Sinister Security: Life Beyond earth

NASA May Have Already Found Signs of Alien Life on Saturn’s Enceladus

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Microbes that produce methane may already be living on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn which is tipped to host life because it boasts a liquid water ocean beneath a crust of solid ice, and strange atmospheric plumes of water. That’s the implication of research showing that an earthbound organism which also produces methane can happily survive in conditions known to exist on Enceladus, from observations by the Cassini space probe before its mission ended last year.

Could the methane we've detected on Enceladus be signs of life?

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Isolated from deep sea vents almost 1000 meters deep in the Okinawa Trough off Japan, Methanothermococcus okinawensis was subjected to gruelling physical and chemical conditions found on Enceladus for more than five years.

This microbe, called a methanogenic archaeon, survives without oxygen by combining hydrogen and carbon dioxide – both observed in Enceladus’s atmosphere – to make the energy it needs, emitting methane as a waste product. Cassini detected traces of methane in Enceladus’s plumes, and there’s a chance that some of it may have come from this kind of microbe.

“The conditions we mimicked in the lab are as close as possible to those inferred from Cassini on Enceladus,” says Simon Rittmann at the University of Vienna in Austria, who led the investigations.

Rittmann subjected the microbe to various combinations of gases found on Enceladus, and found that it was always able to survive when provided with the moon’s levels of hydrogen and carbon dioxide. It was still able to thrive at temperatures and pressures likely found in Enceladus’s oceans, ranging respectively from 0 to 90 degrees Celsius, and up to 50 Earth atmospheres.

Life on the seafloor

Rittmann’s team also computed how much hydrogen would be produced by a breakdown of olivine minerals – which are predicted to make up the moon’s solid core – under a range of likely geological conditions on Enceladus. They found these minerals could break down chemically to produce enough hydrogen for methanogens to thrive. The best environment for them is likely to be the seafloor.

“There, you have contact with rock and minerals, pressures of around 50 atmospheres and temperatures most likely a bit higher than 0 degrees Celsius,” says Rittmann.

“This [team] has taken the first step to showing experimentally that methanogens can indeed live in the conditions expected on Enceladus,” says Chris McKay at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

Rittmann says he hopes there will be future missions to Enceladus to explore further for signs of life. He says a probe fitted with a mass spectrometer would be able to detect carbon isotope ratios unique to living organisms, as well as other potential “biomarkers” of methanogens, including lipids and hydrocarbons.

“If we find life on Enceladus, it is not likely to be very Earth-like, unless the origin of these life forms is from a common source outside the solar system, which is highly unlikely,” says Hunter Waite at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas. Proof of concept on Earth is interesting, he says, but there is no substitute for finding and studying a methanogenic organism in the unique environment of Enceladus.

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This is Why the Discovery of Alien Life Would be our Doom

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Humanity May Be Alone In The Universe

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There may never have been another intelligent, technologically advanced alien species in the entire history of the Universe. Last week, in the New York Times, scientist Adam Frank emphatically wrote that Yes, There Have Been Aliens, concluding that given all the potentially habitable worlds we know must be out there from our astrophysical discoveries, intelligent life must have arisen.

Moon and clouds over the Pacific Ocean, as photographed by Frank Borman and James A. Lovell during the Gemini 7 mission. Image credit: NASA.

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What he fails to account for, however, is the magnitude of the unknowns that abiogenesis, evolution, long-term habitability and other factors bring into the equation. Although it's true that there are an astronomical number of possibilities for intelligent, technologically advanced lifeforms, the huge uncertainties make it a very real possibility that humans are the only spacefaring aliens our Universe has ever known.

The longest untethered spacewalk ever, by NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless, aboard STS-41-B. Image credit: NASA.

Back in 1961, scientist Frank Drake came up with the first equation to predict how many spacefaring civilizations there were in the Universe today. He relied on a series of unknown quantities that he could make estimates for, and ultimately arrive at how many technologically advanced alien species there were, at present, in both our galaxy and our observable Universe right now. With the advances of the last 55 years, many of those quantities we once could only estimate via guesswork can now be known to an incredible degree of precision.

The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), which revealed approximately 50% more galaxies-per-square-degree than the previous Ultra-Deep Field. Image credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team.

For starters, our understanding of the size and scale of the Universe has increased dramatically. We now know, thanks to observations made with space-based and ground-based observatories covering the full spectrum of the electromagnetic wavelengths, how big the Universe is and how many galaxies there are within it. We have a much better understanding of star formation and how stars work, and so when we look out into the grand abyss of deep space, we can calculate how many stars there are out there in the Universe, both now and over the entire cosmic history since the Big Bang. That number is huge -- somewhere close to 10^24 -- and it represents the number of chances the Universe has had, over the past 13.8 billion years, to produce life like ours.

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Illustration of the planet-finding space telescope, Kepler, from NASA.

Image credit: NASA Ames/ W Stenzel.

We used to wonder how many of those stars had planets around them, how many of those planets were rocky and capable of having atmospheres like our own, and how many of them were the right distances from their stars to have liquid water on their surfaces. For innumerable generations, this was something we only wondered about. But thanks to huge advances in exoplanet studies, most spectacularly with the advent of NASA's Kepler spacecraft, we've learned so much about what's out there, including that:

somewhere between 80-100% of stars have planets or planetary system orbiting them,
approximately 20-25% of those systems have a planet in their star's "habitable zone," or the right location for liquid water to form on their surface,
and approximately 10-20% of those planets are Earth-like in size and mass.

So adding that all up, there are more than 10^22 potentially Earth-like planets out there in the Universe, with the right conditions for life on them.

Sugar molecules in the gas surrounding a young, Sun-like star.

Image credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/L. Calçada (ESO) & NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team.

The situation is even better than that, because except for the very first generations of the very first stars, practically all of them come enriched with the heavy elements and ingredients necessary for life. When we look at the interstellar medium, at molecular gas clouds, at the centers of distant galaxies, at outflows from massive stars or even at our own galaxy, we find the elements of the periodic table -- carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, sulphur, phosphorous, copper, iron and more -- necessary for life as we know it.

When we look inside meteors and asteroids in our own Solar System, we find not only these elements, but we find them configured into organic molecules like sugars, carbon rings and even amino acids. In other words, there are not only more than 10^22 potentially Earth-like planets out there in the Universe; there are more than 10^22 potentially Earth-like planets with the right raw ingredients for life!

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Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Lucianomendez, under a creative commons share alike license.

But that's where our optimism, if we're being scientifically honest and scrupulous, ought to end. Because there are three big steps out there, in order to get a human-like civilization, that need to happen:

1. The step of abiogenesis -- where the raw ingredients associated with organic processes actually become what we recognize as "life" -- needs to occur.

2. Life must survive and thrive for billions of years on a planet in order to evolve multicellularity, complexity, differentiation and what we call "intelligence."

3. And finally, that intelligent life must then become a technological civilization, either gaining the ability to announce its presence to the Universe, to reach out beyond its home and explore the Universe, or to reach the stage where it can listen for other forms of intelligence in the Universe. Or, more optimistically, all three.

When Carl Sagan originally presented Cosmos in 1980, he claimed it was reasonable to give each of these three steps a 10% chance of succeeding. If that were correct, there would be more than 10 million intelligent, alien civilizations that have existed in the Milky Way galaxy alone!

A stellar nursery in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration.

Today, Adam Frank argues that it's unrealistic to give these three steps a combined probability of less than 10^-22, and therefore concludes that there must have been aliens elsewhere in the Universe. But this is itself a preposterous claim, based on no evidence whatsoever. Abiogenesis may have been common; it may have occurred multiple times on Earth alone, or on Mars, Titan, Europa, Venus, Enceladus, or elsewhere even in our own Solar System. Or it may be such a rare process that even if we created a hundred clones of a young Earth -- or a thousand, or a million -- our world might be the only one where it occurred.

Structures on ALH84001 meteorite, which has a Martian origin. Some argue that the structures shown here may be ancient Martian life. Image credit: NASA, 1996.

And even if life does occur, how fortunate do you need to be to have it survive and thrive for billions of years? Would a catastrophic warming scenario, like Venus, be the norm? Or a catastrophic freezing scenario, like on Mars? Or would life wind up poisoning itself out of existence most of the time, as it almost did on Earth two billion years ago? And even if you had life make it for billions of years, how often would you get something like the Cambrian explosion, where huge, multicellular, macroscopic plants, animals and fungi came to dominate a planet? It could be relatively common, where maybe 10% of attempts make it, or it could be rare, where 1-in-a-million or even 1-in-a-billion are closer to the realistic odds.

Bonobo at the San Diego Zoo "fishing" for termites. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Mike R, under a c.c.-by-s.a. 3.0 license.

And even if you get there, how rare is a tool-using, technology-developing, rocket ship-launching species like a human? Complex reptiles, birds and mammals that could be considered intelligent by many metrics have been around for tens to hundreds of millions of years, but modern humans came about less than one million years ago, and we only became what we'd consider "technologically advanced" in the last century or two. Is there a 10% chance that if you make it through the previous step, you get to a spacefaring civilization? Or is that more like one-in-a-thousand, one-in-a-million, one-in-a-trillion or even worse?

Alan Chinchar's 1991 rendition of the Space Station Freedom in orbit. Image credit: NASA.

The truth of the matter is, this: we don't know. We know the Universe gives intelligent life a very large number of chances, on the order of 10^22. And we know that there's only a small probability of going from a chance at life to a spacefaring, technologically advanced civilization. What we don't know is whether that chance is something like 10^-3, 10^-20, 10^-50, or any number in between (or even worse). We know that life like humans arose once, at least, so the probability must be non-zero. But beyond that? We need data. And no amount of speculation or pronouncements will substitute for that information; we've got to find it to know. Anything else, despite what the New York Times claims, is nothing more than guesswork.

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China's Astronomers Aim to Be First to Discover Existence of an Advanced Technological Civilization

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"We don't know when earthlings will discover ET. It could be 1,000 years from now, or in our lifetimes. It could be next year, when FAST gets going on the sky surveys," said Dan Werthimer, chief scientist for the SETI Research Center at University of California, Berkeley.

However, with no clues of extraterrestrial life over the past five decades, questions are constantly asked as whether the search methods are appropriate. "Some strange signals have been found, but it's hard to confirm their origins, because these signals do not repeat," says Li Di, chief scientist of China's new FAST Radio telescope. "We look for not only television signals, but also atomic bomb signals. We'll give full play to our imaginations when processing the signals," Li says. "It's a complete exploration, as we don't know what an alien is like."

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With a dish the size of 30 football fields, China's new FAST radio telescope, which measures 500 meters in diameter, dwarfs Puerto Rico's 300-meter Arecibo Observatory. Having the world's largest and most powerful new radio telescope, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), "We can receive weaker and more distant radio messages," said Wu Xiangping, director-general of the Chinese Astronomical Society, "It will help us to search for intelligent life outside of the galaxy and explore the origins of the universe," he added underscoring the China's race to be the first nation to discover the existence of an advanced alien civilization.

The dish will have a perimeter of about 1.6 kilometers, and there are no towns within five kilometers, giving it ideal surroundings to listen for signals from space. Scientists have depicted it as a super-sensitive "ear", capable of spotting very weak messages - if there are any - from "cousins" of human beings.

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The telescope, nicknamed Tianyan, or the Eye of Heaven, can accurately image twice as much the sky as the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which had previously been the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, with double sensitivity and five to 10 times the surveying speed. Douglas Vakoch, president of METI International, an organization promoting messaging outer space in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, noted that astronomers worldwide will be invited to use the facility through a competitive review of observing proposals.

“By opening FAST to use by the broader international community, China is demonstrating its commitment to fostering astronomy as a global scientific enterprise,” he told Xinhua, saying it may lead to "discoveries beyond our wildest imagination.”

As for FAST's scientific missions, Vakoch said it will be used to look for the signatures of complex organic molecules in interstellar space, which will show how widely the basic building blocks of life are distributed throughout the cosmos.

“For over a half century, astronomers have been using radio telescopes to answer the haunting question, 'Are we alone?' But astronomers face a daunting challenge: the signals they seek are so weak that an incredibly sensitive telescope is needed to detect them,” he said.

“FAST's innovative design and huge collecting area give it unsurpassed speed and sensitivity, making it vital to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the coming decades,” said Vakoch. “We can expect China to become a world leader in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence because of its demonstrated commitment in building FAST.”

However, FAST will not initially be outfitted with the signal processing capabilities to search for aliens, he said. This technology will be added at a later stage, and when that happens, FAST will be able to scan the heavens for signals that "can't be created by nature, but only by advanced civilizations," Vakoch said. Sometimes, radio telescopes are "confused" by signals from astronomical objects. For example, astronomers once mistook signals from a pulsar for extraterrestrial signs, because a pulsar can also give out very stable periodical signals.

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“It is highly possible that life on other planets is entirely different from that on Earth, and it might not be carbon-based,” says Jin Hairong, deputy curator of Beijing Planetarium.

Liu Cixin, a Chinese science fiction writer and winner of the Hugo Award for his novel The Three Body Problem (check out the fascinating video trailer below), points out the current method assumes that aliens also communicate in radio waves. "But if it's a truly advanced civilization, it is possible to use other more advanced forms of communication, such as gravitational waves."

But Mao Shude with the National Astronomical Observatories of China and professor of astrophysics at the Jodrell Bank Observatory believes many methods deserve a try: “Who knows what they are and how they think?” When we study the origin of life, we risk going down a blind alley if we only have one sample from Earth,” Mao says. “If we could find more samples in the universe, we could look at the puzzle more comprehensively and solve it more easily.”

Shude gives an example in astronomy to explain the limitations of a single sample. “When scientists started to look for planets around Sun-like stars, they thought it must be difficult as their period might be as long as a year. However, the first such planet discovered outside our solar system takes only four days to orbit its host star - much faster than astronomers expected. At that time, some people doubted it, showing how the example of our solar system narrowed their thinking.”

“If we really discover extraterrestrial life, I'd like to know how life spreads in the universe. Is it distributed uniformly in space, or clustered?” Mao wonders.

However, the idea communicating with aliens comes with concerns. Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has warned that communicating with aliens could be a threat to Earth:
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans.”

The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin depicted the universe as a jungle with every civilization as a hidden hunter. Those who are exposed will be eliminated. But Han Song, another leading Chinese science fiction writer, believes humans naturally want to connect, citing the Internet as proof.

“I think aliens might think similarly. It is a biological instinct to connect with each other. Everyone wants to prove that they are not alone in the universe. Loneliness is intolerable to humans,” he says.

He also points out that the contact will be driven by curiosity and real requirements. “Humans will ultimately go to space to find resources and expand their living area, so it will be hard to avoid aliens. Contact with them, especially those with more advanced intelligence, may help us leap forward in civilization.”

Regardless of the theoretical debate, scientists have never wavered in the search. “I think we shall call out. As a matter of fact, we have been yelling for years, and our radios and televisions are broadcasting in space all the time,” Mao says, “Aren't you curious what our counterparts would look like?

If they are inferior or equal to us in terms of civilization, we won't be easily destroyed. If they are much more intelligent than us, they wouldn't be so narrow-minded as to compete with us. Some worry they will come to rob us of our natural resources, but they likely have the power to transform the entire globe already. What's the point of eliminating a much lower civilization?”

Mao believes the result will be significant however it turns out. “If we find other life, it will undoubtedly be the most important scientific discovery in our history; if not, it shows that life on Earth is unique and we should respect life and cherish each other. “No matter the outcome, we shall never stop searching, and I hope to hear more voices and contributions from Chinese scientists.”

The Daily Galaxy via China News and Xinhuanet

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Meet ELF; A Telescope Capable Of Seeing 120 TRILLION Miles into Space and Finding Aliens

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This groundbreaking telescope would have the ability to see up to 120 Trillion miles into outer space and discover life beyond Earth. Dubbed as ELF—which stands for ExoLife finder—the telescope would search the universe for ‘chemical fingerprints’ of life on the surface of distant alien worlds. The telescope would have the capability of snapping images go distant alien continents and oceans.

The best part, you can be a part of it. The project is currently on Kickstarter raising funds. Once the telescope is constructed, it will start searching the cosmos with one main goal: Finding alien life, whether it’s small or big.

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In order to do so, it will start off by exploring its first target—an alien world located in the Proxima Centauri system dubbed as Proxima B thought to orbit its host star within its habitable zone. This star system is our closest neighbor located around 4.2 light-years away.

This massive alien hunting telescope will be composed of sixteen 5-meter mirrors, based on printed mirror technology according to reports from the Planets Foundation. Once finished, the telescope is expected to be 25 meters wide and will be located in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

According to initial reports, the ELF telescope would have the ability to explore distant alien worlds located within 25 light-years from our sun. Most excitingly perhaps, it will have the ability to explore the nearby Alpha Centauri System. Alpha Centauri is of great interest for Astronomers.

Once the ELF telescope is finished, experts plant to search the neighboring star system and its possible planets for evidence of life as we know it. Experts will use the telescope to sniff out energy signatures of life in its atmosphere, as well as search the planets’ atmosphere and detected water, oxygen, methane as well as ozone.

However, astronomers note how their revolutionary telescope could even detect photosynthetic organisms or even traces of thermal waste at the surface of the planets from advanced alien civilizations.

Dr. Svetlana Berdyugina, Director of the Kipenheuer Institute for Solar Physics and Planets Foundation, as well as the co-founder, said:

“We aim to find life on nearby planets outside the solar system, also known as exoplanets. We have designed a revolutionary telescope with a number of metamaterials, making our mirrors incredibly light and also reducing the cost of our telescopes by a factor of 10. Our powerful new telescope ExoLife Finder, or ELF, will be able to see planets up to 120 trillion miles away, and will image oceans, continents, and life on exoplanets.”

Currently, the team behind the project has raised around $17,000 toward their initial goal of $35,000. They hope to meet their initial goal by October 2017.

$35,000 isn’t the price for the telescope.

Telescope Summary:

Total Cost: $130 million USD

Time To Build: 60 months

Planned Location: Atacama Desert, Chile

You can find out more about the telescope by visiting their Kickstarter page, and planets.life

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SETI Scientist Bets that We'll Find Intelligent Alien Life in 20 Years

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The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute has spent decades researching and exploring the mysterious, and often unexplained, phenomena of our universe. The enduring hope being that the search will help us confirm that there is, in fact, life out there.

In an interview with Futurism at the Worlds Fair Nano NY, Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, discussed where we currently are in the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life. He began by boldy stating that he “bet everybody a cup of coffee that we’ll find intelligent life within 20 years.”

Image result for seti intelligen alien life

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When asked what science has to say currently about the existence of aliens, Shostak said, “Very little — because we haven’t found any.” Shostak went on to say that while we may not have found evidence confirming extraterrestrial life yet, what we have discovered about our universe, say, over the last 20 years, has not been insignificant.

In fact, those findings might mean a lot to our search. One thing we know now that we didn’t know decades ago is that there’s a lot of unexplored cosmic real estate out there.

Life Beyond Earth

Shostak went on to discuss the likelihood and nature of discovering alien life somewhere out there in the as yet uncharted parts of our universe:

“We may find microbial life — the kind you’d find in the corners of your bathtub. We may find that a lot sooner, but that remains to be seen. But it’s gonna happen, I think, in your lifetime.”

While Shostak is confident that, not just eventually but relatively soon, we will discover the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life, making “contact” may not go quite according to what we would imagine. What decades of science fiction would have us believe it would be like.

“I don’t know about contact,” Shostak said. “I mean if they’re 500 light years away. . .you’ll hear a signal that’ll be 500 years old, and if you broadcast back ‘Hi we’re the Earthlings, how’re you doing?’ — it’ll be 1,000 years before you hear back from them. If you ever hear back from them. So, it’s not exactly contact, but at least you know they’re there.”

References: Worlds Fair Nano, SETI

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Here Are 7 Places in Our Solar System Most Likely to Harbour Alien Life

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As humans have ventured further from our home planet, we have sought other living organisms, proof that we're not alone. We, of course, haven't found any yet. But a growing amount of data has given us a better sense of where in the solar system we should look more carefully.

Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, suspects that there are multiple nearby places where some form of microbial life is likely to exist.

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“There are at least seven other places in our own solar system, so kind of next door places you could get to with a rocket, that could have microbial life,” Shostak told Futurism.

He also thinks that we'll possibly spot these alien microbial life "sooner" than we could find intelligent extraterrestrial life. Can you guess what these seven places are?

The Red Planet and Jupiter's Moons

Mars is an obvious one, Shostak said. It's possible that lower life forms are hidden under the dirt of the Red Planet, 30 metres (100 feet) or so below the surface where some liquid water might exist. Aside from Mars, three of Jupiter's moons are candidates.

One is Europa, which has subsurface oceans capable of hosting microbial life. These would survive off of hot spots at the bottom, which are like "little mini volcanoes and that would give you energy for life," said Shostak.

The others are, presumably, Ganymede - the largest moon in the whole solar system and is home to a body of water similar to the Earth's oceans, but buried under a thick crust of ice - and Callisto, which has an ocean and an atmosphere.

Saturn's Moons and Our Favorite Non-Planet

Then, there are two moons around Saturn - thanks, Cassini! - that could potentially harbour some form of life.

One is Titan, which has liquid lakes made of natural gas.

Enceladus presents even more favourable conditions, Shostak told Futurism. It might be easier to find microbial life there because:

“it's shooting geysers into space. So you don't have to land. You don't have to drill,” he explained. “You just go grab some of those geyser gunk and bring it back to Earth and maybe you'll find aliens.”

Lastly, there's Pluto.

“Under the surface of Pluto there could be pockets of liquid water,” Shostak said. “Any place [where] you have liquid water - liquid of any kind - maybe have microbes.”

He did make a clarification, though:

“I'm not saying there are Plutonians.”

These seven have the right organic processes that could serve as food or a source of energy as well as some form of liquid - and not necessarily just water - to sustain microbial life.

“You have something that gives you food, fundamentally, and the opportunity to create life, which after all is just organic chemistry.”

Asked about when we'll find intelligent alien life, Shostak said he believes it's going to be within the next two decades.

“There's a lot of real estate out there, right? There are a trillion planets in the Milky Way. We can see a trillion other galaxies, each with a trillion planets. If they're not out there, then all these people behind us are really special.”

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To Find Aliens, We Must Think Of Life As We Don’t Know It

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From blob-like jellyfish to rock-like lichens, our planet teems with such diversity of life that it is difficult to recognize some organisms as even being alive. That complexity hints at the challenge of searching for life as we don’t know it – the alien biology that might have taken hold on other planets, where conditions could be unlike anything we’ve seen before.

“The Universe is a really big place. Chances are, if we can imagine it, it’s probably out there on a planet somewhere,” said Morgan Cable, an astrochemist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “The question is, will we be able to find it?”

Jupiter's moon, Europa, is believed to conceal a buried ocean. emPhoto NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute/em

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For decades, astronomers have come at that question by confining their search to organisms broadly similar to the ones here. In 1976, NASA’s Viking landers examined soil samples on Mars, and tried to animate them using the kind of organic nutrients that Earth microbes like, with inconclusive results. Later this year, the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter will begin scoping out methane in the Martian atmosphere, which could be produced by Earth-like bacterial life. NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will likewise scan for carbon-based compounds from possible past or present Mars organisms.

But the environment on Mars isn’t much like that on Earth, and the exoplanets that astronomers are finding around other stars are stranger still – many of them quite unlike anything in our solar system. For that reason, it’s important to broaden the search for life. We need to open our minds to genuinely alien kinds of biological, chemical, geological and physical processes. ‘Everybody looks for “biosignatures”, but they’re meaningless because we don’t have any other examples of biology,’ said the chemist Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow.

Bottom of Form

To open our minds, we need to go back to basics and consider the fundamental conditions that are necessary for life. First, it needs some form of energy, such as from volcanic hot springs or hydrothermal vents. That would seem to rule out any planets or moons lacking a strong source of internal heat. Life also needs protection from space radiation, such as an atmospheric ozone layer. Many newly discovered Earth-size worlds, including ones around TRAPPIST-1 and Proxima Centauri, orbit red dwarf stars whose powerful flares could strip away a planet’s atmosphere. Studies by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), set to launch next year, will reveal whether we should rule out these worlds, too.

Finally, everything we know about life indicates that it requires some kind of liquid solvent in which chemical interactions can lead to self-replicating molecules. Water is exceptionally effective in that regard. It facilitates making and breaking chemical bonds, assembling proteins or other structural molecules, and – for an actual organism – feeding and getting rid of waste. That’s why planetary scientists currently focus on the ‘habitable zone’ around stars, the locations where a world could have the right temperature for liquid water on its surface.

These constraints still leave a bewildering range of possibilities. Perhaps other liquids could take the place of water. Or a less exotic possibility: maybe biology could arise in the buried ocean on an ice-covered alien world. Such a setting could offer energy, protection and liquid water, yet provide almost no outward sign of life, making it tough to detect. For planets around other stars, we simply do not know enough yet to say what is (or is not) happening there. ‘It’s difficult to imagine that we could definitively find life on an exoplanet,’ conceded Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University. ‘But the outer solar system is accessible to us.’

The search for exotic life therefore must begin close to home. The moons of Saturn and Jupiter offer a test case of whether biology could exist without an atmosphere. Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus both have inner oceans and internal heat sources. Enceladus spews huge geysers of water vapour from its south pole; Europa appears to puff off occasional plumes as well. Future space missions could fly through the plumes and study them for possible biochemicals. NASA’s proposed Europa lander, which could launch in about a decade, could seek out possible microbe-laced ocean water that seeped up or snowed back down onto the surface.

Meanwhile, another Saturn moon, Titan, could tell us whether life can arise without liquid water. Titan is dotted with lakes of methane and ethane, filled by a seasonal hydrocarbon rain. Lunine and his colleagues have speculated that life could arise in this frigid setting. Several well-formulated (but as-yet unfunded) concepts exist for a lander that could investigate Titan’s methane lakes, looking for microbial life.

For the motley bunch of exoplanets that have no analog in our solar system, however, scientists have to rely on laboratory experiments and sheer imagination. ‘We’re still looking for the basic physical and chemical requirements that we think life needs, but we’re trying to keep the net as broad as possible,’ Cable said. Exoplanet researchers such as Sara Seager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Victoria Meadows at the University of Washington are modelling disparate types of possible planetary atmospheres and the kinds of chemical signatures that life might imprint onto them.

Now the onus is on NASA and other space agencies to design instruments capable of detecting as many signs of life as possible. Most current telescopes access only a limited range of wavelengths. ‘If you think of the spectrum like a set of venetian blinds, there are only a few slats removed. That’s not a very good way to get at the composition,’ Lunine said. In response, astronomers led by Seager and Scott Gaudi of the Ohio State University have proposed the Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission (HabEx) for NASA in the 2030s or 2040s. It would scan exoplanets over a wide range of optical and near-infrared wavelengths for signs of oxygen and water vapour.

Casting a wide search for ET won’t be easy and it won’t be cheap, but it will surely be transformative. Even if astrobiologists find nothing, that knowledge will tell us how special life is here on Earth. And any kind of success will be Earth-shattering. Finding terrestrial-style bacteria on Mars would tell us we’re not alone. Finding methane-swimming organisms on Titan would tell us, even more profoundly, that ours is not the only way to make life. Either way, we Earthlings will never look at the cosmos the same way again.

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Astronomers to Send Cosmic Messages in 2018 to Search for Aliens

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A group of alien searchers is gearing up to send out cosmic messages in 2018 in order to look for the existence of extraterrestrial life, according to a report in CNET.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which brought a number of alien hunters together, led to the scanning of cosmos with massive radio telescopes, but despite 50-odd years of efforts, we're still looking out for the solid signs of alien life. With the efforts of astronomer Frank Drake, the SETI began in 1960.

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Now, a specific group of astronomers within the SETI community has grown tired of waiting and is prepping to send out messages to the unknown, if they exist somewhere in the cosmos. The research group, which calls itself Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligences (METI) International, is working on cosmic messages, hoping to send them out sometime in 2018.

However, the question that arises here is that they will send the messages to where. The cosmos is practically endless and the number of planets in the habitable zone (at the right distance from its host star) is increasing continuously.

Douglas Vakoch, the president of the group, addressed this concern by telling CNET that they will go for nearby stars, specifically those with planets in the habitable zones. It's also worth noting that they'll have to devise a message which extraterrestrial species could understand easily. There have been some ways in the past – mathematical languages, rudimentary chatbots, music, or pictograms – but METI will specifically focus on maths and physics.

“Some of the most prominent messages of the past have tried to cover everything,” Vakoch said. “We're taking the opposite approach. Rather than trying to communicate everything [about math, science, and life on Earth], we are focusing on saying a few things very clearly. For our first messages, we are emphasizing the essentials of math and physics.”

The idea of proactively reaching out to the extraterrestrials seems fair, but not many are in favour of the prospect. Why? Because aliens could ATTACK! Many prominent scientists, including Stephen Hawking, believe contacting the unknown could not only lead them to us but also increases the chances of a potential attack if they're hostile. Still, METI is moving ahead with their plan, looking forward to finding alien life.

“One of the reasons people are so afraid of METI is that it seems riskier to do something than to do nothing,” Vakoch said. “When we try to evaluate the risks and benefits of an unknown situation where we have little or no actual data, we fall back on the most vivid images that come to mind. But just because the first images of alien contact that come to mind are horrific, that doesn't mean they're realistic.”

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Aliens on At Least Nine Planets beyond Solar System Could See Earth, Scientists Claim

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Aliens on at least nine planets beyond the solar system could see - and potentially study - Earth, scientists have claimed. The new research from Queen's University Belfast offers a whole new angle to exoplanet-hunting, looking at how an alien observer might be able to detect Earth using our own methods.

The scientists identified parts of the sky from where various planets in our solar system could be seen passing in front of the sun as they undertake so called "transits". Of the thousands of known exoplanets* the team identified 68 worlds where observers would see one or more planets in our solar system transiting the sun.

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Nine of these planets were "ideally" placed to observe transits of the Earth, although none of them are thought to be capable of hosting Earth-type life. They calculated that the smaller rocky planets including Earth would be far more easy to spot than the gas and ice giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune that are further from the sun.

The scientists identified parts of the sky from where various planets in our solar system could be seen passing in front of the sun as they undertake so called "transits" (Image: PA)

The research, conducted alongside the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . Scientist Robert Wells, from Queen's University Belfast, told the royal Astronomical Society :

“Larger planets would naturally block out more light as they pass in front of their star. However the more important factor is actually how close the planet is to its parent star. Since the terrestrial planets are much closer to the sun than the gas giants, they'll be more l’ikely to be seen in transit.”

Katja Poppenhaeger, a co-author of the study, adds:

“We estimate that a randomly positioned observer would have roughly a 1 in 40 chance of observing at least one planet. The probability of detecting at least two planets would be about ten times lower, and to detect three would be a further ten times smaller than this.”

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Mars Could Have Once Supported Life, New Discovery Suggests

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A 40-Year Old Voyager Spacecraft Can Guide Aliens to Earth

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40 years ago, NASA launched the Voyager spacecraft and a plan was devised in the event that intelligent life wanted to find their origin point. That plan involved the creation of a map that would lead the finders of the Voyager probes back to Earth. Now, it couldn’t be any old map that used directions like North, South, East, West, or vague locations like “the third planet from the Sun.”

Instead, astrophysicist Frank Drake decided to create a map that used pulsars — massive neutron stars that can live for millions of years. They often look like they’re flickering, but are actually spinning constantly, and slow down with age, and by timing those flickers, you can figure out their spin rate.

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As explained by Nadia Drake at National Geographic, an intelligent being who found the Voyager and the accompanying map could measure the current spin rate of a pulsar, and compare it to the spin rate noted on the map, informing them of how long the probe had been traveling.

Frank Drake and fellow astrophysicist Carl Sagan decided on this in 1971, six years before either of the Voyagers were launched. 14 pulsars were used for the original map, which contains lines connecting each pulsar to the Sun as the central point. The pulsars’ individual spin rates are written on the lines in binary code, with the entire map inscribed on the Voyager Golden Record.

The Voyager Golden Record (Right), with the pulsar on the bottom left. Image Credit: NASA

“There was a magic about pulsars … no other things in the sky had such labels on them,” explained Drake. “Each one had its own distinct pulsing frequency, so it could be identified by anybody, including other creatures after a long period of time and far, far away.”

More than One Way to Find a Planet

The Pulsar map isn’t the only way we’ve provided extraterrestrial life with a way to track us down. It’s widely known that we’ve sent radio messages and signals to space, including the Aceribo Message which was initially sent in 1974. Even unintentional signals have been sent from various radio and TV broadcasts over the years.

Presently, organizations like Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) are putting more funding into sending additional messages to the stars, while the Breakthrough Message initiative is encouraging a new round of debates about what should be said if/when we find alien life (or it finds us). These efforts are going so far as to hold a competition in which people come up with the “best” digital messages, though there are no plans to send them just yet.

Some are against the idea of continually letting the Universe know we’re here, and how to find us. With regards to the Voyager probe, though, it’s unlikely the map will ever reach anyone that can read it.

“The thing is going something like 10 kilometers (6 miles) per second, at which speed it takes—for the typical separation of stars—about half a million years to go from one star to another,” said Drake. “And of course, it’s not aimed at any star, it’s just going where it’s going.”

References: National Geographic News, New York Times, Space

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We May be the Only Technologically Advanced Civilization Still Around, Recent Theory Suggests

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For retired astrophysicist Daniel Whitmire, currently a mathematics professor at the University of Arkansas (UARK), humanity is typical. Not exactly in the sense that we’re ordinary; we’re typical in a statistical sense, following a concept in modern cosmology called the principle of mediocrity. This principle suggests that in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we should consider humanity to be a typical member of a certain reference class.

This was Whitmire’s conclusion, in a study published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, when he revisited his thoughts on the Fermi Paradox — that we haven’t encountered alien life, despite the high probability of it existing — and again asked if there’s alien life out there. With all the billions of stars in billions of galaxies, chances are there’s bound to be other intelligent life in the cosmos. So, where are they?

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“I used to tell my students that by statistics, we have to be the dumbest guys in the galaxy,” Whitmire said in a UARK press release. “After all, we have only been technological for about 100 years, while other civilizations could be more technologically advanced than us by millions or billions of years.”

But Whitmire changed his mind on this concept based on two observations: Firstly, that humanity was the first technologically advanced civilization that evolved on Earth, and we’re currently in our early technological development. (“Technological,” here, is to be understood as biological species that developed electronic devices and are capable of significantly changing the planet.)

On the surface, this may seem like an obvious observation. However, based on the Earth’s habitable time span — from around 50 billion years ago, and for an estimated billion years in the future — it would have been possible for other technological civilizations to precede us on this planet. The thing is, there’s no geologic record that shows someone else came before us. “We’d leave a heck of a fingerprint if we disappeared overnight,” Whitmire said.

Anybody Out There?

But what about life outside of the Earth? Following the same principle of mediocrity, technological civilizations that lasts millions of years or longer are atypical, Whitmire says. If one considers a bell curve of all supposedly extant technological civilizations in the universe, humanity would fall in the middle 95 percent.

If that is the case, the lack of communication from similar civilizations around us does not bode well. Whitmire explains the silence of the cosmos as a product of how typical technological civilizations work: They usually go extinct after attaining technological knowledge. This is the same explanation held by other scientists, and one even suggests that we should look for traces of alien technology instead of alien life.

The “Great Filter” hypothesis is another possible explanation. It suggests that before any life in the universe becomes technological or before technological life goes beyond the bounds of its own planet, it had to overcome some extremely difficult evolutionary threshold. Some even think that climate change is humanity’s great filter.

For resident “Science Guy” Bill Nye, the Fermi Paradox should push humanity to explore further. The reason why we haven’t found intelligent extraterrestrial life or even simple alien life is because we haven’t been looking hard enough. There’s still a big chance that they’re somewhere out there.

Yet these theories assume that we’re not a typical representative of life in the cosmos.

“If we’re not typical then my initial observation would be correct,” Whitmire said. “We would be the dumbest guys in the galaxy by the numbers.”

References: University of Arkansas News, International Journal of Astrobiology

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Researchers Have Discovered Two Potentially Habitable Earth-Like Planets Just 12 Light Years Away

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Two potentially habitable "super-Earths" orbit a star just 12 light years away that is our nearest sun-like neighbor, scientists have discovered. The worlds at the edges of Tau Ceti's "habitable zone" belong to a solar system of four rocky planets similar in size to Earth.

British-led astronomers speculate that the system might be a potential candidate for future interstellar colonization. But life on the new outposts may be far from peaceful. There is evidence of a massive debris disc circling the star, increasing the chances of the planets being pounded by asteroids and comets.

Artist impression of one of a Super Earth Planet

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A key aspect of the discovery was the detection of exoplanets with masses as low as 1.7 times the Earth's, making them the smallest worlds ever spotted around a sun-like star.

The scientists used the "wobble" method of planet finding that measures the influence of gravitational interaction on a star. As a planet orbits, it causes its parent star to wobble by a tiny degree. Astronomers can see the signature of this effect in the star's light.

Lead researcher Dr Fabo Feng, from the University of Hertfordshire, said:

“We're getting tantalizingly close to observing the correct limits required for detecting Earth-like planets. Our detection of such weak wobbles is a milestone in the search for Earth analogues and the understanding of the Earth's habitability through comparison with these.”

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Sun-like stars hold out the best hope of finding planets beyond the solar system that host life. Tau Ceti, a favorite destination of science fiction writers, is very similar to the sun both in size and brightness.

Like the sun, it has a "habitable zone", a narrow region around it where conditions are favorable for Earth-like life. Within the habitable, or "Goldilocks" zone, temperatures are not too hot or too cold but just right for surface water to exist as a liquid. A habitable zone planet could have oceans, lakes and rivers. Neither of Tau Ceti's "super-Earths" lie in the centre of its habitable zone. One orbits on the inner border and the other on the outer. The Earth is situated halfway between the middle of the sun's habitable zone and its inner boundary.

The astronomers analyzed starlight wavelength data obtained from the European Southern Observatory in Chile and the Keck observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Their findings are to be published in the Astronomical Journal.

Co-author Dr Mikko Tuomi, also from the University of Hertfordshire, said improved techniques were making it easier to distinguish between light signals caused by the presence of planets and stellar activity. Two Tau Ceti signals previously identified in 2013 were now known not to have a planetary origin.

“But no matter how we look at the star, there seems to be at least four rocky planets orbiting it. We're slowly learning to tell the difference between wobbles caused by planets and those caused by stellar active surface. This enabled us to verify the existence of the two outer, potentially habitable, planets in the system.” Dr Tuomi said.

References: Arxiv, University of Hartfordshire.

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Potential Ingredient for Alien Life Found On Titan

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A molecule that could help build otherworldly life is present on Saturn’s moon Titan, researchers have discovered.

Vinyl cyanide, a compound predicted to form membrane like structures, is created in Titan’s upper atmosphere, scientists report July 28 in Science Advances. There’s enough vinyl cyanide (C2H3CN) in the moon’s liquid methane seas to make about 10 million cell-like balls per cubic centimeter of ocean, researchers calculate. On Earth, about a million bacteria are found in a cubic centimeter of ocean water near shore.

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“It’s very positive news for putative-Titan-life studies,” says Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University who was not involved in the new study.

Titan has no water, usually considered a prerequisite for life. Instead of water, freezing-cold Titan has liquid methane. There’s even a methane cycle that mimics Earth’s water cycle (SN: 3/21/15, p. 32). But Titan is so cold — usually about –178° Celsius — that the smallest unit of life on Earth, the cell, would shatter in the moon’s subzero seas.

In 2015, Lunine and Cornell colleagues James Stevenson and Paulette Clancy proposed a way life might exist in methane. Computer simulations predicted that vinyl cyanide (also called acrylonitrile or propenenitrile) could make flexible bubbles called azotosomes that would be stable in liquid methane (SN: 4/30/16, p. 28). Those bubbles might act much as cell membranes do on Earth, sheltering genetic material and concentrating biochemical reactions needed for life.

When the Cornell researchers suggested the presence of azotosomes on Titan, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen had already been detected in abundance in the moon’s atmosphere. But no one knew whether those atoms joined to make vinyl cyanide there. The Saturn probe Cassini had detected a molecule of the right mass to be vinyl cyanide, but couldn’t definitively identify the molecule’s chemical makeup.

But evidence for the chemical compound was buried in archived data from a large radio telescope, Maureen Palmer of Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and colleagues discovered. Palmer, an astrochemistry and astrobiology researcher, combed data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile between February 22 and May 27, 2014.

Astronomers point ALMA at Titan to calibrate the telescope because the moon has known brightness levels, says Palmer, who also works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The team used that calibration data to detect the signature of vinyl cyanide at specific wavelengths of light and calculate its abundance.

“This is a pretty secure detection,” says Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Md.

Even with confirmation of vinyl cyanide, researchers can’t say that azotosomes form on Titan. That’s probably not something telescopes can determine, Lunine says. A probe would need to sample Titan’s seas to detect the structures.

And even detecting azotosomes would not mean there’s life on Titan, says Lorenz. The moon’s extreme cold may hamper metabolism. What’s more, no one knows whether liquid methane can take the place of water for supporting life, he says. “If I were a betting man, I’d say Titan does not have life.”

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Humans Came From Distant Galaxies, Along With Everything Else In the Milky Way

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Humans are formed from matter that flew billions of miles from another galaxy, according to a new study. Much of the stuff around us and spread throughout our Milky Way is made up of "extragalactic matter", according to the research.

The study used computer models to find out how the matter around us came to be acquired by our galaxy. It found that supernova explosions throw out huge amounts of matter from galaxies, spreading it throughout the universe as it is carried on powerful galactic winds.

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That means that the same matter that we're made out of probably began its life in a long distant time and far, far away, before being carried through the universe.

“Given how much of the matter out of which we formed may have come from other galaxies, we could consider ourselves space travelers or extragalactic immigrants. It is likely that much of the Milky Way's matter was in other galaxies before it was kicked out by a powerful wind, traveled across intergalactic space and eventually found its new home in the Milky Way.” Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, a postdoctoral fellow in Northwestern's astrophysics center, said.

Intergalactic transfer – this movement of matter between galaxies – is a newly identified phenomenon and could fundamentally change our understanding of how galaxies are formed.

“This study transforms our understanding of how galaxies formed from the Big Bang. What this new mode implies is that up to one-half of the atoms around us – including in the solar system, on Earth and in each one of us – comes not from our own galaxy but from other galaxies, up to one million light years away.” said Faucher-Giguère, a co-author of the study.

Even though the matter spread through the universe at hundreds of kilometers per second, the distances that the matter had to travel meant that it still took billions of years. The scientists conducted the work by simulating the movement of matter through the universe, relying on the equivalent of millions of hours of computing. They developed a detailed picture of the universe at its very beginning in the Big Bang – and then used computers to simulate their movement all the way up to the present day.

Those simulations showed that the matter moved from smaller galaxies into bigger ones, like our own Milky Way. That gas then forms stars and helps account for as much as 50 per cent of the matter in galaxies like ours.

At the very beginning of the universe, it was filled with a uniform gas and none of the stars or galaxies that we recognize – and live in – today. But with time slight disturbances pushed things together, an effect that sped up as gravity helped to pull things together and eventually settle into galaxies, all moving around one centre of mass.

“Our origins are much less local than we previously thought. This study gives us a sense of how things around us are connected to distant objects in the sky.” said Faucher-Giguère, a CIERA member.

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