Great News for a Mars Colony!

We won't live to see it but I suspect that there are multiple shortcuts that will allow us to beat the speed of light in getting from point A to point B.

I hope those shortcuts don't take us through a bad galactic neighborhood. You never want to have a vehicle breakdown in a bad 'hood. ;)
 
^^^Keeping other things in perspective:

The Earth's coronavirus is deadly enough... what happens when we get infected by an unknown super-deadly extraterrestrial pathogen? I'm sure they're out there and humans would have virtually no defense against them. Colonizing other planets or contaminated probes returning from other planets could be very deadly to humans.

If that kind of pandemic happened, imagine the run on toilet paper!

and Reece's Pieces.

Has it been proven these were Earth bats?
 
Promising Signs of Past Martian Life at Jezero Crater

New research indicates river delta deposits within Mars' Jezero crater—the destination of NASA' Perseverance rover on the Red Planet—formed over time scales that promoted habitability and enhanced preservation of evidence.

Undulating streaks of land visible from space reveal rivers once coursed across the Martian surface—but for how long did the water flow? Enough time to record evidence of ancient life, according to a new Stanford study.

 
Scientists may have just found evidence of a parallel universe

And now, after reviewing the previous data, scientists at the University of Hawaii suggest these particles may hail from a parallel universe — and where another Earth where everything runs backward, including time itself.

Indeed, even the standard law of physics in that universe would run in reverse.

"What we saw is something that looked just like a cosmic ray, as seen in reflection off the ice sheet, but it wasn't reflected," Peter Gorham, the physicist who led the research, tells the University of Hawaii News. "It was as if the cosmic ray had come out of the ice itself. A very strange thing. So we published a paper on that, we just suggested that this was in pretty strong tension with the standard model of physics."

 
Scientists may have just found evidence of a parallel universe




The first thing I thought after reading the first sentence above was a mirror. Read on and.....nope! (Nope. That's a funny word).

Physics: the more things stay the same, the more they change. Gotta love it.
 
Scientists may have just found evidence of a parallel universe




Awesome paper Yappi. My favorite part:

The particles, called tau neutrinos, normally rain down on our planet from the cosmos. The fact they're blazing outward from our planet not only defies standard physics, but also suggests high up in the Antarctic, there may be an overlap with a kind of bizarro world. But of course, to inhabitants of that world, our version of Earth would be the one that runs in reverse.

"Not everyone was comfortable with the hypothesis," Gorham tells New Scientist.

I bet they're not comfortable! How long until we get the Netflix series?
 
I think this is exactly how we'll be able to explore and settle the solar system. We're getting good at genetic sciences and a 100 years from now we'll probably be able to do this routinely.



Genetic enhancement may not be restricted to the pages of sci-fi novels for much longer. For example, scientists have already inserted genes from tardigrades — tiny, adorable and famously tough animals that can survive the vacuum of space — into human cells in the laboratory. The engineered cells exhibited a greater resistance to radiation than their normal counterparts, said fellow webinar participant Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine, the medical school of Cornell University in New York City.
 
And here's some good news:



SpaceX’s Crew Dragon ‘Endeavor’ successfully docked with the International Space Station as planned on Sunday morning, marking another key milestone during this historic Commercial Crew demonstration mission it’s conducting with NASA. On board Crew Dragon were NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, the test pilots selected to be the first ever humans to fly on board SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, and the first people ever to make the trip to orbit aboard a spacecraft built by a private company.

The docking process was handled completely autonomously by Crew Dragon itself, which is designed by SpaceX to operate on autopilot from the moment of launch throughout the course of the entire mission. The spacecraft is able to dock with a newer automated international docking adapter installed on the ISS, unlike the original cargo version of Dragon, which required manual capture by the robotic Canadarm 2 controlled by astronauts on the station. The updated cargo Dragon and Crew Dragon are designed to work with the new automated system.
 
Scientists discover new star and planet that are ‘mirror image’ of Earth and Sun

SCIENTISTS have detected a distant planet and star that look more similar to the Sun-Earth system than any other exoplanet-star pair yet observed.

The similarities between this distant planet – named KOI-456.04 – and Earth are numerous, and researchers hope it could mean that the conditions there might be right for life. The observation was made by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany.

 
Scientists discover new star and planet that are ‘mirror image’ of Earth and Sun





Within the next decade we're going to find so many "earth like" planets it will make our heads spin. This reminds me of when they first started finding planets. It started as a trickle and turned into a torrent.
 
The early history of our galaxy remains a mystery:



Instead, using a new technique that allowed the researchers to better view low-mass galaxies that would originally have remained hidden, they found early galaxies that were more mature than they should have been by that point in the history of the universe.

“These results have profound astrophysical consequences as they show that galaxies must have formed much earlier than we thought,” Rachana Bhatawdekar, lead author of the research, said in a statement. This means the timeline that some scientists believe documents the beginnings of the universe has been thrown into question, and it’s probable that objects like stars and structures like systems and galaxies began forming way before anyone assumed.
 
It's always fun to speculate:



A new paper looked to understand how many planets in our neighbourhood could be home to alien life, by assuming that life develops on other planets in a similar way to how it develops on Earth, and matching that to planets that could be home to similar evolution
It found that there could be dozens of active civilisations waiting to be found in our Milky Way. But it could also shed light on our own fate, and suggest our prospects for long-term survival are lower than we may have thought.



My only issue with these types of articles is that they're not imaginative enough. These scientists are speculating with almost no data but they don't have the flair that a good science fiction writer brings to this topic.
 
As I get older with the experience of having read Science Fiction and have reread a lot of science with that context, I'm amazed how much Science reflects and affirms Science Fiction. I'm not sure there's a clear horse and cart here. I'm starting to believe alternate dimension fourth wall theories of Science Fiction writing. These ideas aren't new, they're channeled, lol.
 
As I get older with the experience of having read Science Fiction and have reread a lot of science with that context, I'm amazed how much Science reflects and affirms Science Fiction. I'm not sure there's a clear horse and cart here. I'm starting to believe alternate dimension fourth wall theories of Science Fiction writing. These ideas aren't new, they're channeled, lol.

This is due in part to the fact that a lot of actual scientists and amateur science enthusiasts write the books.
 
It's always fun to speculate:



A new paper looked to understand how many planets in our neighbourhood could be home to alien life, by assuming that life develops on other planets in a similar way to how it develops on Earth, and matching that to planets that could be home to similar evolution
It found that there could be dozens of active civilisations waiting to be found in our Milky Way. But it could also shed light on our own fate, and suggest our prospects for long-term survival are lower than we may have thought.



My only issue with these types of articles is that they're not imaginative enough. These scientists are speculating with almost no data but they don't have the flair that a good science fiction writer brings to this topic.
This is always an interesting topic, but we still know so little about extraterrestrial life. Too many assumptions, speculations, probabilities and guesswork involved for a reasonable answer. I've seen similar "Drake equation" answers that suggest thousands-to-millions of intelligent species in The Milky Way alone. It's always fun to speculate and get us thinking, but it's still such a crapshoot. Statistical confidence and standard deviations are impossible to calculate.

Somewhere between zero and a billion alien civilizations is my best guess.;)
 
This is always an interesting topic, but we still know so little about extraterrestrial life. Too many assumptions, speculations, probabilities and guesswork involved for a reasonable answer. I've seen similar "Drake equation" answers that suggest thousands-to-millions of intelligent species in The Milky Way alone. It's always fun to speculate and get us thinking, but it's still such a crapshoot. Statistical confidence and standard deviations are impossible to calculate.

Somewhere between zero and a billion alien civilizations is my best guess.;)

Sounds about right to me.
 
Are technosignatures the key to finding advanced civilizations among the stars?



In order to detect if planets are harboring life, however, scientists must first determine what features indicate that life is (or once was) present.

Over the last decade, astronomers have expended great effort trying to find what traces of simple forms of life—known as "biosignatures"—might exist elsewhere in the universe. But what if an alien planet hosted intelligent life that built a technological civilization? Could there be "technosignatures" that a civilization on another world would create that could be seen from Earth? And, could these technosignatures be even easier to detect than biosignatures?
 
Now this is one cool car:



The launch of NASA's Mars rover Perseverance, the life-hunting, sample-caching Red Planet explorer, is just a month away. The car-size robot is scheduled to lift off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station during a window that runs from July 20 through Aug. 11.


Looks like they're aiming to check out a very interesting piece of Martian real estate.

Whenever the six-wheeled rover lifts off during the coming window, it will land on Feb. 18, 2021, inside the Red Planet's 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater. Jezero harbored a lake and river delta billions of years ago, and Perseverance will use its seven science instruments to characterize that potentially habitable ancient environment and look for evidence of long-dead Mars life, among other things.
 
Here's a chance to make some money!


How long does it take for the poop to hit the water at 1/6 G?

"We are looking forward to seeing what the crowdsourcing community can come up with that is out-of-the-box and bring different perspectives for what is needed for a toilet."

I bet they are!
 
Scientists propose plan to determine if Planet Nine is a primordial black hole
Scientists at Harvard University and the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) have developed a new method to find black holes in the outer solar system, and along with it, determine once-and-for-all the true nature of the hypothesized Planet Nine. The paper, accepted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters, highlights the ability of the future Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) mission to observe accretion flares, the presence of which could prove or rule out Planet Nine as a black hole.
 
On the subject of Black Holes:


While we are not anywhere close to extracting energy from a rotating black hole, this doesn't mean it couldn't be done by a very advanced alien civilization — or indeed our own civilization in the distant future. Such a civilization could build a structure around the black hole that rotates with it and then drop asteroids or even electromagnetic waves into it what would be reflected with more energy.

I'm not sure this would be a good idea.
 
The three big Mars missions taking place this summer:


The summer race to land a space probe on Mars is off to a hot start.

Three countries—The Hope Probe (United Arab Emirates), Tianwen-1 (China) and Mars 2020 (United States)—have all taken their positions, hoping to take advantage of the period of time when the Earth and Mars are nearest: a mere 55 million kilometres (34 million miles) apart.
 
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