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“The Search for Techno-Artifacts” From an Earlier Civilization in the Solar System

May 14, 2020
ExoNews Editor

May 2, 2020 (dailygalaxy.com)

• In his 2016 study, ‘Prior Indigenous Technological Species’, Penn State’s Jason Wright discussed possible origins and locations for “technosignatures” of a technological species’ civilization that could have existed in the solar system prior to humanity’s rise on Earth, or on nearby planets Venus and Mars. “From a purely scientific standpoint, it’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask whether life may have existed elsewhere in the Solar System, or does today,” said Wright, who is also a member of the ‘Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds’ at Penn State.

• What could have ended a prior technologically advanced civilization within our solar system? “The most obvious answer is a cataclysm, whether a natural event, such as an extinction-level asteroid impact or self-inflicted, such as a global climate catastrophe,” says Wright. “[S]uch an event would only permanently extinguish the species if there were many cataclysms across the solar system closely spaced in time, (such as) a swarm of comets or interplanetary warfare, …an unexpected nearby gamma ray burst or supernova…”

• In the case of Venus, its global greenhouse and resurfacing might have erased all evidence of a prior civilization’s existence on the Venusian surface. In the case of Earth, erosion and plate tectonics may have erased most of such evidence if the species lived a billion years ago. Remaining indigenous technosignatures would be extremely old, limiting the places they might still be found to beneath the surfaces of Mars and the Moon, or in the outer solar system.

• In a 2019 study co-written by Manasvi Lingam (at Florida Tech) and Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb entitled, “The Moon as a Fishing Net for Extraterrestrial Life”, Loeb suggested that Earth’s Moon might yield traces of technological equipment that crashed on the lunar surface a billion years ago. “The absence of a lunar atmosphere,” wrote Loeb, “guarantees that these messengers would reach the lunar surface without burning up. In addition, the geological inactivity of the Moon implies that the record deposited on its surface will be preserved and not mixed with the deep lunar interior. Serving as a natural mailbox, the lunar surface collected all impacting objects during the past few billions of years. Most of this “mail” comes from within the solar system.”

One of the primary open questions of astrobiology is whether there is extant or extinct life elsewhere the Solar System. Astrophysicists Avi Loeb at Harvard and Penn State’s Jason Wright have both explored the question, with Loeb suggesting that ancient technological artifacts from beyond the Solar System may exist on Earth’s Moon amounting to a letter from an alien civilization saying, “We exist.”

Wright, a member of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, has considered the possibility that a technological

species could have existed in the Solar System prior to humanity’s rise on Earth in his study, Prior Indigenous Technological Species.

In 2016, Wright authored a paper that discussed possible origins and locations for “technosignatures” of such a civilization while other astronomers have suggested looking for lights on Kuiper Belt Objects that “may serve as a lamppost which signals the existence of extraterrestrial technologies and thus civilizations.”

The origins and possible locations for technosignatures of such a prior indigenous technological species might have arisen on ancient Earth or another body, such as a pre-greenhouse Venus or a wet Mars. In the case of Venus, the arrival of its global greenhouse and potential resurfacing might have erased all evidence of its existence on the Venusian surface. In the case of Earth, erosion and, ultimately, plate tectonics may have erased most such evidence if the species lived a billion years ago. Remaining indigenous technosignatures, observes Wright, might be expected to be extremely old, limiting the places they might still be found to beneath the surfaces of Mars and the Moon, or in the outer Solar System.

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Astronomers Have Formula for Finding Subsurface Oceans in Exomoons

May 4, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article by Erik Arends April 23, 2020 (phys.org)

• In the search for extraterrestrial life, we have typically looked at Earth-like planets at a distance from their parent star where the temperature is between the freezing and boiling point of water. But as in our own solar system, most of the liquid water seems to be outside of this ‘habitable zone’ on moons where interior water is heated beyond the melting point by tidal forces.

• In our solar system only Mars and Earth have ‘habitable’ surfaces. But moons within our solar system, such as Enceladus, Europa and six other moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, are examples of celestial bodies that are freezing cold on the surface but may harbor habitable subsurface oceans.

• Researchers from SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research and the University of Groningen (RUG) have derived a formula that indicates whether a subsurface ocean is present on an ‘exomoon’ and how deep it is. Adding moons to the equation, exoplanet hunters have a much larger field of potentially habitable places to search for extraterrestrial life. In fact, “there could be four times as many habitable exomoons as exoplanets,” says lead author Jesper Tjoa.

• The formula analyzes factors including the diameter of the moon, the distance to its planet, the thickness of the gravel layer on the surface, and the thermal conductivity of the ice or soil layer below the surface to provide a lower limit for the ocean depth.

• Just as “astronomers study starlight shining through the atmospheres of exoplanets” to identify oxygen, for example, says Tjoa, future telescopes “may see geysers like on Enceladus, stemming from a subsurface ocean”, as an indication of life there.

So far, the search for extraterrestrial life has focused on planets at a distance from their star where liquid water is possible on the surface. But within

our Solar System, most of the liquid water seems to be outside this zone. Moons around cold gas giants are heated beyond the melting point by tidal forces. The search area in other planetary systems therefore increases if we also consider moons. Researchers from SRON and RUG have now found a formula to calculate the presence and depth of subsurface oceans in these ‘exomoons.”

In the search for extraterrestrial life, we have so far mainly looked at Earth-like planets at a distance from their parent star where the temperature is between the freezing and boiling point of water. But if we use our own Solar System as an example, moons look more promising than planets. Enceladus, Europa and about six other moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune may harbor a subsurface ocean. They all reside far outside the traditional habitable zone—it is literally freezing cold on the surface—but tidal interaction with their host planet heats up their interior.

With moons entering the equation, exoplanet hunters such as the future PLATO telescope—which SRON is also working on—gain hunting ground regarding the search for life. When astronomers find a so-called exomoon, the main question is whether liquid water is possible. Researchers from SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research and the University of Groningen (RUG) have now derived a formula telling us whether there is a subsurface ocean present and how deep it is.

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We May Be Closing In On the Discovery of Alien Life. Are We Prepared?

October 15, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “E127 10-15-19 We May Be Closing In On the Discovery of Alien Life. Are We Prepared?” on Spreaker.

Article by Seth Shostak October 4, 2019 (nbcnews.com)

• In 2020, Mars and Earth will be relatively close to each other in their adjacent orbits around the sun. Taking advantage of this fortuitous orbital circumstance, NASA and European-Russian space agencies will be dispatching a small brigade of spacecraft to Mars. The new NASA craft will go beyond merely scouting for locations that were once suitable for life. They’ll be looking for life itself.

• Jim Green, the director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, is concerned that scientists haven’t thought much about the next steps should life be found on Mars. What if they found a biota that went extinct billions of years ago on Earth under the surface of Mars? Are we prepared for the discovery of life beyond this planet? Green isn’t worried about an overreaction by the public, though. In 1996, fossilized microbes were found in a meteorite that was ostensibly from Mars itself. The public barely took notice.

• What if we found an intelligent civilization on Mars? Would we do any better than the Spanish did to Native Americans in 1492? A recent survey at Arizona State University reveals that most people would welcome the revelation of intelligent extraterrestrials coming to the Earth. These rubes believe that the advanced beings would be friendly to them. Sure. Thanks ET (the movie).

• No need to worry, says Shostak. There are no intelligent beings on Mars, and certainly no civilizations. And there is no evidence that there ever were. It is a ‘silly concern’. Any life we encounter on Mars will be microscopic. But even this discovery would be enormously significant. It would be evidence that life is a process that begins on many worlds and consequently that the universe may be brimming with biology. But as of now, this is no more than hypothesis.

• [Editor’s Note] Senior SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, the poster boy for the Deep State, is at it again. Here he is smugly reciting the status quo disinformation that extraterrestrial intelligence does not exist anywhere near the Earth, and that the only life we can hope to find off-planet is microbial life. To the very end, Shostak and the Deep State will deny that there are in fact many intelligent species currently visiting the Earth. We are a part of a local star cluster teeming with extraterrestrial civilizations all around us, waiting for us to shake off the shackles of ignorance cultivated by the Deep State serving an elite Illuminati cabal, to pull ourselves out of this third-density zombie apocalypse, and to join the other advanced civilizations of the Galactic Federation.

In the next decade or so, it’s entirely possible that you’ll see a headline announcing that NASA has found evidence of life in space.

Would that news cause you to run screaming into the street? An article that appeared recently in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph hints that Jim Green, the director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, thinks the public might be discombobulated by the discovery of biology beyond the bounds of our own planet. But that’s not really what Green believes. He’s concerned that we haven’t thought much about the next steps by scientists, should we suddenly confront the reality of Martian life.

Here’s the backstory: In 2020, Mars and Earth will once again be relatively close to each other in their adjacent orbits around the sun. To take advantage of this fortuitous orbital circumstance, space agencies will be lobbing a small brigade of spacecraft toward the Red Planet. Unlike the robotic explorers now prowling Mars’ dusty landscapes, these new craft — launched by both NASA and a European-Russian collaboration — will be engaged in a type of reconnaissance that hasn’t been tried since NASA’s Viking landers set down there in the mid-1970s. The new craft will go beyond merely scouting for locations that were once suitable for life. They’ll be on the hunt for life itself. Dead or alive.

It’s the imminent dispatch of these new robotic explorers that prompted Green to say that we might learn of life on Mars within a few years. They could dig up compelling evidence of biology. But he also said that the next steps are murky. Now, he wasn’t saying that news of extraterrestrial life would inevitably disquiet the public. We know it won’t because, after all, we ran that experiment more than two decades ago.

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Featured image by Jake Gillman and Andie Isaacs.

Are Humans a Genetic Accident?

August 30, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “E81 8-30-19 Are-Humans-a-Genetic-Accident?” on Spreaker.
August 22, 2019 (dailygalaxy.com)

• Scientists have identified a group of planets outside our solar system where the same chemical conditions that may have led to life on Earth exist in what they call the Abiogenesis Zone. Would it contain life? Intelligent life? Human-like intelligent life?

• At some point the cosmos must have harbored extraterrestrial life, argues astrophysicist Adam Frank in a New York Times article “Yes, There Have Been Aliens”, Frank reasons that with an estimated 10 billion trillion habitable planets residing in boundless star system’s Goldilocks Zones, and considering that there are two planets in our own solar system – Earth and Mars – that we know have contained water and vegetation in its history, the degree of pessimism required to doubt the existence of another advanced extraterrestrial civilization existing at some point in time, borders on the irrational.

• On the other hand, there may have been only a handful of civilizations that have come and gone throughout a timeline of billions of years, decreasing the odds of two of them running into one another. How long does a civilization typically exist? It took the human race 7 million years to get far enough just to build a radio. Adam Frank points out that we haven’t the slightest clue how life arose on this planet, and what series of happenstance allowed primordial ooze to evolve into an intelligent being. Who knows what sort of life might be spawned on a different planet under different circumstances? The development of life is quite an unreliable process which further decreases the odds of our finding another civilization.

• Colin Blakemore, a neurobiologist at Oxford University, estimates that 200,000 years ago the brains of some, but not all, of an ancient primate species mutated into an intelligent human species. As it is unknown how this could have happened, it appears that humanity is a genetic accident. Then suddenly, over mere hundreds of years, we’ve recently develop the technological means to destroy ourselves. Perhaps, as Harvard’s Avi Loeb hypothesized in his book: How to Search for Dead Cosmic Civilizations, the explanation to Fermi’s paradox as to ‘where are all of the aliens?’ , is – from a cosmic perspective of billions of years – that they have all run the course of their brief existences.

• Paul Rimmer, an astrophysicist at Cambridge University, is pessimistic that life might exist outside of our own world. “You want to at least look at the places where the (building blocks of life) exist,” says Rimmer. “But they may not be sufficient. It’s possible you could mix them for billions of years and nothing happens.” Rimmer speculates that life itself may have come as one big accident. If so, then we are probably the only intelligent life in the universe, and maybe the only life at all. But this seems highly unlikely.

• [Editor’s Note] Oh how the world yearns for the truth about how we humans came to this point. These academics and scientists, coming from Deep State institutions such as Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard, must adhere to the Rockefeller Deep State presumption that as hard as we’ve tried, we have yet to find any evidence of extraterrestrial life. This is to ignore and obfuscate the multitude of evidence all around us – from ancient rock and renaissance paintings of ETs and UFOs, to modern testimony of ET and UFO sightings and personal experiences, to leaks of classified government documents, to consistent reports by credible insiders that various extraterrestrial species have been working behind the scenes with the Deep State government and the covert development of various secret space programs over the past eighty years. When these mainstream “experts” are finally unshackled from the Deep State-controlled narrative, they will relearn a history that answers all of their questions.

The universe, our galaxy, and our local star cluster of 52 stars is teeming with intelligent and highly advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. In fact, we Earth humans here in third density consciousness are at the bottom of the developmental totem pole. The fossil records suggest that we suddenly appeared here on Earth because, well, we suddenly appeared here on Earth. Human-like species of a wide variety of races happen to dominate this region of our galaxy. For millions of years, Earth was used as a haven for some of these third density races to escape catastrophes or wars on their home planets. For hundreds of thousands of years, technologically advanced extraterrestrials conducted genetic experiments on these different human-like species to create a congruent human species made up of various races, genetically and physiologically adapted to this particular planet. Higher density beings sat back to allow the Earth humans to develop uninhibited, while technologically advanced negative beings did their best to infiltrate and control the planet.

Some of these refugees came here upon the destruction of their Super Earth home which blew up and became the asteroid belt about a half million years ago. It left nearby Mars a barren husk of what it once was. About 55,000 year ago they resettled on Atlantis, an island that was and is part of the Antarctica continent. Then they set out to conquer the planet, evolving from the Pharaoh priest class into the “church and crown” medieval rulers, and then into the modern Illuminati cabal. This bloodline of the “Sons of Belial” worked with the advanced negative extraterrestrials over millennia to fully control the planet. But we now happen to be at the precise point in our species’ history when a solar energy event will cause the planet, and those humans on the planet who are prepared, to ascend to a fourth density of consciousness, and take our place among our human star cousins. This will extract us from the control of the dark ET/cabal alliance. The dark forces want to maintain the status quo and prevent this shift in consciousness by keeping the human population ignorant of the truth. They do this through their official control over the mainstream narrative which denies that extraterrestrial life exists beyond this small planet, and propagating articles such as this one.

Insights from the world’s leading scientists on evolution, climate change, technology and extraterrestrial life. We are the only species of the billions of species that have existed on Earth that has shown an aptitude for radios and even we failed to build one during the first 99% of our 7 million year history, says Australia National University’s Charley Lineweaver.

Are Homo sapiens a one-off, genetic accident?

Scientists have identified a group of planets outside our solar system where the same

chemical conditions that may have led to life on Earth exist in what they call the Abiogenesis Zone. It’s also possible that if there is extraterrestrial life, that it has, or will, develop in a totally different way than it did on Earth.

“I’m not sure how contingent life is, but given that we only have one example so far, it makes sense to look for places that are most like us,” said Cambridge University astrochemist, Paul Rimmer. “There’s an important distinction between what is necessary and what is sufficient. The building blocks are necessary, but they may not be sufficient, it’s possible you could mix them for billions of years and nothing happens. But you want to at least look at the places where the necessary things exist.

Rimmer speculates that life may have come from non-life as one big accident. This seems highly unlikely, at least given the way our universe is set up, so if it’s that way, then we are probably the only intelligent life in the universe, maybe the only life at all.

For what purpose did the human brain evolve?

“For what purpose did the human brain evolve?” It is a question that has puzzled scientists for decades, and was answered in 2010 by Colin Blakemore, an Oxford University neurobiologist who argued that a mutation in the brain of a single human being 200,000 years ago turned intellectually able primates into a super-intelligent species that would conquer the world. Homo sapiens appears to be genetic accident. Or are we?

1 hour video of Adam Frank “Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds
and the Fate of the Earth” (Talks at Google YouTube)

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Tag: Earth

“The Search for Techno-Artifacts” From an Earlier Civilization in the Solar System

Astronomers Have Formula for Finding Subsurface Oceans in Exomoons

We May Be Closing In On the Discovery of Alien Life. Are We Prepared?

Are Humans a Genetic Accident?