Our Milky Way galaxy contains
tens of billions of potentially habitable planets, but we have no idea whether we're alone. For now Earth is the only world known to harbor life, and among all the living things on our planet we assume Homo sapiens is the only species ever to have developed advanced technology.
But maybe that's assuming too much.
In a mind-bending
new paper entitled "The Silurian Hypothesis" — a reference to an ancient race of brainy reptiles featured in the British science fiction show "Doctor Who" — scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the University of Rochester take a critical look at the scientific evidence that ours is the only advanced civilization ever to have existed on our planet.
"Do we really know we were the first technological species on Earth?" asks Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rochester and a co-author of the paper. "We've had an industrial society for only about 300 years, but there's been complex life on land for nearly 400 million years."....(..)
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If aliens reach out to us, what would happen first?
It's a question that has puzzled science fiction fans and scientists alike for decades, and we already may have a hint of how people will react. On Oct. 30, 1938, a dramatized version of the 1898 H.G. Wells novel "War of the Worlds" played on the CBS Radio system across the United States. The story details how Martians attacked Earth.
The radio broadcast caused
a reaction when people mistook it for a real radio report, but accounts vary as to how much of a reaction. Some accounts describe nationwide panic, while others say not very many people actually listened to the broadcast. The promise of alien life stars in Episode 1 of "
AMC Visionaries: James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction," which debuts on AMC tonight. Still, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researcher Duncan Forgan told Space.com the "War of the Worlds" broadcast may be instructive to think about as SETI scientists worldwide update their "first contact" protocols. [
E.T. Etiquette: How Should Humanity Interact with Alien Life?]
"If you pick the right science fiction — the hard science fiction — it's placed in the best possible educated guesses about what will happen," said Forgan, who is a research fellow at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He explained that "hard" science fiction refers to science fiction that emphasizes accuracy (think the 2015 movie "The Martian," for example)....(..)
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Astronomers using the Kepler space telescope have detected 219 possible new exoplanets in our galaxy, including 10 relatively small, rocky and possibly habitable planets similar to our own, NASA announced Monday.
These are the last additions to the
catalog of exoplanets compiled during the first phase of the Kepler mission, when the space telescope scanned about 200,000 stars in the Cygnus constellation in an effort to find worlds beyond our own. The official catalog contains 4,034 total “candidates” — tiny blips in the data that are thought to signal the presence of a planet around a star. Of these, 49 fit squarely into their star's “habitable zone,” that Goldilocks region where liquid water can pool on the surface and life may be able to thrive.... (..)
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The Earth will experience a number of (relatively) close calls in one day, as NASA reports that an alarming total of five asteroids will hurtle towards – but happily not quite at – our planet.
The Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California publishes a comprehensive list of space rocks that are worth keeping an eye on, just to prepare yourself for any potential armageddons or extinction-level collisions. These rocks can range in size from a few meters in length to asteroids more akin to skyscrapers....(..)
