The human race will find life elsewhere in the universe as it pushes ahead with space exploration, reported astronauts back from the latest US space mission, the space shuttle Endeavour, which returned to Earth in March completing a 16-day journey of nearly 6.6 million miles in space.
Endeavour's flight was the longest shuttle mission to the International Space Station and included a record five spacewalks. The shuttle's seven astronauts worked with the three-member station crew and ground teams around the world to install the first section of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kibo laboratory and the Canadian Space Agency's two-armed robotic system, known as Dextre.
"If we push back boundaries far enough, I'm sure eventually we'll find something out there," said Mike Foreman, a mission specialist on the Endeavour,
"Maybe not as evolved as we are, but it's hard to believe that there is not life somewhere else in this great universe," he told a news conference in Tokyo.
The crew members on the Endeavour mission, which included a Japanese astronaut, said that so far they have not seen anything inexplicable or mysterious in terms of other life forms.
"I personally believe that we are going to find something that we can't explain," said another astronaut, Gregory Johnson. "There is probably something out there but I've never seen it," he said.
Dominic Gorie, the crew commander and veteran of four space flights, pointed out that explorers in past eras did not know what they would find before setting off across the ocean. "As we travel in the space, we don't know what we'll find. That's the beauty of what we do. I hope that someday we'll find what we don't understand."
But it could take a while before human beings come into contact with extraterrestrial life, Richard Linnehan, a fellow mission specialist and believer in the possibilities of extraterrestrial life, told the news conference. "Unfortunately we are taking only baby steps in outer space efforts and we left our planet barely a few hundred miles above the atmosphere," he said.
Takao Doi, the Japanese astronaut on the Endeavour mission, agreed "life like us must exist" elsewhere in the universe. The comments come after a surprisingly high-level debate in Japan about UFOs.
Nobutaka Machimura, the number two in government, said in December that he personally believed aliens existed, in an unusual rebuttal to a government statement that Japan had no knowledge of UFOs.
Defence Minister Shigeru Ishiba went as far as to say that he was studying the legal ramifications of responding to an alien attack in light of Japan's post-World War II pacifist constitution.
At the recent celebration marking the 50th anniversary of NASA, Stephen Hawking, Newton's heir as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, answered the question, “Are we alone?” His answer is short and simple; probably not!
Hawking presented three options. One, being that there is no life out there, and two – somewhat pessimistically, but subsequently, a little too realistic – being that when intelligent life gets smart enough to send signals in to space, it is also busying itself with making nuclear bombs.
Hawking, known not only for his sharp mind, but his sharp sense of humor, prefers option number three. "Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare," he quickly added: "Some would say it has yet to occur on earth."
Alien abductions, in Hawking’s view, are nothing more than claims made by “weirdos,” but we should be careful if we ever happen upon an alien. Because alien life may not have DNA like ours, Hawking warns "Watch out if you would meet an alien. You could be infected with a disease with which you have no resistance."
Other prominent astrobiologists have warned that we humans may be blinded by our familiarity with carbon and Earth-like conditions. In other words, what we’re looking for may not even lie in our version of a “sweet spot”. After all, even here on Earth, one species “sweet spot” is another’s species worst nightmare. In any case, it is not beyond the realm of feasibility that our first encounter with extraterrestrial life will not be a solely carbon-based occasion.
So what about water? Isn’t at least water essential to life? Not necessarily. Ammonia, for example, has many of the same properties as water. An ammonia or ammonia-water mixture stays liquid at much colder temperatures than plain water. Such biochemistries may exist outside the conventional water-based "habitability zone". One example of such a location would be right here in our own solar system on Saturn's largest moon Titan.
Hydrogen fluoride methanol, hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen chloride, and formamide have all been suggested as suitable solvents that could theoretically support alternative biochemistry. All of these “water replacements” have pros and cons when considered in our terrestrial environment. What needs to be considered is that with a radically different environment, comes radically different reactions. Water and carbon might be the very last things capable of supporting life in some extreme planetary conditions.
Posted by Josh Hill with Rebecca Sato and Casey Kazan.
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Harvard-Smithsonian Scientists Zero In On Key Sign of Habitable Worlds
Cruising the Goldilocks Zone -The Search for Super Earths
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GAIA -Mapping the Family Tree of the Milky Way
The "Hubble Effect" -A Galaxy Insight
James Cameron & Arthur C Clarke on 2001 A Space Odyssey
New Technologies & the Search for ET -A Galaxy Insight
Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos Revisited
Eyes on the Cosmos -European Space Agency's Hawk 1 & Hubble's Successor
New Phoenix Mission Technology to Search for Mars Life
Non-Carbon Lifeforms -Why We May Overlook
The Milky Way Enigma -How Galactic Forces May Control Life on Earth
Astro-Engineering Artifacts as Evidence of Extraterrestrial Life
The Biological Universe -A New Copernican Revolution
Jupiter's Europa & the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Earth's Twin Habitable?
Posted by Casey Kazan.
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