Astrobiology
Thanks to Cosmic Radiation, There Could be Life on Mars, Just a Couple of Meters Under the Surface
Remember back in 2008 when the Phoenix lander on Mars scraped away a few inches of rust-colored regolith to reveal…
New Estimate Calculates There Could be 30 Intelligent Civilizations Communicating Across the Milky Way
Over the years, scientific estimates of potential intelligent life in our galaxy have ranged widely. Some estimates say just one…
Is the Concept of a Habitable Zone Too Wide?
Exoplanets are often considered potentially habitable if they could have liquid water. But the necessities of biology set the habitability…
Curiosity Finds Organic Molecules That Could Have Been Produced by Life on Mars
What do coal, crude oil, and truffles have in common? Go ahead. We'll wait. The answer is thiophenes, a molecule…
Confirmed. Fossils That Formed 3.5 billion Years Ago, Really are Fossils. The Oldest Evidence of Life Found So Far
The title of Earth's Earliest Life has been returned to the fossils in the Pilbara region of Australia. The Pilbara…
Searching For The Red Edge: How The Earth’s Forests Are Telling The Aliens Where We Live
People are always worried that alien civilizations will detect the transmissions from our old radio shows and television broadcasts, and…
Language in the Cosmos II: Hello There GJ273b
The ‘Language in the Cosmos’ symposium Three times in October, 2017 researchers turned a powerful radar telescope near Tromsø, Norway…
Language in the Cosmos I: Is Universal Grammar Really Universal?
Is there any way we can hope to communicate with aliens? Will they have a concept of language as we…
Why Finding Alien Life Would Be Bad. The Great Filter
Kurzgesagt just released a new video all about the Great Filter. It's great, and it's unsettling.
What’ll It Take to Find Life? Searching the Universe for Biosignatures
When astronomers scan the atmospheres of other worlds, they’ll be looking for gases to confirm that yes, indeed, there’s life…