Lifeboat Foundation

Definitely watch it for the sense of isolation when our technology bubble evaporates and for the “comb jelly” space alien.

The cosmos is likely teeming with intelligent civilizations who have sent untold numbers of space probes out into interstellar space, says Harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb is this week’s Cosmic Controversy guest. This episode lives up to the podcast’s branding! Episode 37 — Is Oumuamua, Our Solar System’s 1st Identified Interstellar Asteroid, Actually An Alien Probe?

Did an alien lightsail traverse our solar system in 2017? Harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb thinks so. In today’s episode, I welcome Loeb to discuss his bestselling book — “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.” We chat about why he thinks this object, Oumuamua, is likely to be artificial and why the scientific community at large remains so unreceptive to progressive scientific thinking when it comes to the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence.

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Perseverance will scour mud and clay in Jezero’s river delta and shorelines for signs of microbe communities.

For noted theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, finding aliens is a matter of figuring out what exactly we are looking for. To detect other space civilizations, we need to search for the specific effects they might be having on their worlds, argues the Nobel laureate in a new proposal.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Wilczek says that it’s a real challenge to figure out which among the over 4000 exoplanets that we found so far outside of our solar system might host extraterrestrial life. The classic way of listening for space signals is insufficient and inefficient, says the scientist. What might really help are new developments in exoplanetary astronomy that can allow us to get much more precise information about faraway space objects.

In particular, there are two ways we should focus our attention to turn the odds of finding alien life in our favor, argues the physicist.

Are malevolent space aliens keeping quiet as an act of instinctual self-preservation?

If our universe is a bubble that inflated inside a larger multiverse, it might bear scars from collisions with nearby bubbles.

What lies beyond all we can see? The question may seem unanswerable. Nevertheless, some cosmologists have a response: Our universe is a swelling bubble. Outside it, more bubble universes exist, all immersed in an eternally expanding and energized sea — the multiverse.

The idea is polarizing. Some physicists embrace the multiverse to explain why our bubble looks so special (only certain bubbles can host life), while others reject the theory for making no testable predictions (since it predicts all conceivable universes). But some researchers expect that they just haven’t been clever enough to work out the precise consequences of the theory yet.

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Astronomers propose new estimate of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy.

(SPHEREx) mission is a planned two-year mission funded at $242 million (not including launch costs).

SPHEREx will survey the sky in optical as well as near-infrared light which, though not visible to the human eye, serves as a powerful tool for answering cosmic questions. Astronomers will use the mission to gather data on more than 300 million galaxies, as well as more than 100 million stars in our own Milky Way.

SPHEREx will survey hundreds of millions of galaxies near and far, some so distant their light has taken 10 billion years to reach Earth. In the Milky Way, the mission will search for water and organic molecules — essentials for life, as we know it — in stellar nurseries, regions where stars are born from gas and dust, as well as disks around stars where new planets could be forming.