Many scientists believe that it is, suggests Paul Davies, theoretical physicist at Arizona State University and director of the Beyond Center, in The Demon in the Machine, observing that the Great Red Spot is an example of a “dissipative structure” first recognized in the 1970’s by the chemist Ilya Prigogine, who defined life as operating far from equilibrium with its environment and supporting a continued throughput of matter and energy.
“In science fiction, there is a lot of effort put into searching for signs of life like plants, animals and organisms that look like us. But there is a higher probability that alien life will be at the microscopic level,” says Rutgers University geochemist, Nathan Yee, co-investigator at the NASA-funded ENIGMA project that’s researching how proteins, “sophisticated nanomachines,” evolved to create life on earth. “That fact is so much more interesting when you consider what the earliest lifeforms on Earth were capable of doing.”
Mars’ Curiosity rovers path through ancient Gale Crater indicates that Mars’s climate ‘dried out’ over the long term, on a way that still allowed for the cyclical presence of a lake, says Marion Nachon, at Texas A&M, member of a team that examined Mars’ geological terrains from Gale Crater, an immense 95-mile-wide rocky basin that is being explored with the NASA Curiosity rover since 2012 as part of the MSL (Mars Science Laboratory) mission.
Two prominent astronomers, Harvard’s Avi Loeb and NASA’s Jeremy Schnittman, have proposed that inhabited planets might exist around the black holes harbored at the center of most galaxies similar to the fictional waterworld planet Miller, the first planet in the system orbiting the supermassive black hole Gargantua in the movie Interstellar. It’s even possible that life may form on some of these planets, given that extremeophiles on Earth have adapted to boiling heat, freezing cold, and acidic, highly salty and even radioactive environments. (more…)
“The Galaxy Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our knowledge of our Galaxy and beyond.
