“Venus is like the control case for Earth,” said planetary scientist Sue Smrekar with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory echoing recent research that suggests that Venus might have looked like Earth for three billion years, with vast oceans that could have been friendly to life. “We believe they started out with the same composition, the same water and carbon dioxide. And they’ve gone down two completely different paths. So why? What are the key forces responsible for the differences?”
Today’s “Galaxy Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our knowledge of the Milky Way and Universe beyond.
British physicist Stephen Wolfram believes extraterrestrial intelligent life is inevitable, but with a caveat. Although intelligent life is inevitable, we will never find it -at least not by searching in the Milky Way. Wolfram points out that in order to compress more and more information into our communication signals – be they mobile phone conversations or computer- we remove all redundancy or pattern. If anything in a signal repeats, then it can be deleted. But this process of removing any pattern from a signal makes the signal look more and more random – in fact, pretty much like the random radio “noise” that rains down on Earth coming from stars and interstellar gas clouds.
Arthur C. Clarke harshly warned his fellow Homo sapiens not to attempt a landing on Jupiter’s ocean moon, Europa. Ignoring his warning, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers are developing BRUIE, or the Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration for underwater exploration in lunar oceans, such as those on Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. It will spend the next month testing its endurance at Australia’s Casey research station in Antarctica, in preparation for a mission that could one day search for life in ocean worlds beyond Earth.
“They’re out there,” goes the common quip about extraterrestrials. It would seem more likely to be true in light of a new study by astrophysicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology on planetary axis tilts that modeled a theoretical twin of Earth into other star systems called binary systems because they have two stars. They concluded that 87% of exo-Earths one might find in binary systems should have axis tilts similarly steady to Earth’s, an important ingredient for climate stability that favors the evolution of complex life.