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. Davies suggests 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.
Seven minutes of harrowing descent to the Red Planet occured on February 18th when NASA’s Perseverance rover — a robotic “scientist” weighing 2,260 pounds–parachuted through the tenuous Martian air, marking a new era in red planet exploration. Once at the top of the Red Planet’s atmosphere, a science-fiction movie descent began as it dropped through temperatures equivalent to the surface of the Sun, along with a supersonic parachute inflation, and the first ever autonomous guided landing on Mars delivering the biggest, heaviest, cleanest, and most sophisticated six-wheeled robotic geologist ever launched into space north of the Martian equator.
“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.
“They are stained glass windows to the earliest time period of the solar system,” says Harold Connolly, a cosmochemist with Rowan University in New Jersey, about the enigmatic origins of ancient chondrules delivered to Earth by Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission. “They are witnesses to processes that operated in the early solar system. The question is, what did they witness?”
The weekend edition of the “Planet Earth Report” provides a descriptive link to a headline news story by a leading science journalist about an extraordinary discovery, technology, person, or event changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
“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.
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you twice-weekly 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.
