Paul Patton
Defining Life II: Metabolism and Evolution as clues to Extraterrestrial Life
In the movie "Avatar", we could tell at a glance that the alien moon Pandora was teeming with alien life.…
Defining Life I: What are Astrobiologists Looking For?
How can astrobiologists find extraterrestrial life? In everyday life, we usually don’t have any problem telling that a dog or…
Communicating Across the Cosmos 4: The Quest for a Rosetta Stone
On television and in the movies, it’s so easy. Aliens almost always speak English (at least in America they do).…
Communicating Across the Cosmos, Part 3: Bridging the Vast Gulf
If extraterrestrial civilizations exist, the nearest is probably at least hundreds or thousands of light years away. Still, the greatest…
Communicating Across the Cosmos, Part 2: Petabytes from the Stars?
Since it was founded in 1984, the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California, has been a…
Communicating Across the Cosmos, Part 1: Shouting into the Darkness
Over the last 20 years, astronomers have discovered several thousand planets orbiting other stars. We now know that potentially habitable…
Questioning the Impact Theory: What Really Killed the Dinosaurs?
About sixty five and a half million years ago, the Earth suffered its largest known cosmic impact. An asteroid or…
Moons of Confusion: Why Finding Extraterrestrial Life may be Harder than we Thought
Astronomers and planetary scientists thought they knew how to find evidence of life on planets beyond our Solar System. But,…