Four billion years ago, the first primordial organisms emerged, eventually evolving into today’s complex web of life of which the human species with our destructive impact on the biosphere is playing what perhaps may prove to be a fleeting role. Or, we may not even be at the halfway stage, where in a posthuman future our evolution could extend billions of years.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to the day’s news headlines on the discoveries, people, and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
You would have though it was 1938 again following Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds the way the way Twitter lit up last week when the chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department, Israel-born theoretical physicist Avi Loeb, suggested that an alien spaceship was possibly on its way to Earth to study humankind, and probably had Stephen Hawking spinning in his grave.
“It is impossible to guess the purpose behind Oumuamua without more data,” said Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department. “If Oumuamua is a lightsail,” he added, “one possibility is that it was floating in interstellar space when our solar system ran into it, “like a ship bumping into a buoy on the surface of the ocean.”
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to the day’s news headlines on the discoveries, people, and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“If you wanted to build this thing on the far side of the moon where no one’s living or orbiting much, then that could be a safer place for it,” says MIT’s James Clark.
