“One can best feel in dealing with living things how primitive physics still is,” said Albert Einstein. “Can life be explained in terms of physics or will it always be a mystery? And if physics can explain life, is existing physics up to the job, or might it require something fundamentally new – new concepts, new laws even?” asks Arizona State University cosmologist, theoretical physicist, and astrobiologist, Paul Davies answering Einstein.
“Although Earth was originally created from the Sun (as part of the ecliptic plane of debris and dust that circulated around the Sun 4.5 billion years ago), our Sun is barely hot enough to fuse hydrogen to helium, observed physicist Michio Kaku in Parallel Worlds: A Journey through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos. “This means that our true “mother” sun was actually an unnamed star or collection of stars that died billions of years ago in a supernova, which then seeded nearby nebulae with the higher elements beyond iron that make up our body. Literally, our bodies are made of stardust, from stars that died billions of years ago.”
With a layered inner structure including a liquid iron core, a thin oxygen-rich atmosphere, an ice-shrouded global ocean with surface plumes that may spew signs of life, and an induced magnetic field—Jupiter’s fourth largest moon, Europa, has greater resemblance to a planet than a gas-giant’s moon.
“One in 200 stars has habitable Earth-like planets surrounding it – in the galaxy, half a billion stars have Earth-like planets going around them – that’s huge, half a billion. So when we look at the night sky, it makes sense that someone is looking back at us,” says physicist, Michio Kaku, author of The Future of Humanity.
Life is incredibly resilient. In April, 2019, a microscopic, multicellular species, also known as the water bear, likely made it out alive following a crash landing on the Moon’s surface by Israel’s Beresheet probe. Based on an analysis of the spacecraft’s trajectory and the composition of the device the micro-animals were stored in the chances of survival for the tardigrades… are extremely high,” reported AFP, adding that the diminutive creatures, which are under a millimeter (0.04 inches) in size, had been dehydrated to place them in suspended animation, then “encased in an epoxy of artificial amber, and should be revivable in the future.”
