqueor the peoples in the lands we have invaded.  It’s not just the record of Europeans invading the Americas or Africa.  Before that, the Greeks and Romans, the Goths and the Visigoths, the Vikings and the Normans, the Christians and the Muslims, Genghis Khan and Byzantium head a long list of humans who have tried to impose the will on others.

My own hunch is that if we haven’t already, we will eventually come in contact with life forms that we do not recognize as belonging to planet Earth.  But my fear is that in the process, one of us will annihilate the other.

Why UFOs are hard to prove

Yesterday the Defense Department in Britain released a file of the reports of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).  A couple of them are tantalizing observations by seasoned, hard-headed pilots.  An American pilot was ordered to shoot a UFO down, but it seemed to disappear in thin air.  Another pilot was bringing his Alitalia plane into land in London’s Heathrow Airport in 1991.  He saw a missile-shaped object whiz outside his window, his co-pilot saw it, and it was observed on radar by the air traffic controllers.  Investigators have established that it wasn’t a missile, a weather balloon, or a space rocket, and closed the investigation without a clue about what it was.

So given these events and others like it, why aren’t most scientists convinced that we are faced with hard proof that flying objects from outer space are visiting Earth?

To answer this question, it helps to understand why scientific “facts” are never absolute and unchanging.  What science accepts as a fact is based on empirical observations usually by many different scientists in a variety of repeatable conditions.  But that is not all.  Those observations are then explained or given a meaning and it is this explanation (or theory) that often changes.

UFOs, for instance.  Nobody doubts that they have been seen by the hundreds.  The disagreement is about the explanation of what people have seen.  Some UFO sightings seem to be reported by people who in all sincerity are reporting what they think are objective experience but which are hallucinations.  It might be a speck in the observer’s eye, the result drugs, or mental illness.  But not all sightings, by any means, can be dismissed in this way.  Some UFOs are the result of mistaking the identity of familiar flying objects like balloons, our own space craft, miscellaneous bits of space debris, or even birds.  Other sightings are the result of an unusual interplay of light and atmosphere.

But while these may explain the majority of reported UFO sightings, there is a handful that mystify investigators.  Yet most scientists don’t accept them as hard scientific evidence that planet Earth is being visited by alien creatures.  Why not?  Why isn’t the evidence so far scientifically compelling?  The following are some of the reasons:

1.  Although there are many reports of sightings, there is very little physical evidence that has ever been left behind – no vehicles, no stay bits of strange DNA, no food wrappers from an intergalactic Fast Food stop.  So what we have is mostly what people report they have seen and heard, but not the thing itself that has been observed.  We don’t even have any radio messages, though we’ve been listening.

2.  And that makes the observations impossible to replicate.  Generally, when scientists publish an important finding, other scientists try to repeat the study in order to confirm that it can generally be observed by many different people under appropriate conditions.   We can’t do that with the kind of UFO evidence we currently have on hand.

3.  Scientists, being a sceptical lot by nature, look for the simplest explanation before accepting more exotic possibilities.  And most scientists today, although accepting that there are some very strange unexplained things out there, think that there are simpler explanations for UFO sightings than that aliens have come for a visit.

Suppose for instance, your four-year-old daughter came into the kitchen and said she’d just seen a dinosaur walking down the street.  Would your first thought be to believe that she’d actually seen a dinosaur?  or would you tend to test out a simpler explanation first?  Perhaps you might wonder about the local circus in town, or if she’d seen a large lizard.  And if you went out to the street and did not see anything unusual yourself, what would you think?  Many people would probably think that perhaps something strange was happening, but that it probably wasn’t a dinosaur.

Does this mean that science therefore has proof that aliens have never visited Earth?  No, science can never prove the negative, because it’s always possible to argue that we just haven’t found it yet.  Just as it is possible that there is a Loch Ness monster in Scotland, it is possible that some UFOs today are from outer space. 

So what science doesn’t have is proof that some UFOs are aliens from outer space, not proof that they aren’t.

Snowing on Mars

Canadian scientists have just announced that it’s snowing on Mars a couple of miles from the landing site of their weather instrument.

This means that one of the most basic conditions for life exists there. 

But the really important thing is that we can go sledding there.

http://www.canada.com/topics/technology/story.html?id=b39346d8-294b-4d26-b072-2e1711d479f8

What is the God Particle?

Scientists who recently switched on the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are looking for what has been called “the God Particle.”  But what is the God Particle, and how did it earned its exalted name?

Right now scientists (let alone the rest of us) don’t understand how the Big Bang can possibly have happened or, for that matter, how the universe continues to hold itself together, although it clearly does.  With Newton, scientists originally thought the explanation was gravity, but it turns out that gravity isn’t nearly strong enough to be holding the whole universe together on its own.  There must be something else.  What could that something else be?

The theory is that there is a huge field in the universe of something resembling sticky syrup that slows some particles down.  Being slowed down is what “mass” really is.  The professor who first proposed that this field exists is Peter Higgs (he’s retired now but still living in Edinburgh, Scotland).  That’s why the field is called “the Higgs Field.”  The particle that he proposes gets slowed down by the sticky syrup – err, by the Higgs Field – is called “the Higgs Boson,”  If I understand correctly, the Higgs Boson controls other particles, slowing them down and giving them mass.  And mass is what makes it possible for us to experience them.  Mass, for that matter, is what we and everything we touch and feel and smell and see around us has.  It feels like everything has mass, but that’s only because we cannot experience anything that doesn’t have mass, so things without mass feel like they don’t exist.

The Higgs Boson was nick-named the “God Particle,” because if scientists can find it, they can explain why the universe has mass instead of racing around in wild unconnected bits and explain how the universe – not to mention a leisurely cup of morning coffee – can possibly exist as it does. 

So, depending on your theological stance, discovering the God Particle whirling around for a split second or two in the LHC could explain how God created the universe with a Big Bang.