Water World Hopefuls Get Interstellar Reality Check - http://clapway.com/2015/08/15/water-world-hopefuls-get-interstellar-101/

One would think, despite the strangely haunting sequence of monstrous waves ripping and chewing spacecraft and human bodies alike, that extraterrestrial planets covered in water would be prime life supporting material. One might even go so far as to suppose that–considering the degree which water is both necessary and nearly sufficient to support any kind of carbon-based life–that an ocean world should actually be preferred to one covered with land or archipelago.

WATER WORLD HOPEFULS TO GO DAUNTED

According to new research published online before in print in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, that’s not the case. Water that totally covers the surface of a planet interacts with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in ways that are capable of turning chilly planets frigid and warm ones even hotter. This recent research shows that Earth-sized water worlds would be habitable in an extremely limited range of temperatures; from roughly 32 to 260 degrees Fahrenheit. Any world slipping outside of that range is liable to be detrimental to primordial forms of life. The bad news is that these sub- and super-temps are actually quite common among planets inhabiting the “Goldilocks zone,” which, for a G2 star like our sun, places a planet roughly 102 million to 140 million miles from its star.

For comparison, the Earth is 93 million miles away from the sun.

INTERSTELLAR REALITY CHECK

When temperatures fall below freezing, the ocean water decomposes more carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas of obvious portent, which reduces the planet’s temperature, and at higher temperatures, less carbon dioxide is absorbed, causing the ocean to release a much greater amount of carbon dioxide, which sets a planet into a runaway warming period (hence the term greenhouse effect).

WIDER IMPLICATIONS

This supposition sketches scenarios for water worlds whose type falls outside that of Earth-sized planets and Sun-like stars. Researchers involved in this study have added that the process would be very similar for larger worlds orbiting even more gigantic stars.

The same cycle would take place with greenhouse gases like methane. With such thin temperature range necessary for habitability, ocean planets unfortunately are not likely to make the splash we might have hoped they would as we explore our interstellar neighborhood for signs of life.

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Water World Hopefuls Get Interstellar Reality Check

Color me red -- #Saturn"s #Tethys moonlights #Red. - http://clapway.com/2015/07/30/red-graffiti-on-saturns-moon-tethys-353/

With all the hubbub about Pluto and extraterrestrial planets, no one seems to be paying attention to the fingerpaint-esque pan-gender celebration of passion apparently limning its way across the surface of one of Saturn’s moons. Known as Tethys, the heavily cratered moon has red graffiti sketches all over it, baffling scientists. The photos of Tethys were snapped up by NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft, a major interplanetary program that arrived in Saturn’s system eleven years ago, in 2004. Cassini will carry on in Saturn’s system until 2017.

GRAFFITI NEAR SATURN?

These strange scratches discovered on Saturn’s moon Tethys avoided scientists’ first meticulous gazes, when the first images of Tethys became available to NASA experts. Indeed, it wasn’t until they combined images with disparate filters–some green, others clear, a few UV and then also IR spectral filters–that the graffiti-like traces were caught.

SPECIAL METHODS USED ON TETHYS

The way they did it was by keeping their gazes (i.e. the researchers’) on highlighted anomalies of color webbing out across Tethys’ mad, wrinkly surface. They seemed indubitably the work of a master graffiti artist, “perhaps a Man from Saturn,” one man may have shouted, but then another shook his head in stolid disbelief, because these streaks would not be visible to human eyes; only with filters, may we see the red streaks.

HOW DID TETHYS GET A MAKEOVER?

This recent discovery is still a fresh mystery. Scientists and researchers alike have only opined an educated guess that may-haps the red arcs have been caused by ice on Tethys’ surface having been exposed to chemical impurities.

Still sounds like a robot could have graffitied the surface? Another hypothesis held that this could all just be an massive emission of gas coming out of Tethys’ surface.

More than how it got there, the very fact that the mystery formation is blatantly red confuses scientists. Nevertheless, scientists are doubling potential losses, and are already speaking of basing some of their understanding of the moon on this strange find.

THE NEED TO KNOW

But this isn’t the end of the story. Scientists fervently hold that a plenum of studies must follow this irregularity, that clearer pictures must be captured, that no means are to be spared to capture more images of Tethys, that no mental effort be stayed in the pursuit of understanding, when it comes to this Tethys. This is necessary because, to natural scientists, the presence of red lines generally indicates fractures on the moon’s surface, and the latests images inspiring this entire rodeo are not resolved enough to give merit to this usual conclusion.

This is also the first time any such phenomenon has been discovered on Saturn’s moons. There is a similar pattern one can trace resting on the Dione moon, but the other 62 moons have not a single hint of such colorful mosaic patterns.

DEATH OF A LEGEND

As was mentioned, Cassini will carry on its mission with Saturn until 2017, until which time it will provide scientists with additional pictures hopefully solving more than creating mysteries becoming endemic of the Saturnian system. When its mission is finished, scientists will guide Cassini in an intentional free-fall into Saturn’s atmosphere, leaving its instruments active and transmitting for as long as possible, until it is eventually quelled by the immense pressure of Saturn’s ancient winds.

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Red Graffiti on Saturn"s Moon Tethys

New Yorkers Asked to Join Stephen Hawking in the Search for ET - http://clapway.com/2015/07/26/new-yorkers-asked-to-join-stephen-hawking-in-the-search-for-et345/

Hailing back to the campfires of ancient nomadic hominids and their sky gods, the question of whether or not we’re alone in the universe is among the oldest that still goes unanswered.

But recently, New Yorkers and Stephen Hawking were asked to help the world search for other inhabited ones with their magnificent tenacity in a $100 million program set to scan the cosmos for extraterrestrial life.

STEPHEN HAWKING JOINS RUSSIAN BILLIONAIRE

The eminent astrophysicist Professor Stephen Hawking, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner agreed to fund a decade-long program named Breakthrough Listen that will search for advanced civilizations on other worlds by listening for radio signals.

Extremely powerful radio telescopes worldwide will coordinate while the data is analyzed with the supercomputing power of millions of PCs in homes and offices in every nation on Earth.

HOW ALL OF US CAN SEARCH FOR ET

The team of scientists led by Peter Worden (former NASA Ames Research Center director) will organize gathered signals, release them to the public, and analyze the data for traces of patterns endemic of intelligence.

Every telescope is expected to create massive banks of data, all of which will be immediately released to the public at large who will be able to download a computer program that will automatically sift through the cosmic waves alongside the most gifted scientific minds for minds from another planet.

OLD IDEA, NEW MEANS

And yes, it’s well known that other organizations have tried this before, so Breakthrough Listen is going to join the University of California in Berkeley’s Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) @home initiative , unifying new technology with good ol’ California grit (and is there any adjective less Californian than grit?).

The software to be used to sift through this cosmic data can actually be rewritten for improvements, so that anyone can customize their own SETI-style apps.

“Breakthrough Initiatives are also developing powerful software for analysing this data. All this software will be open source. The hardware and software used in Listen project will be compatible with other telescopes around the world, enabling them to join the search for intelligent life…[a]nd scientists and members of the public can develop their own apps to sift the data for phenomena of interest.”

WARY OF RUSSIAN BILLIONAIRES?

Yuri Milner Russian billionaire made his riches by making a series of wise investments in technology start-ups like Facebook, and he’s opined that other civilizations could probably teach us ways to handle some of our greatest social antagonisms, like how to allocate natural resources.

The world spends less than $2 million on SETI every year, which is pathetic, so this new source of relatively infinite funds from Breakthrough Initiative is a welcomed boon to the cause.

THE LIMITS OF PHYSICS, THE DRIVE OF LIFE

However, the limits of physics do rain on ET’s parade–any signal detected will almost certainly have been sent many years ago, possibly hundreds or thousands of years ago. It takes four years for a radio signal to travel from the Earth to the nearest solar system. Consequently, direct communication will not be available. Even if we find a signal, we will not be able to respond, except in kind, by radio, which would take just as long to reach them.

In one decade, Milner believes that his $100 billion will be enough for scientists to monitor not only the entire galaxy, but surrounding galaxies, as well.

“It’s the most interesting technological question of our day. If we’re alone, we need to cherish what we have. The message is, the universe has no backup,” said the Russian billionaire.

Professor Stephen Hawking fully condones and supports Milner’s project, but he is still starkly wary about the implications about making contact with a more intelligent species.

“We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth, so in an infinite universe there must be other occurrences of life. Somewhere in the cosmos perhaps intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean.”

Stephen Hawking continues:

“It’s time to commit to finding the answer to search for life beyond Earth. The Breakthrough Initiate is making that commitment.”

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New Yorkers Asked to Join Stephen Hawking in the Search for ET

The because according to #StephenHawking “We are intelligent, we are alive, we must know." - http://clapway.com/2015/07/20/stephen-hawking-teams-up-with-russian-billionaire-in-search-for-extraterrestrial-life-224/

When worldwide renown physicists like Stephen Hawking says they’re going to do something, people have a tendency to perk their ears up and listen. Monday morning, Hawkings and Russian tech entrepreneur Yuri Milner announced that they were going to partner up and get to the bottom of the extraterrestrial life debate.

What Makes This Attempt Any Different?

The program is being called the Breakthrough Initiative, and so far it’s the largest and most ambitious search for extraterrestrial life ever attempted. It’s a 10-year project that will use both open data and software in an attempt to catch chatter among the closest 1,000 stars.

Two of the world’s largest telescopes, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Telescope in Australia, are being used in the search, and the Breakthrough Initiative are offering a $1m prize for anyone that’s able to find any evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Andrew Siemion, director at the University of Berkley’s SETI research center, state that this attempt is somewhere between 50 and 100 times more powerful than any efforts made previously. Any extraterrestrial life broadcasting anything with power similar to a “common aircraft radar” will be heard from the widest range of stars we’ve been able to listen out for yet.

Having the Right Resources

The Breakthrough Initiative is receiving $100m in funding to get the ball rolling, but Milner is also pitching in $160m to help fund the Breakthrough Prize, which is a prolific award to recognize major advances.

“This was once a dream, it is now a truly scientific quest,” Milner said. “In the 21st century we will find out about life at a galactic scale.”

A Leap of Faith

Scientists have been searching for signs of extraterrestrial life for decades, and still seem light years away from finding out the truth about whether or not Earth really is that lone, tiny pale dot Carl Sagan once referred to. That’s to no fault of their own, however. Space is a big place and even if aliens were trying to communicate with us, we may not have the tools, or the capacity, to understand what to look for.

“We are intelligent, we are alive, we must know,” said Hawking when talking about the potential danger of contact extraterrestrial life.

Whether or not the Breakthrough Initiative is able to find signs of extraterrestrial life, it’s good to see someone as prominent as Hawking throw his hat into the ring.

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Stephen Hawking Teams Up With Russian Billionaire in Search for Extraterrestrial Life