Lifeboat Foundation

In a forward-looking article, George Church, PhD, from Harvard University and the Wyss Institute, proposes the use of picogram to nanogram-scale probes that can land, replicate, and produce a communications module at the destination to explore nearby stars.

The fascinating new article is published in a special issue on “Interstellar Objects in Astrobiology” of the peer-reviewed journal Astrobiology.

“One design is a highly reflective light sail, traveling a long straight line toward the gravitational well of a destination star, and the photo-deflected to the closest non-luminous mass – ideally a planet or moon with exposed liquid water,” states Dr. Church.

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Physicists proposed that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are using black holes in their quantum computers since they are abundant in quantum information. Read the article to learn more.

In the search for life on other Earths, astrobiologists should look for signs of photosynthesis, say scientists.

NASA has turned to AI to help them develop, and build, more robust, lightweight components for its spacecraft of the future.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland has been using commercially available AI software to design specialized, bespoke parts, called “evolved structures,” for its missions. They also look a little “out of this world.”

Continue reading “‘They look alien’: NASA uses AI to design complex spacecraft parts” »

The Perseverance rover has spent close to two years on Mars.

NASA’s Perseverance rover has spent just under two years collecting samples and beaming images of the red planet back to Earth. During that time, Perseverance placed several Mars rock sample tubes on the Martian surface as backup samples in case anything happened to the rover’s main sample cache.

The highly-ambitious Mars Sample Return mission aims to develop the technology to collect and transport the samples back to Earth by the early 2030s.

Continue reading “Images: NASA Perseverance samples aid search for ancient life on Mars” »

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Stephen Hawking was one of the greatest scientific and analytical minds of our time, says NASA’s Michelle Thaller. She posits that Hawking might be one of the parents of an entirely new school of physics because he was working on some incredible stuff—concerning quantum entaglement— right before he died. He was even humble enough to go back to his old work about black holes and rethink his hypotheses based on new information. Not many great minds would do that, she says, relaying just one of the reasons Stephen Hawking will be so deeply missed. You can follow Michelle Thaller on Twitter at @mlthaller.

Continue reading “What Stephen Hawking would have discovered if he lived longer | NASA’s Michelle Thaller | Big Think” »

If life is common in our Universe, and we have every reason to suspect it is, why do we not see evidence of it everywhere? This is the essence of the Fermi Paradox, a question that has plagued astronomers and cosmologists almost since the birth of modern astronomy.

It is also the reasoning behind the Hart-Tipler Conjecture, one of the many (many!) proposed resolutions, which asserts that if advanced life had emerged in our galaxy sometime in the past, we would see signs of their activity everywhere we looked. Possible indications include self-replicating probes, megastructures, and other Type III-like activity.

Continue reading “Physicists Say Aliens May Be Using Black Holes as Quantum Computers” »