DailyDirt: Searching For Life Forms

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Discovering an alien life form would be quite an achievement, but we've been burned before by over-eager press releases that claimed to find evidence of life from beyond our planet. NASA might be more careful about making any announcements about life based on peculiar and potentially extra-terrestrial-based life, but NASA seemed to have forgotten about the extraordinary claims over ALH84001. Overall, though, it's probably good that NASA hasn't given up on searching for aliens, so here are a few links on looking for life from outer space.

• Recently, some UK scientists claimed to find evidence of alien life in the Earth's upper atmosphere, suggesting that alien life is just raining down from space all the time. The concept of panspermia is interesting, but the evidence for it isn't quite convincing yet. [url]
• There are a bunch of ways to look for aliens, such as a search for extraterrestrial technology (SETT) to find non-natural shapes in space. Looking for alien crop circles on exoplanets ain't easy, though. [url]
• Some astronomers are looking for evidence of Dyson Spheres -- a massive array solar panels that advanced alien civilizations might use for sustaining enormous energy needs. This search is actually being funded by a grant from the Templeton Foundation. [url]
• NASA's Curiosity rover hasn't detected much methane in the Martian atmosphere, so the odds of finding familiar living organisms seems a bit more distant. Mars was most likely suitable for Earth-like life at some point, but it's looking pretty dead right now. [url]

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Filed Under: alh84001, aliens, astrobiology, biology, curiosity, dyson sphere, et, extraterrestrial, life, mars, nasa, seti, sett, templeton foundation

DailyDirt: Life On Other Worlds

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The origin of life is a pretty enormous mystery. There are several theories for how life might have come about, but it's difficult to design experiments to narrow down these options. In the meantime, researchers continue to look for clues and evidence for life that didn't originate on our planet. Here are just a few examples that could one day lead us in the right direction.

• Meteorite fragments found in Sri Lanka *might* contain extra-terrestrial fossils -- if you kinda squint and tilt your head, the algae-like fossils support a panspermia theory for the origin of life. This isn't the first time a peer-reviewed journal has published a story like this, and it won't be the last. The real question is when will these papers actually be convincing to skeptics.... [url]
• In 1996, a rock named ALH84001 made a lot more headlines when scientists claimed that it might contain evidence of life from Mars in the form of microfossils. Since then, the ALH84001 debate seems to have settled on the view that those small fossils weren't necessarily created by ET life, and the media hoopla re-affirmed that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." [url]
• Maybe we'll see evidence of life outside our solar system by looking for evidence of asteroid mining operations around other stars -- if we see unusual amounts of dusty debris, it could mean intelligence life has been exploring for interplanetary resources. It might be hard to determine the difference between natural and unnatural debris, though. [url]
• NASA's Curiosity rover has discovered that Mars once had an environment suitable for life. This is an important find, and it raises questions of why Mars doesn't seem to have ubiquitous life now. [url]

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Filed Under: alh84001, aliens, asteroids, astrobiology, biology, et, life, mars, meteorite, microfossils
Companies: nasa