“A plume came and a plume went,” Paul Mahaffy, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said on Sunday about Curiosity’s detection of a methane spike during a presentation at an astrobiology meeting in Bellevue, Wash.
“To confirm whether the lakes of Saturn’s moon, Titan, has shoreline rings of co-crystals and other, undiscovered, hydrocarbon crystals, scientists will have to wait until a spacecraft can visit its shorelines,” said Morgan Cable of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.
There’s a black hole in the middle of the history of life: how did we go from tiny bags of chemicals to the vast menagerie of creatures we see around us? RadioLab explores one of the most underrated mysteries of all time, and present one possible answer that takes us from an unexpected house guest to a tiny bolt of lightning to every critter you hold dear. It’s the story of one cosmic oops moment that changed the game of life forever.
“Life could spread from host star to host star in a pattern similar to the outbreak of an epidemic. In a sense, the Milky Way galaxy would become infected with pockets of life,” said Harvard-Smithsonian CfA astronomer Avi Loeb.
The worldview of the cosmos as a biological universe is a revolutionary perspective as profound a revision in our way of thinking as the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. It is a worldview that believes that “planetary systems are common, that life originates wherever conditions are favorable, and that evolution culminates with intelligence.”
