Nowhere is the joy of existence so apparent as in music… Intelligent life-forms have created a multitude of sounds that express their exhilaration at being alive.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has proven just how powerful it is with its latest discovery: sand storms swirling on a planet 40 light-years from Earth, or about 235 trillion miles away.
One of Webb’s greatest powers is its ability to decipher what’s going on in alien atmospheres. From its vantage point in space, Webb can peer at a distant world and analyze the entire infrared spectrum of starlight passing through the planet’s atmosphere.
Different spectra of light correspond to different elements, so Webb can show astronomers exactly which gases and vapors are in another world’s atmosphere.
The existence of aliens continues to elude scientists, including those that have dedicated their lives to finding definitive proof of extraterrestrial life. While a new study doesn’t point to the existence of aliens, some researchers have been left scratching their heads as to what the “coherent” signal being broadcast from an interstellar planet could be.
Published Monday in Nature Astronomy, scientists revealed they’ve discovered a repeating radio signal coming from the planet YZ Ceti b, located some 12 light-years from the edge of our solar system.
Alien life could thrive in terminator zones, the edges between the light and dark sides of planets that are tidally locked with their host stars.
Over the short span of just 300 years, since the invention of modern physics, we have gained a deeper understanding of how our universe works on both small and large scales. Yet, physics is still very young and when it comes to using it to explain life, physicists struggle.
Even today, we can’t really explain what the difference is between a living lump of matter and a dead one. But my colleagues and I are creating a new physics of life that might soon provide answers.
More than 150 years ago, Darwin poignantly noted the dichotomy between what we understand in physics and what we observe in life—noting at the end of The Origin of Species “…whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.”
Earth’s magnetic field does more than keep everyone’s compass needles pointed in the same direction. It also helps preserve Earth’s sliver of life-sustaining atmosphere by deflecting high energy particles and plasma regularly blasted out of the sun. Researchers have now identified a prospective Earth-sized planet in another solar system as a prime candidate for also having a magnetic field—YZ Ceti b, a rocky planet orbiting a star about 12 light-years away from Earth.
Researchers Sebastian Pineda and Jackie Villadsen observed a repeating radio signal emanating from the star YZ Ceti using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, a radio telescope operated by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Research by Pineda and Villadsen to understand the magnetic field interactions between distant stars and their orbiting planets is supported by NSF. Their research was published today (April 3) in the journal Nature Astronomy.
“The search for potentially habitable or life-bearing worlds in other solar systems depends in part on being able to determine if rocky, Earth-like exoplanets actually have magnetic fields,” says NSF’s Joe Pesce, program director for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. “This research shows not only that this particular rocky exoplanet likely has a magnetic field but provides a promising method to find more.”
Aliens could come to Earth — and they might arrive sooner than you might think.
Writing in the Spectator, Professor Sasha Hinkley, associate professor of astrophysics at the University of Exeter, said it is becoming “increasingly likely” signs of extraterrestrial life will be uncovered “within his lifetime”, though that doesn’t mean we will get to meet them.
We’re half way there! Join us… and find out more!
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Echopraxia is a book set in one of the most interesting sci-fi universes that I have covered on this channel. It is technically a sequel to Blindsight, but it is not necessary that you read Blindsight to understand Echopraxia is set in the late 21 century. About 14 years after man’s first contact with alien life.
This book brings up one of the most interesting concepts I’ve ever encountered in any sci-fi book ever. And that is the concept of the “Digital Universe” and God as a Virus. Now this is a concept that comes from the field of digital physics, which keep in mind is all theoretical. It is based on the premise that the universe is pure mathematics at its base, every event that occurs can be thought of as a kind of computation. This could mean that the universe is a simulation, but that is not necessary for the idea to work.
In 1960, visionary physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that an advanced alien civilization would someday quit fooling around with kindergarten-level stuff like wind turbines and nuclear reactors and finally go big, completely enclosing their home star to capture as much solar energy as they possibly could. They would then go on to use that enormous amount of energy to mine bitcoin, make funny videos on social media, delve into the deepest mysteries of the Universe, and enjoy the bounties of their energy-rich civilization.
But what if the alien civilization was… us? What if we decided to build a Dyson sphere around our sun? Could we do it? How much energy would it cost us to rearrange our solar system, and how long would it take to get our investment back? Before we put too much thought into whether humanity is capable of this amazing feat, even theoretically, we should decide if it’s worth the effort. Can we actually achieve a net gain in energy by building a Dyson sphere?
