Today’s stories range from What Ancient DNA Reveals About Life in Africa 20,000 Years Ago to What Ancient Mass Extinctions Tell Us about the Future to Frank Drake on What Intelligent Aliens Would Mean, and much more. The 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.
Language has existed on Earth for about one million years beginning with Homo erectus, says linguist Daniel Everett (see video below), which begs the question: do sentient beings with language exist elsewhere in the Cosmos? In December, 2020 ex-CIA Director John Brennan said it was “presumptuous and arrogant” to believe there are no other forms of life than the ones on Earth, referring to the videos released by the Pentagon of US Navy sightings of UFOs.
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
“Homo naledi seems very similar to modern humans in ways that we think reflect its behavior,” wrote paleoanthropologist John Hawks, Vilas-Borghesi Distinguished Achievement Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “It had hands that clearly were adapted for toolmaking and tool use. It had teeth that seemed adapted to the kind of high-quality diets that we have thought were a pathway to the evolution of large, humanlike brains. Even though its brain size was around a third the size of ours, it survived for a million years or more in Africa where much larger-brained species lived, including early modern humans.”
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
Could one of Earth’s most intelligent species be an alien, ‘seeded’ on the planet by an interstellar genetic code? Scientists speculate that the clue might be found in the ancient precursor to life: RNA.
NASA’s mantra is that we should be open to search for life not as we know it. Arik Kershenbaum at the University of Cambridge and author of The Zoologists Guide to The Galaxy believes that “the bizarre and the unexpected – aliens made of gas, or with properties and abilities we’ve never dreamed of – are always possible, but they will always be rare.”
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
Another week of amazing news from our Pale Blue Dot, with stories ranging from strange things are happening at the outer edges of our solar system to plants feel pain and might even see to a wrinkle in nature could lead to alien life.
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.
Our Sun as Never Seen Before (and a New Discovery)
Did the Milky Way Lose Its Original Black Hole to Will the James Webb Space Telescope Reveal Another Earth? (The Galaxy Report)
Radio Galaxies of the Early Universe -Would Take Several Million Years to Cross at Speed of Light
Before the “Bang” –The Primordial Universe NASA Probing How Life Began on Earth to Alpha Centauri a Billion Years Older than Our Solar System (The Galaxy Report)
“Simultaneously Beautiful and Terrifying” –First Image of Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole to A New Earth Rises (Planet Earth Report)Extraterrestrial Lighthouses to Harvard’s Avi Loeb & Company On Our Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole Image (The Galaxy Report)
Earth’s Astronomers on the Significance of the First Image of Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole
Decoding the Mysteries of the Oldest Stars in the Milky WayLive from the Center of Our Galaxy! First Image of Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole (VIDEO)
