Today’s stories range from How Mammals Conquered the World after the Asteroid Apocalypse to New Type of Magnetic Wave Discovered Sweeping Across Earth’s Outer Core, 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.
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.
Before his death in 2018, Stephen Hawking predicted that the world’s mounting population will consume enough energy to render the world a “ball of fire” within 600 years. Speaking via video in 2018 at Beijing’s Tencent WE Summit, Hawking declared that humans must “boldly go where no one has gone before” if they wish to survive another million years.
At present, our Solar System is in its twentieth orbit of the Milky Way near the inner edge of a spiral feature known as the Orion Arm or, less poetically, the Local Arm. The ghostly arms are not permanent features of a disc galaxy like the Milky Way. Rather, they are concentrations of gas and dust where stars form, produced by disturbances within the Milky Way, or on occasions by a jolt from outside, such as a supernova or the passage of the Solar System through one of the dusty gas clouds that congregate in spiral arms.
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.”
“As we put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and temperatures rise, we are quickly rewinding the climate clock to climate states not seen in human history,” wrote acclaimed University of Wisconsin paleo-climatologist Jack Williams in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “We can expect that over the next few decades, climates will most resemble those of the warm Pliocene, roughly three million years ago, or perhaps even the hothouse Eocene, 50 million years ago.”
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.”
In the blink of a geological eye, nearly 600 million years ago, a massive ice age radically altered the planet’s climate, resulting in a “Snowball Earth,” also known as the Cryogenian Period, severely constricting the oxygen supply on the planet. Scientists at the University of Southampton have proposed that changes in Earth’s orbit may have allowed complex life to emerge and thrive during the most hostile climate episode the planet has ever experienced.
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.”
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.
Giant Asteroid Impacts Created Earth’s Continents to Michio Kaku: “We’ll Make Contact with Aliens in This Century” (Planet Earth Report Weekend)
Black Hole Robots to Physics of Nothing Key to Understanding Origin of the Universe (The Galaxy Report Weekend)
The Language That Doesn’t Use “No” to Why Do JWST’s Images Inspire Panic Among Cosmologists? (Planet Earth Report)
Michio Kaku On the Shift in the UFO Phenomenon to The Psychology of Alien Contact (The Galaxy Report)
Io, Jupiter’s Exploding Moon: Unique in the Milky Way?
Could Dark Matter Be a Source of Light In the Universe?
Human Brain Did Not Shrink 3,000 Years Ago to The Insect Apocalypse (Planet Earth Report)
Building Blocks for Life Found at Milky Way’s Center to Does Light Live Forever? (The Galaxy Report Weekend)Does Life on Earth Have a Purpose to Ancient ‘Ghost’ Tracks of the West (Planet Earth Report)The Origin of Zero to What Earth’s Minerals Can Tell Us About Aliens (The Galaxy Report)
