Alien Life Forms
Is there life in outer space? Was there life on Mars? Did a collision of an asteroid and the primordial Mars blow tiny precursors of present day life forms to Earth billions of years ago?
After all, the Tagish Lake meteorite, which landed in British Columbia in January 2000, carried organic molecules from the time of the creation of the solar system. A meteorite that was probably blasted off of the surface of the planet Mars about 16 million years ago by an impact with an asteroid and traveled through space to the earth, where it landed on Antarctica about 13,000 years ago. Some scientists believe that the rod-shaped structures across the top and center of this image may be tiny fossilized bacteria. Many other scientists believe that the structures were formed by processes other than life.
Not only have we learned that life is far more robust here on Earth and living in environments that we once thought impossible, but there are life-forms that can survive dormant for millions of years in rather extreme circumstances. The idea of panspermia, in which microbial life could travel across interplanetary distances and maybe even interstellar distances to seed other worlds, is not so crazy anymore. We have also learned there are environments even right here in our solar system that are promising for life. There's water on Mars, and it was probably once warm; Jupiter's moon Europa likely has a liquid ocean. For exoplanets not in the [Earth-like] Goldilocks zone around their stars, maybe they have an environment sustainable for [non-Earth-like] life.
Most scientists now agree that life probably exists in other solar systems. The chemical elements for carbon based life like the life forms on Earth are common in the Universe, so maybe life forms like ourselves are numerous in the Galaxy.
As he has done frequently in the past, Stephen Hawking once again drew allegories to the European settlement of North Africa. He has also previously stated the existence of extra-terrestrial life in the universe is probably a mathematical certainty.
"If aliens visit us, the outcome could be much like when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach."
"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like." Stephen Hawkins
So what might alien life be like? How likely are we to find humanoid aliens? How about intelligent aliens? How likely are the various aliens we meet in Aliens or Yautja?
It seems doubtful that humanoid shapes would be as common as so often imagine them to be, though. Could half-human / half-alien hybrids ever exist? It seems almost impossible, but with recombinant DNA, our scientists have already created interspecies hybrids.While the likelihood that there isn't life elsewhere is extremely small, the likelihood that xtraterrestrial life resembles life on Earth is probably not great either
Any alien life lurking on Mars will most likely be in the form of tiny microorganisms ? not complex biological beings like the ones on our planet. That means finding these aliens is going to be tricky; they will probably be quite small and simple, hiding inside soil samples or hard to reach places. They could look like microbes here on Earth, or they may look like nothing we've ever seen before.
We still can't say what real aliens are like, of course, but science can provide some useful insights. After all, any biology out there will exist in a landscape of finite resources. Darwinian competition will be their lot, as well as ours. So you can expect that there will be predators. Predation is an economic device: carnivores leave it to plants or plant eaters to slowly build up energy-rich molecules from sunlight or some other source. They then harvest this crop of useful compounds quickly, a tactic that can power an active life style.
Perhaps there is life out there that is silicon-based rather than carbon-based like our own.
Of course, despite the dangers, Hawking presumably thinks it is still relatively safe to search for aliens. He recently invested $100 million into Breakthrough Listen, a project which aims to use powerful radio telescopes to actively make 'calls' to other galaxies. However, the scale of the distances traveled by the radio-waves are so vast, it is unlikely any extra-terrestrial life we do encounter could ever actually come and visit, and vice versa.
Alternate Universes
Alternate or parallel universe is a copy of our universe, but with a different timeline. In the movies, Aliens and Alien3, Newt and Hicks die. In the Dark Horse comics, they still died in Alien3, but there are still chronicles of them saving an kiande amedha-infested Earth after Aliens.
Particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, and its ilk push the envelope on physics as presently understood. We will no doubt learn more from those machines about the fundamental nature of space and time and matter, and that will obviously help us understand issues that ultimately would be related to everything from extra dimensions to creating exotic energy configurations that we might need for warp drive. There's the remote possibility that at the LHC we might actually discover extra dimensions in space beyond the four that we've measured. These dimensions may even be large enough to fit aliens or other universes in.
One of the problems of alternate universes is how to test the idea. No one has yet devised an experiment that could prove or disprove the validity of it.
Colonization
Stephen Hawking believes our destiny as a species is also out there in the stars. He portended that the Earth would soon be facing ecological disaster which could force us to abandon the planet.
"I think the survival of the human race will depend on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe, because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy Earth. I therefore want to raise public awareness about the importance of space flight. I have learnt not to look too far ahead, but to concentrate on the present. I have so much more I want to do." Stephen Hawking
Each planet is a product of the unique conditions of its formation. The planets that have been discovered around other solar systems are quite different than those in this solar system.
The only planets in the solar system with gravity greater than Earth's are the gas giants Jupiter and Neptune, which have no solid surfaces and are so unlikely targets for future prospects for colonization. On the Moon and Mars, gravity is 1/6 and 1/3 Earth's, so we'd have a feeling of enhanced strength there. However, should permanent settlements be established, any children born on those worlds may never be able to risk visiting the home planet. Scientists reported indications of water, the breath of life, on Mars. By 2010, a consortium of experts from leading universities and research institutes will present NASA with a "go" or "no-go" recommendation on a Mars mission.
In the future, we may see a form of gravitational segregation, as our species divides into various tribes, adapted to zero, fractional, and one gravity.
Extra-Solar Planets
Planets are quite hard to detect because they're much smaller than star and they shine only by catching and reflecting a small portion of their star's light.
The first extra-solar planet orbiting a sun like star was discovered in 1995. It is a huge gas giant half the size of Jupiter and revolves around the star in 4.2 days, at only 1/8th in the distance from Mercury from our sun. That close, the planet would be heated to 1900o.
Since the discovery in 1995 of the first planet orbiting a normal star other than the sun, more than 300 exoplanets have been found. The discovery of 15 new planetary companions to solar-type stars have been confirmed. The discovery also includes two new multiplanet systems.
About one out of every twenty stars studied has a planet. This means that about 10% of all stars have planets. Thus, the Milky Way alone would be home to 20 billion solar systems. 2 billion of these solar systems would have planets.
Immortality
There appears to be a gene, nicknamed the "suicide gene," that is activated in order to terminate cell growth. Some cells seemed to be designed to divide and reproduce a certain number of times. The control of cell growth is an important function of every cell; when cell reproduction proceeds in an uncontrolled fashion, cancer is often the result (cancer is defined in terms of uncontrolled cell reproduction). Cells also simply "wear down" over time, like any complex machinery that operates continuously.
Scientists have cloned six cows that show none of the worrisome premature aging reported for Dolly the sheep. In fact, the cows' cells seem to have a surprisingly prolonged youth, appearing as young as the cells of newborn calves. Unlike Dolly, the cows were cloned from cells nearing the end of their life span.
This is the first very dramatic proof that people's very old cells could one day be rejuvenated for tissue engineering by having their "aging clock" essentially rewound.
Cells can divide only a certain number of times before they die - about 70 times for human cells; around 60 times for cows. All chromosomes have protective tips called telomeres that prevent a cell's genetic code from fraying during this cellular division. But each time the cell divides, the telomere gets a little shorter. It eventually becomes too short to protect the chromosome, so the cell can no longer divide and eventually dies.
Dolly was the first large animal to be cloned from genetic material extracted from an adult cell. She seems healthy. But last year, scientists discovered her telomeres were too short - while she was just 3, her genetic material was aging at the rate of the 6-year-old sheep from which she was cloned. Not only did that suggest Dolly could age and sicken prematurely, it meant any cloned cells one day developed as medical treatments might be too old to last in the body and fight disease. The six new cloned cows have telomeres significantly longer than regular cows the same age - in other words, the cells look far younger than expected. When cloned cow cells were put in a lab dish, they divided more than 90 times before dying. The cow cloning process is done a little differently than Dolly was cloned. The sheep was cloned from a cell that temporarily stopped dividing, not a terribly old cell. In contrast, Lanza let cow cells divide in a dish for several months until they were at the very end of their life span, a period called senescence. He cloned only the oldest of these old cells, ones with incredibly short telomeres.
One theory: Putting super old genetic material into an egg - the next step in cloning - may prompt the egg to overreact and ensure it produces an embryo with extra long telomeres, Shay said.
Scientists and transhumanists such as Ray Kurzweil talk a lot about radical life extension and immortality, which they think can be achieved in a few different ways. One approach involves improving our physical bodies to the point that they?re pretty much immune to disease and aging, either through cellular and genetic manipulation or the use of nanotechnology that cleanses the body from the inside. Another method of achieving immortality involves ditching our biological bodies and uploading our brains into computers ? not unlike the plot of Transcendence, but presumably with a lot less stupid evil. Anyway, the idea is that, eventually, we can all be body-less avatars flying around doing whatever we want, leaving these earthly trappings behind. Of course, that raises some pretty hefty questions, such as whether or not one?s avatar or virtual self is really that person, or if something?s lost in the translation. Given that it?s pretty tough to know for sure either way, scientists are trying to do more than simply speculate about this possible future. Thus, scientists wanted to start small - with a worm brain.
Psionics / Telepathy
In earlier ages, manifestations were classified as occult or sorcerous. Those who possessed such putative talents were either worshiped or burned. In the Industrial Age, with its strong urge to plumb the unknown, psychic phenomena cane under the critical eye of science. Are there senses beyond he traditional five?
Paranormal psychic abilities are roughly classified into 4 groups:
- Telepathy: reading thoughts
- Clairvoyance: knowledge without sensory input, aka remote viewing
- Precognition: sensing future events
- Psychokinesis: manipulating matter with the mind (telekinesis, teleportation, firestarting, distant healing)
What they all have in common is perception or exertion of force at a
distance without recruitment of the known resources contained within our
bodies, but by sole use of our thoughts.
Mind Reader Tech
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Surface thought readers do exist. The EPOC Emotiv is the most visible to the public, but not as sophisticated as the ones the military is playing with.
There are endless applications for a surface thought reader and they are being used now to help paralyzed folks integrate with cybernetic limbs.
In 2012, a paralyzed patient equipped with an implanted brain chip has been able to use a robotic arm to reach for and pick up a bottle of coffee, bring it close enough to her face so she could drink from a straw, and then place the bottle back on the table.
Time Travel
![[Time Travel]](synths/term.jpg)
If alternate universes are constantly splitting off from our universe, a trip backward in time could land a traveler in an alternate universe - ever so slightly different from the past recorded.
This theory solves a paradox: if you traveled back in time to kill your father when he was a young man, you would never have been born; therefore you couldn't have traveled back in time to kill your father. So, with this theory, killing your father in the past would not have any effect on your birth in the present; you would simply never be born in the universe your father was killed.
One of the consequences of rapid interstellar travel would be that one could also travel back in time. One example given is a wormhole where one end of the hole is moving through space very fast and the other is static. Say one end of the wormhole is moving in a big circle five light-years around, and it takes nearly five years for it to move in that circle. If you're sitting on the fast-moving end of the wormhole, because of special relativity your clock is slowed down, so the whole trip might take just a week. If you then went through the wormhole, you'd come out five years minus a week behind in time. Suppose the wormhole is located two light-years away and you get back at near light-speed, then you can arrive back three years before you left.
If you could create a traversable wormhole, then you could create a time machine, there's no doubt about it. But the question is: Can you create a traversable wormhole? And that all depends on having weird negative energy configurations. We simply don't know if that's possible. It's not ruled out, but I wouldn't bet on it. It's an open question for modern physics that people like me continue to work on every day.
Daniel Hawking's explanation in Lost that everyone is on their own linear timeline, regardless of their travel forward or backward in history. Activities that "happened before" in their past may have had different characters than those of the present, even if the latter behaves as the past.
Transplants
This is a relatively recent development in medical science. Dr. Christian Barnard performed the first successful human heart transplant in 1967. It is also possible in some cases to transplant organs from other mammals into humans, a process called xenotransplantation. In 1984, a baboon heart was transplanted into a young girl with an irreparable heart (but her body rejected it eventually).
The creation of artificial blood and organs has been a goal of medical
research since the 1970's. By utilizing electronic sensor technology and
recent breakthroughs in our understanding of the physiology of vision,
medical scientists are close to creating artificial eyes that could be
directly linked into the brain's optic nerve.
Reproduction
All senses are connected to sexual attraction, but smell, the most primitive one, is primary. A human nose can pick up a scent of one molecule in a billion - and human noses are actually insensitive compared to those of a bloodhound.
Males of all mammalian species know instantly which female is in estrus (heat) and at what stage her cycle she is. Humans males cannot.
There is a connection of the nose to the gonad. If deprived of their sense of smell, humans also become sterile. Female mice that lack the sense of smell never go into heat.
Not surprisingly, sight is also involved in mate selection. Recent studies among vertebrates have shown that members of both sexes will prefer in a prospective mate whatever external appearances denotes good health.
Holograms
Holograms are produced by making a coherent laser beam split in two pieces. Half of the beam shines on a photographic film. The other half illuminates an object, bounces off, and then shines on the same photographic film. When these two beams interfere on the film, an interference pattern is created that encodes all the information of the original 3D wave. The film, when developed, doesn't look like much, just an intricate spider web pattern of whirls and lines. But when a laser beam is allowed to shine on this film, an exact 3D replica of the original object suddenly appears as if by magic.
Though not a holodeck, we do have Virtual Reality.
Phasers
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Phasers, the powerful rayguns used by the Enterprise to defend itself against hostile forces. These phasers are some sort of generic high-energy beam that can blast targets. The U.S. military already has phaser-like stun weapons that use microwaves to cause a painful sensation, and military laser weapons are in development.
The problem with a real Star Trek-style phaser is that it would be pretty hard to generate the energy to heat something or someone up to vaporize them. You would get some recoil, too. If you heat an object to billion degrees instantly that would create a powerful explosion also. To make an object disappear a Phaser ray should somehow cause all particles to be converted to "virtual" particles and go out of existence.
The US government unveiled a "non-lethal" laser rifle designed to dazzle enemy personnel without causing them permanent harm. But the device will require close scrutiny to ensure compliance with a United Nations protocol on blinding laser weapons.
The Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response (PHASR) rifle was developed at the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico, US, and two prototypes have been delivered to military bases in Texas and Virginia for further testing.
The US Department of Defense (DoD) believes the weapon could be used, for example, to temporarily blind suspects who drive through a roadblock. However, the DoD has yet to reveal details of how the laser works and has yet to respond to New Scientist's requests for further information.
Laser weapons capable of blinding enemies have been developed in the past but were banned under a 1995 UN convention called the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons. The wording of this protocol, however, does not prohibit lasers that temporarily dazzle a foe.
Newer systems may avoid this problem by using less powerful laser beams. This new wave of low-intensity laser weapons do not have a permanently damaging effect, apparently.
Several laboratories across the world are working on such weapons. But even low power laser systems can cause eye damage if they are used at close quarters or for extended periods.
The PHASR may attempt to address safety concerns by automatically sensing its distance from a target. The limited information released by the DoD includes mention of an "eye-safe range finder", which may mean the laser's power is adjusted depending on the distance to the target. The system is also said to incorporate a "two wavelength laser system", which may be designed to counter goggles that can filter out certain wavelengths of laser light.
Neil Davison, another expert at Bradford University, says the situation in Iraq may encourage the US to push for the development of less-than-lethal laser weapons. "They already use bright white lights at vehicle checkpoints in Iraq to dazzle drivers who are approaching too fast," he says.
Several commercial systems capable of temporarily dazzling a target exist. LE Systems, based in Connecticut, US, for example, makes the Laser Dazzler, which resembles an ordinary torch and emits a low power pulsing green laser light. The company says this device has been tested extensively and been shown to cause no lasting eye damage.
The possibility of causing lasting eye damage can be reduced by diffusing the laser beam or rapidly moving it across the target with a series of mirrors.
And the same US military research lab developed another laser weapon more than a decade ago, called the Sabre 203. This device attached beneath the barrel of a normal rifle and emitted a low-power laser light over a range of 300 metres. It was used by US forces in Somalia in 1995 but later shelved because of concerns over safety and effectiveness.
Lasers
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In human scientific circles, there are five main types of lasers (Physics of the Impossible). These include:
- Chemical lasers: these types of lasers are energized by a chemical reaction, an example of which is a burning jet of ethylene reaction with nitrogen trifluoride. This type of laser is used by the United States military to shoot down short-range missiles.
- Solid-state lasers: these use a chromium sapphire ruby crystal (or a massive variety of other applicable crystals), in conjunction with yttrium, holmium, thulium and some other chemicals, producing high-energy pulses of laser light.
- Gas lasers: These types of lasers are energized by radio waves or electricity. Carbon dioxide lasers can cut, weld, and blast heavy industrious materials, and yet are invisible. However, the lasers from Wolf's laser mine were red. Thus, the carbon dioxide lasers could be used in conjunction with helium-neon lasers to produce similar effects and the reddish glow.
- Excimer lasers: these are powered by chemical reactions (using inert gases such as argon or xenon, in conjunction with fluorine and chlorine (which are not inert gases)). However, these are used for delicate procedures such as eye surgery and etching tiny transistors onto computer chips. They produce ultraviolet light.
- Semiconductor lasers: these use diodes to create intense laser beams for heavy cutting and blasting.