“For a long time, scientists were really focused on finding sun- and Earth-like systems. That’s all we knew. But we found out that there’s this whole crazy diversity in planets. We found planets as small as the moon. We found giant planets. And we found some that orbit tiny stars, giant stars and multiple stars,” said Elisa Quintana, a NASA Goddard astrophysicist who led the 2014 discovery of Earth-sized planet Kepler-186f about the use of NASA’s Discover supercomputer to determine whether any of more than 4,000 distinctly strange exoplanets discovered in the past two decades could support life.
“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species. Our caffeine-inspired curation team scours the world, doing your work for you –all in one place.
Following the appearance of the neocortex some 250,000 years in our past, Homo sapiens evolved as the only species on planet Earth that created sophisticated technology from the clock to the radio and the quantum computer. In Apeman to Spaceman, the BBC reported that about two million years ago, something extraordinary started happening in the Great Rift Valley in East Africa that led our Anthropocene epoch. Our simian ancestors began to evolve from animals with brain power close to that of a chimpanzee, to apes that would ultimately become human – able to talk, and construct complex tools.
Although it’s far enough away to keep Earth safe from radiation when it goes supernova, red supergiant star Betelgeuse is about 700 times the size of our sun, with a radius roughly equivalent to the orbit of Jupiter. “It would be astounding,” said Andy Howell, an astronomer at the Las Cumbres Observatory and the University of California at Santa Barbara about Betelgeuse’s inevitable explosion.
Arrokoth, an object far beyond Pluto, a haunting image reminiscent of a Stone Age carving, has remained undisturbed since it first formed billions of years ago. Data from NASA’s New Horizons mission are providing new insight into how planets and planetesimals – the building blocks of the planets – were formed in a local collapse of a cloud in the solar nebula.
“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species. Our caffeine-inspired curation team scours the world, doing your work for you –all in one place.
God-like beings will exist in the future, and they may be able to affect their past — our present — by means of spacetime engineering. Probably other civilizations out there, perhaps millions to billions of years older than Earth’s, have already attained God-like powers, says Giulio Prisco. a technology expert, futurist and author of Tales of the Turing Church, who believes that the ‘manifest destiny’ of our species is colonizing the universe and developing spacetime engineering and scientific “future magic” much beyond our current understanding and imagination.
