![]() ![]() On Earth, our cities are built up over hundreds of years, each generation adding on a new layer of technology and design. Making the trip with life’s literal necessities crammed into a rocket-sized suitcase presents its own set of hurdles.But Mars could be as liberating as it is limiting. Mars has lower gravity, higher radiation, few raw materials and a lack of breathable air. We dream of living on other worlds and are inspired to tackle the challenges that come with it.Mars is our nearest potentially livable neighbor but the logistics of moving in are somewhat (extremely) complicated. But could they also enable us to live on other planets? Scientists from iGEM teams to NASA are developing ways to make life off Earth a reality.Space has long captured the human imagination. Read the original article.Synthetic biology innovations aim to change how we live on Earth. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Gareth Dorrian is a post doctoral research fellow in space science at the University of Birmingham. No conclusive evidence that extraterrestrial life exists has been found … yet. Today, the scientists behind the discovery believe that the unusual dips in light are caused by clouds of cosmic dust passing across the face of the star.Īs exciting as they are, it is important to treat claims of alien life with a healthy dose of scepticism, and this is indeed what scientists do. For example, radio telescopes have failed to detect any unusual radio emissions from the star. Some also speculated that these were signatures of an advanced alien species building a structure around the star.īut further observations have found no corroborating evidence to support this possibility. This highly unusual behaviour prompted numerous theories to explain the observations, including cometary dust or debris from a massive impact gradually spreading out to cover the face of the star. Data from the Kepler Space Telescope showed not just a regular dimming, as one might expect from a planetary orbit, but highly irregular dips in the light and, interestingly, a consistent decrease in light output over several years. Tabby's Star is named after astronomer Tabitha Boyajian who was lead author on the paper announcing the discovery. In 2015, professional astronomers working with citizen scientists from the Planet Hunters project announced the discovery of a nearby star displaying unusually strong and consistent dimming over time. Tabby's StarĪ key tool of planet hunting is the dimming method – observing light from a star to see if it periodically dips in a regular fashion as an orbiting planet passes in front of it. The exact origin of the Wow! signal is still not fully agreed upon today, and remains an intriguing mystery. Various explanations have been proposed over the years including, recently, that the signal was generated by a passing comet, or transmissions from an Earth-orbiting satellite. The signal was so remarkable at the time that the astronomer on duty, Jerry Ehman, circled the print out of the signal with red pen and wrote "Wow!" next to it. The exact signal has not been detected again since, despite frequent radio surveys of the same part of the sky. Photo / Big Ear Radio Observatory and NAAPO In 1977, the Big Ear radio telescope in the US detected an unusual radio signal while scanning the sky. ![]() Intriguingly, this particular experiment did show a steady increase in carbon-14 over time which was indeed terminated after heating to above the boiling point of water. The carbon-14 would then increasingly be "breathed out" over time, showing a steady increase in concentration within the reaction chamber.Īfter the chemical analyses, each soil sample was steadily heated to hundreds of degrees to destroy any microbes, with the intention of seeing whether any such reactions in the soil ceased. In theory, this should be absorbed by any growing and multiplying microbes. In one of them, nutrients containing radioactive carbon-14 were added to the soil samples. The experiments chemically treated small samples of Martian soil in reaction chambers on board the landers. In the 1970s Nasa's Viking robotic landers carried a series of experiments designed to test the Martian soil for the presence of microorganisms. ![]() In other words, simply because something might look a bit like life (mushrooms or otherwise), that does not mean it is. Debate over the true origins of these structures continues today – many scientists have pointed out that well known inorganic processes are quite capable of producing structures which resemble living organisms. ![]()
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