Putting aside random events such as the 14-mile wide asteroid that destroyed the 150-million-year reign of the dinosaurs and cleared the path for the evolution of the human species, aliens are potentially shaped by the same processes and mechanisms that shaped humans, such as natural selection. “A fundamental task for astrobiologists is thinking about what extra-terrestrial life might be like,” said Sam Levin, at the University of Oxford.
“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.
“Life on Earth has littered the fossil record with a wealth of information that has only recently been accessible to science,” says Phil Manning, a professor at Manchester University. “A suite of new imaging techniques can now be deployed, which permit us to peer deep into the chemical history of a fossil organism and the processes that preserved its tissues. Where once we saw simply minerals, now we gently unpick the ‘biochemical ghosts’ of long extinct species.”
“We don’t yet know where methane on Mars comes from,” tweeted Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate. “A leading idea is that methane on Mars is being released from underground reservoirs created by past biology. But sometimes, methane is a sign of geology rather than biology.”
In contrast to Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s optimism that extraterrestrials are less speculative than dark matter or extra dimensions, a study that we posted in September of 2018 conducted by three scholars from the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford University, suggests that although we exist in a universe with a potential 50 quintillion habitable planets, the expectation that life — from inorganic to bacteria to sentient beings —abiogenesis– has or will develop on other planets as it has on Earth, might be based more on optimism than scientific evidence.
Around 540 million years ago, the strange Ediacaran world was destroyed—dramatically swept aside in the most important moment in the history of evolution when the spectacular supernova of biology, the Cambrian Explosion, was detonated and the world of animal life was born.
