Lifeboat Foundation

Geological evidence suggests that Mars was temporarily habitable three billion years ago when liquid water existed on the surface of the planet. Because life had little time to develop and flourish, possible microfossils found in the Martian rocks will likely resemble simple organisms. On Earth, life persisted for over three billion years in the form of single-celled bacteria and algae.

In a new open-access study published in the Journal of the Geological Society, the two authors, astrobiologists Sean McMahon and Julie Cosmidis from the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford, note that the origins of any fossil-like specimens found on Mars are likely to be very ambiguous.

Rocks on Mars may contain numerous types of pseudofossils, structures formed by chemical processes or minerals resembling organic structures, that look similar to the kinds of fossils likely to be found if the planet ever supported life, a press release provided by University of Edinburgh explains.

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We often consider interacting with Aliens and Robots in the future, but what about Alien Robots? Today we’ll ask what artificial intelligence created by aliens might look like and what sort of circumstances we’d encounter them, and if they may be the only aliens we ever encounter.

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I think intelligent tool making life is rare but there is plenty of room for those far, far in advance of us. Robert Bradbury, who thought up M-Brains, said he did not think truly hyper advanced entities would bother communicating with us. Being able to process the entire history of human thought in a few millionths of a second puts them further away from us than we are from nematodes. But then that might not be giving them credit for their intelligence and resources, as they might wish to see how well their simulations have done compared to reality.

Foresight Intelligent Cooperation Group.

Continue reading “Anders Sandberg | Game Theory of Cooperating w. Extraterrestrial Intelligence & Future Civilizations” »

Extraterrestrial life refers to life forms that did not originate and are not indigenous to our planet. So this term covers all possible types of life outside the Earth: These can be viruses, but also plant-like life forms. Some go even further: they are looking for creatures that are very similar to humans in their complexity or even surpass them, popularly known as aliens. But if there is extraterrestrial life, why hasn’t anyone heard about it until now? Do so-called aliens even exist? The Fermi Paradox addresses this very question. What approaches there are to this you can find out here!

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Recently, the SETI, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, released an application called SETI AT HOME, which allows any regular computer to help the SETI researchers find alien intelligence. This idea is brilliant since it saves an enormous amount of money by distributing processing power throughout computers all around the globe instead of buying super expensive supercomputers. So, anyone can go to their website and download this application to help the SETI researchers crunch data to find extraterrestrials. This way, the entire internet can be turned into a giant supercomputer! But what if we needed a processing capacity that far exceeded all the computers on Earth used in conjunction? Well, for such vast computational power, we may have to look beyond our planetary resources, directly to the stars! This is where the idea of the Matrioshka Brain proposed by Robert J. Bradbury comes in!

In his 1960 paper “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation”, physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson proposed the idea of a megastructure. Now commonly known as a Dyson Sphere, it was conceived to spot other advanced civilizations in the universe, particularly, Kardashev Type 2 civilizations that are capable of controlling all of the available energy in their stellar system! Dyson believed that a Type 2 civilization should be able to build this hypothetical megastructure around its star which would completely encircle it and harness all its energy.

It’s one of the most fascinating aspects of the natural world: shapes repeat over and over. The branches of a tree extending into the sky look much the same as blood vessels extending through a human lung, if upside-down. The largest mammal, the whale, is a scaled-up version of the smallest, the shrew. Recent research even suggests the structure of the human brain resembles that of the entire universe. It’s everywhere you look, really. Nature reuses its most successful shapes.

Theoretical physicist Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico is concerned with fundamental questions in physics, and there are few more fundamental than this one: why does nature continually reuse the same non-linear shapes and structures from the smallest scale to the very largest? In a new Big Think video (see above), West explains that the scaling laws at work are nothing less than “the generic universal mathematical and physical properties of the multiple networks that make an organism viable and allow it to develop and grow.”

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An international team of space researchers working with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has found previously unknown organic molecules on Mars using a new experiment aboard the Curiosity rover. The results are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

To date, NASA has sent nine orbiters and six rovers to Mars, in part to learn more about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. To that end, the planet has been photographed with various types of cameras. More recently, rovers have dug down into the Martian soil to collect samples for analysis. The goal of such work is to learn more about the chemicals in the soil on or near the surface, but more specifically, to see if it contains organic molecules. If so, they could be evidence of life or prior life on the planet. The rovers have found organic molecules, but samples were not sufficient to claim they were produced or used by a living organism. Thus, the search continues. In this new effort, after the Curiosity rover’s drill stopped working in 2,017 the control team chose to conduct a type of experiment that had not been done by the rover before.

Curiosity carries an instrument called the Sample Analysis at Mars, an array of cups that hold samples of soil as they are being analyzed. The array has 74 cups—all but nine of them are empty most of the time. The other nine hold chemicals that are used to conduct other kinds of experiments. Because of the drill malfunction, the team at NASA chose to drop soil samples into the cups containing the chemicals and then to analyze the chemicals released due to reactions. The researchers found organic molecules in the soil that had never been seen on Mars before. While the new experiment did not find evidence of life, it did show that there are other novel ways to test for it on Mars and other planets.

An exploration of SETI and the possibility of detecting alien von Neumann probes at focal points of stellar gravitational lensing.

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A huge gas giant’s yield of water and carbon dioxide could one day help us understand the atmospheres of planets closer to the size of Earth, scientists say.

Telescopic observations of a “hot Jupiter” gas giant, which is a huge planet hugging in close to its parent star, revealed the first-ever direct measurements of water and carbon monoxide in an exoplanet.

The planet is too close to its star to host life as we know it, and far too large besides. But you can think of this study as a practice round, as measuring gas abundance in a larger planet will help with figuring out how to do so with much smaller planets that are potentially habitable — those that are closer to Earth’s size and potentially able to host water on their surfaces.