The 1947 crash in the New Mexico desert that become legendary among UFO fans and conspiracy theorists turns out to have been nearly as strange a visit by an alien spaceship. Long after the Cold War ended, observers continue to report a pattern of UFO activity near missile silos and other nuclear weapons sites. Perhaps it is not surprising that two subjects —nuclear war and alien invasion—should be linked.
In 2015, astronomer Tabetha Boyajian and her colleagues reported on a star 1,400 light-years away that occasionally dimmed. Actually, it dimmed a lot, and this wasn’t normal stellar behavior. One explanation was that the star was surrounded by a Dyson sphere. The idea, proposed years ago by physicist Freeman Dyson, is that really advanced aliens would construct a gargantuan, spherical swarm of solar panels in orbit beyond their own planet gathering enough starlight to energize the aliens’ terrestrial lifestyles, and could sometimes get in the way of light from the star, causing it to intermittently dim as seen from afar.
Are Homo sapiens a one-off, genetic accident? Scientists have identified a group of planets outside our solar system where the same chemical conditions that may have led to life on Earth exist in what they call the Abiogenesis Zone. It’s also possible that if there is extraterrestrial life, that it has, or will, develop in a totally different way than it did on Earth.
Scientists with a NASA-led expedition are operating from the Inner Space Center at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography as colleagues explore the deep Pacific Ocean to prepare to search for life in deep space, blending ocean and space research to better understand if the watery worlds found on moons and planets in our solar system harbor conditions that could support microbial life.
