“Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it,” wrote evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, in The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.
This weekend’s stories include The Mysterious Comets That Hide in the Asteroid Belt to The Seven Most Terrifying Things in Space to Wormholes may Look Almost Identical to Black Holes, and much more.
British physicist Stephen Wolfram believes extraterrestrial intelligent life is inevitable, but with a caveat. Although intelligent life is inevitable, we will never find it. Wolfram says that in order to compress more and more information into our communication signals – be they mobile phone conversations or computers – we remove all redundancy or pattern. If anything in a signal repeats, then it can be deleted. But this process of removing any pattern from a signal makes the signal look more and more random – in fact, pretty much like the random radio “noise” that rains down on Earth coming from stars and interstellar gas clouds.
A 2018 Hubble Space Telescope finding confirmed a nagging discrepancy about the Hubble Constant –the rate at which the Universe is expanding–showing the universe to be expanding faster now than was expected from its trajectory seen shortly after the big bang. Researchers hinted that there may be new physics to explain the inconsistency known as the ‘Hubble Tension’ “The community is really grappling with understanding the meaning of this discrepancy,” said lead researcher and Nobel Laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University.
It has been said that to understand water is to understand the cosmos and life itself. 2021 observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) detected this primal substance in the most massive galaxy in the early Universe.
“We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We see GN-z11 at a time when the universe was only three percent of its current age,” observed Pascal Oesch at the University of Geneva and head of the Galaxy Build-Up at Cosmic Dawn team about the discovery of a 13.4 billion-years -old galaxy. It’s mind-boggling by comparison to think that Earth is only 4.5 billion years old.
Today’s stories include 10 Brilliant Novels About Communicating with Extraterrestrial Life to Does Consciousness Rely on Quantum Entanglement? and much more.
“Judging by the history of life on Earth and the possible futures we think we can see coming, it is indeed quite possible that most, or effectively all, civilizations in the universe are comprised of machine intelligences,” wrote astrobiologist David Grinspoon in an email to The Daily Galaxy.
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you daily news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
Rise of Oxygen –An Evolutionary Moment that Shaped Our Planet
Our Universe Wouldn’t Exist Without Phase Transitions to The Quest for Quantum Gravity (The Galaxy Report Weekend)
Will We Actually Be Able to Detect a Signal from an Alien Intelligence? (Weekend Feature)
Is Something Missing from the Standard Model of the Universe? (Holiday Feature)
Did Water Exist in the Galaxies of the Early Cosmos? (Holiday Feature)
Monster Galaxies at the Dawn of TimeHas Milky Way’s Twin Been Discovered to Will Artificial Intelligence Reveal New Laws of Physics? (The Galaxy Report)
“Alien Habitats Could Be Just About Anywhere”
Was the First Planet Beyond the Milky Way Discovered, or Something Even More Exotic? (Weekend Feature)
“Is Our Universe Extremely Unnatural, a Weird Permutation?” (Weekend Feature)