Lifeboat Foundation

Have you ever laid wide-awake in the late hours of the night wondering what your life would look like if you took that other job, moved countries, or ended up with someone else? While there’s no definite answer — and probably never will be — the idea that there’s multiple versions of you, living in various universes, isn’t as make-believe as you might think.

According to Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology and author of Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, the increasingly popular theory of Many Worlds Interpretation suggests every fundamental event has multiple possible outcomes and splits the world into alternate realities.

This mind-bending idea originally came from Hugh Everett, a graduate student who wrote just one paper in the 1950s. Everett’s theory describes the universe as a “changing set of numbers, known as the wave function, that evolves according to a single equation.” According to Many Worlds, the universe continually splits into new branches, to produce multiple versions of ourselves. Carroll argues that, so far, this interpretation is the simplest possible explanation of quantum mechanics.

I think this is real but some say it isn’t.

A mysterious star whose repeated bouts of darkening might be due to “alien megastructures,” according to some researchers’ conjectures, may now have more than a dozen counterparts that display similarly mystifying behavior, a new study finds.

Further research into all of these stars might help solve the puzzle of their bewildering flickering, the study’s author said.

Continue reading “‘Alien Megastructure’ Star May Not Be So Special After All” »

No one knows how long it has been drifting through the empty, cold abyss of interstellar space. But this year an object called comet 2I/Borisov came in from the cold. It was detected falling past our Sun by a Crimean amateur astronomer. This emissary from the black unknown captured the attention of worldwide astronomers who aimed all kinds of telescopes at it to watch the comet sprout a dust tail. The far visitor is only the second known object to enter our solar system coming from elsewhere in the galaxy, based on its speed and trajectory. Like a racetrack photographer trying to capture a speeding derby horse, Hubble took a series of snapshots as the comet streaked along at 110,000 miles per hour. Hubble provided the sharpest image to date of the fleeting comet, revealing a central concentration of dust around an unseen nucleus. The comet was 260 million miles from Earth when Hubble took the photo.

In 2017, the first identified interstellar visitor, an object formally named ‘Oumuamua, swung within 24 million miles of the Sun before racing out of the solar system. Unlike comet 2I/Borisov, ‘Oumuamua still defies any simple categorization. It did not behave like a comet, and it has a variety of unusual characteristics. Comet 2I/Borisov looks a lot like the traditional comets found inside our solar system, which sublimate ices, and cast off dust as they are warmed by the Sun. The wandering comet provides invaluable clues to the chemical composition, structure, and dust characteristics of planetary building blocks presumably forged in an alien star system.

For more information: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/hubble-observes-1s…lar-comet/

The teams behind TESS and the Breakthrough Listen SETI search are collaborating to look for nearby “technosignatures.”

Could intelligence simply be unlikely to evolve? Unfortunately, we can’t study extraterrestrial life to answer this question. But we can study some 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history, looking at where evolution repeats itself, or doesn’t.

Related: from big bang to present: snapshots of our universe through time.

A ‘GOD-LIKE’ alien civilisation has been discovered deep in the cosmos, according to an extraterrestrial hunter.

Space scientists may have missed alien probes because they’re just too small.

That’s the bold claim from an astrophysicist who reckons we’ve been looking for extraterrestrial life the wrong way.

The argument is an attempt to explain the Fermi Paradox, a decades-old thought experiment.

This does work it essentially is a very powerful microwave oven but it uses the exotic transfer of energy to propel an object. Plasma-based fusion reactors could power it indefinitely as well essentially it just be able to float out of the atmosphere. When it comes to more euclidean geometry or even like curl-free quantum mechanics for essentially space warping I think you could make warp drive with less energy just essentially slip through the ocean of space that is how black holes do it but they do it with gravity wells. I think if a genetic material could do similar things that are how essentially extraterrestrials do it as well it is more just a simple understanding of physics essentially. If the fabled q continuum exists it be essentially the realm of aliens because essentially it allows for travel through the universe without a ship. In fictional stories nightcrawler, a teleporting being was rumored. I think teleportation does exist as it is a qutrit but it is hard understanding travel instantaneously although I think some agencies rumor about it. If we can essentially teleport a photon we can teleport a human being even without a ship it would just require exotic physics and advanced biology. Essentially a portal gun from the Higgs boson could essentially make a physical transfer from one part to another part but it is hard to keep such things stable also there is a problem possibly of radiation you would probably need a suit to travel through a portal. Essentially it could work it just essentially be a wormhole from one point to another point but making that on the skin is essentially too hard unless you understand the properties of wormhole travel better by spaceship it would be easier. Essentially if you knew the physical space-time point by scanning an area you could essentially make a wormhole to that point and travel there. But doing that with genetics is harder as you need exotic properties or a better understanding of essentially of slipping through one place and coming out another.

Scientists have debated for decades whether the propulsion concept known as EmDrive is real or wishful thinking. A sensitive new tool may at last provide an answer.

Are we alone in the universe? It comes down to whether intelligence is a probable outcome of natural selection, or an improbable fluke. By definition, probable events occur frequently, improbable events occur rarely—or once. Our evolutionary history shows that many key adaptations—not just intelligence, but complex animals, complex cells, photosynthesis, and life itself—were unique, one-off events, and therefore highly improbable. Our evolution may have been like winning the lottery … only far less likely.

The universe is astonishingly vast. The Milky Way has more than 100 billion stars, and there are over a trillion galaxies in the visible universe, the tiny fraction of the universe we can see. Even if habitable worlds are rare, their sheer number—there are as many planets as stars, maybe more—suggests lots of life is out there. So where is everyone? This is the Fermi paradox. The universe is large, and old, with time and room for intelligence to evolve, but there’s no evidence of it.

Could intelligence simply be unlikely to evolve? Unfortunately, we can’t study extraterrestrial life to answer this question. But we can study some 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history, looking at where evolution repeats itself, or doesn’t.