For what purpose did the human brain evolve is a question that has puzzled scientists for decades.In 2010 Colin Blakemore, an Oxford neurobiologist argued that a mutation in the brain of a single human being 200,000 years ago turned intellectually able primates into a super-intelligent species that would conquer the world. Homo sapiens appears to be a genetic accident.
Some 65 million years ago the greatest asteroid impact in a billion years may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth. Blasted debris escaped Earth’s gravitational force forming irregular orbits around the sun, eventually finding its way to the planets and moons of the solar system.
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.
While the scientific community debates Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s bold conjecture that our solar system has been visited by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, philosopher Susan Schneider, who holds the Baruch Blumberg Chair, Library of Congress and NASA, preemptively upped the ante, suggesting that artificial intelligence exists out in the Universe, and it’s billions of years old. (more…)
In 2016, astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler mission, discovered a planet unlike anything in our solar system –a “water world” planetary system orbiting the star Kepler-62 –a five-planet system with two worlds in the habitable zone — their surfaces completely covered by an endless global ocean with no land or mountains in sight.
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