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 THIS WEEK'S TOP STORY

Rock May Contain 'Space Bugs'

New evidence has made it more likely that remnants of Martian microbes were transported to Earth in meteorite, it was revealed today. A new study by scientists from the American space agency Nasa has found chemical signatures in the rock strongly associated with life.

The discovery strengthens the case for believing that worm-like structures in the meteorite are “microfossils” of ancient Martian bugs. Sceptics have pointed out that similar-shaped structures could be formed from non-biological processes.

Another unanswered question is whether the microfossils were the result of contamination by Earthly bacteria. This was originally ruled out by Nasa but has raised doubts in the minds of other experts.

The meteorite, catalogued as Allen Hills (ALH) 84001, crashed onto the frozen wastes of Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984. Scientists believe the rock was blasted off the surface of Mars by an asteroid or comet, reaching Earth after floating through space for around 16 million years.

It would have formed part of the planet’s crust at a time billions of years ago when many experts believe water flowed on the surface of Mars, and conditions were suitable for life. In 1996 Nasa and the White House made the explosive announcement that the rock contained traces of Martian bugs. Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike.

However, the excitement did not last long. Other scientists questioned whether the meteorite samples were contaminated. They also argued that heat generated when the rock was blasted into space may have created mineral structures that could be mistaken for microfossils. The new study was conducted using advanced high resolution electron microscope techniques that were not available 13 years ago. News of the findings, expected to be released soon by Nasa, was leaked to the space news website Spaceflight Now and picked up today by the newspapers.

The research was led by Dr Kathie Thomas-Keprta and members of the original team at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, that claimed to have found evidence of life in the meteorite. It focused on a more detailed analysis of magnetite crystals – tiny magnetic particles – and carbonate discs within the rock.

Certain bacteria on Earth are known to contain magnetite crystals, which they are believed to use as tiny compasses to help them navigate. The crystals form unusual shapes when associated with bacteria which can be seen in ALH 84001, it is claimed. In addition the scientists say the chemical purity of the features they studied points to biology rather than geology, and a possible interaction with water.

Dr Dennis Bazylinski, from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas said: “I think the paper is really excellent.. I work on magnetic bacteria, and one indication there was life on ancient Mars are these particular magnetite crystals in the meteorite that look like they came out of magnetic bacteria.

“At first, I thought there might have been an error. I have no doubt about that now. I know there is no error.

“The big question is can these things be reliable magneto fossils, and that is a matter of debate. But it turns out that the magnetic bacteria make some very unique shapes of magnetite crystals. And one of the organisms we work with on Earth makes particles that look virtually identical to what we see from Mars in the meteorite.”

Spaceflight Now said the data provided “a powerful new case” for believing the meteorite carried traces of extraterrestrial life, according to its sources. The report added: “Although not a smoking gun, the new findings considerably strengthen the Mars life arguments that have been hotly and passionately debated for a decade, given that the discovery of life on Mars is the Holy Grail of science.”

    MORE ASTRO-SPACE NEWS  

South Africa Meteor Display Caught on Film

Such is our paranoia and constant fear of impending doom that if we'd witnessed this, the chances are we would still be curled up in a ball under a table, mumbling the name of our childhood superhero over and over to come and save us.

But despite seeing the night sky illuminated as bright as day for a few seconds, the hardened 'Saffers' just carried on with whatever they were doing.

While few may have been looking skyward to notice the meteor flying over Johannesburg and Pretoria as a green ball of fire last Saturday, the subsequent flash was hard to miss. The bright light illuminated miles of the sky for a split-second, before darkness resumed.

The Johannesburg Planetarium then appealed for anyone with videos of the event to come forward (they knew it would be a hit on YouTube) and this CCTV footage was uncovered.

The race is now on for locals who hope to cash in by finding the meteor – though they have been warned it belongs to the state irrespective of where it landed. Obviously South Africa quite fancies owning Superman. Watch video: Click

AOL News

Solar Tsunamis are Real

Sometimes you really can believe your eyes. That's what NASA's STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) spacecraft are telling researchers about a controversial phenomenon on the sun known as the "solar tsunami."

Years ago, when solar physicists first witnessed a towering wave of hot plasma racing along the sun's surface, they doubted their senses. The scale of the thing was staggering. It rose up higher than Earth itself and rippled out from a central point in a circular pattern millions of kilometers in circumference.

Skeptical observers suggested it might be a shadow of some kind—a trick of the eye—but surely not a real wave. "Now we know," says Joe Gurman of the Solar Physics Lab at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Solar tsunamis are real."

The twin STEREO spacecraft confirmed their reality in February 2009 when sunspot 11012 unexpectedly erupted. The blast hurled a billion-ton cloud of gas (a "CME") into space and sent a tsunami racing along the sun's surface. STEREO recorded the wave from two positions separated by 90o, giving researchers an unprecedented view of the event:

"It was definitely a wave," says Spiros Patsourakos of George Mason University. "Not a wave of water," he adds, "but a giant wave of hot plasma and magnetism." The technical name is "fast-mode magnetohydrodynamical wave"—or "MHD wave" for short. The one STEREO saw reared up about 100,000 km high, and raced outward at 250 km/s (560,000 mph) packing as much energy as 2400 megatons of TNT (1029 ergs).

Solar tsunamis were discovered back in 1997 by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). In May of that year, a CME came blasting up from an active region on the sun's surface, and SOHO recorded a tsunami rippling away from the blast site."We wondered," recalls Gurman, "is that a wave—or just a shadow of the CME overhead?"

SOHO's single point of view was not enough to answer the question—neither for that first wave nor for many similar events recorded by SOHO in years that followed. The question remained open until after the launch of STEREO in 2006. At the time of the February 2009 eruption, STEREO-B was directly over the blast site while STEREO-A was stationed at right angles —"perfect geometry for cracking the mystery," says co-author Angelos Vourlidas of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC.

The physical reality of the waves has been further confirmed by movies of the waves crashing into things. "We've seen the waves reflected by coronal holes (magnetic holes in the sun's atmosphere)," says Vourlidas. "And there is a wonderful movie of a solar prominence oscillating after it gets hit by a wave. We call it the 'dancing prominence.'"

Solar tsunamis pose no direct threat to Earth. Nevertheless, they are important to study. "We can use them to diagnose conditions on the sun," notes Gurman. "By watching how the waves propagate and bounce off things, we can gather information about the sun's lower atmosphere available in no other way."

"Tsunami waves can also improve our forecasting of space weather," adds Vourlidas, "Like a bull-eye, they 'mark the spot' where an eruption takes place. Pinpointing the blast site can help us anticipate when a CME or radiation storm will reach Earth." And they're pretty entertaining, too. "The movies," he says, "are out of this world."

Source: Science@NASA,

Lunar Water Probably Came From Comets

In a discovery that may solve the mystery behind the source of moon's water, an evidence from NASA's LCROSS mission suggested that much of it was delivered by comets that slammed into the Earth's satellite billions of years ago.

Previous missions had also found hints of lunar water but its source was never clear. One idea is that it forms when hydrogen atoms from the solar wind latch onto oxygen atoms in the lunar soil, creating hydroxyl and water.

According to the data revealed recently at the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group meeting, a gathering of 160 lunar scientists in Houston, the evidence is mounting in favour of an alternative explanation – comet impacts.

The first line of evidence comes from compounds that vaporise readily, called volatiles. LCROSS found spectral signs of volatiles containing carbon and hydrogen – likely methane and ethanol – as well as others such as ammonia and carbon dioxide, journal New Scientist reported.

"It appears that we impacted into a very volatile-rich area," LCROSS principal scientist Tony Colaprete said.

These compounds should have been mostly lost to space billions of years ago, when the moon coalesced from the debris of an impact between the Earth and a Mars-sized object.

Water formed through an interaction with the solar wind would therefore be relatively pure – and free of volatiles.

But comets, which are thought to have been responsible for many of the moon's impact scars, are "dirty iceballs" known to contain volatiles such as methane.

Moon Daily

The Women Left on Earth When Space Called Men

The 10 women striding into an Arizona resort for a reunion are a group guaranteed to turn heads. Handsome, sharp and sure of themselves, mostly in their 70s, they look as if they met in college or were the members of a particularly effective Junior League.

Their bond is more unusual, however, a shared circumstance that made them famous as it enslaved them. They were all wives of Apollo astronauts, the relatively small number of men who trained for and, if they were chosen, joined one of the 12 manned Apollo missions.

While their husbands became a new breed of hero, the wives achieved a symbolic status of their own as the women who waited, gathered in groups around radios and television sets.

“Apollo Wives,” a breezy hou long documentary produced by BBC Wales and being shown on BBC America, gives these women a long-overdue chance to talk about the space program as they saw it. It’s a point of view radically different from the real-stuff heroics and forced poetry we’re used to from so many male tellings of the story.

The women have been holding reunions every few years since the early 1990s, and the interviews in the documentary were filmed this year at the group’s 40th-anniversary gathering. No men appear on camera, which is fitting in two ways. For one thing, once astronauts began Apollo training, their wives were lucky to see them one or two nights a week. When they did come home, the adjustment to normal conditions after the pure oxygen of the space capsules could knock a man out before he finished dinner.

And for another, none of the 10 women are still with her astronaut husband, because of death or, in seven cases, divorce. The wages of fame — and of having married into the arrogant fraternity of fighter jocks and test pilots in the first place — have been heavy.

We hear the stories of maintaining households and raising families with little or no help. Millions of women could tell similar tales, but would they also be expected to maintain a “cooperative, well-behaved” public face (in the words of Barbara Gordon, former wife of Richard F. Gordon Jr.) while living with the extreme danger of their husbands’ work? Jane Dreyfus, ex-wife of Pete Conrad, the third man to walk on the Moon, says 10 of their friends were killed over the years. “We never got into any fights with our husbands or tried to yell at them because we didn’t know whether they were going to come home that night,” she says.

The darkest moment in the film is Martha Chaffee’s story of the launch-pad fire aboard Apollo 1 that killed her husband, Roger, and the $2,000 payout she received after his death. The emotional high point comes when Clare Whitfield, former wife of Rusty Schweickart, picks up her ukulele and leads the women in a song she wrote about their strange experience and how they’ve come to understand it: "I won’t be here to interrupt you, I won’t be here to contradict you, I won’t be here to see your thunder, You can be macho man on your own."

Cr: New York Times

Enormous Telescope to Be Completed Soon

The volcanic dome of Mauna Kea, in Hawaii, has been recognized for many years as one of the most suited locations for building ground-based telescopes.  Its unique vantage point allows telescopes built here to make out details of the Universe that can only be seen from only a handful of other places around the world.

As such, it is here that the new Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will be constructed.  The observatory is among the first in a series of super- advanced, Earth-based facilities that will innovate the field of astronomy in the next five to 15 years, making previously unknown objects visible.  The gigantic instrument will have an aperture of no less than 30 meters, or a whopping 100 feet.

This will allow it to produce images with nine times the current collection power of the twin Keck Telescopes, and also to create photos with 12 times the resolution the Hubble Space Telescope is currently capable of, after its overhaul.  The entire project, which costs less than $1 billion, is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2018, its operators announce.

“As we learn more, the cosmos become more mysterious and require[s] more human ingenuity to get to the next step,” Jerry Nelson says.  He is a physicist at the University of California in Santa Cruz (UCSC), and also a project scientist for the TMT.  The most promising area of research for the new telescope is located at the very edge of the Hubble Deep Field.  In these images, some structures appear as small smudges, and astronomers have no idea what they are, because the telescope is unable to see that far into the Universe.  Experts hope that the TMT will break this limitation, and reveal important details about the first structures to appear in the Universe.

In the field of exoplanetary research, astronomers will be able for the first time ever to view light coming in from distant exoplanets directly, without having to determine their traits from variations in their parent stars' brightness.  This will allow experts to infer characteristics such as atmospheric chemistry and dynamics, which are essential to determining if some of them are habitable or not.  The “Dark Ages” of the Universe will also be unraveled, as the observatory will be able to see as far back as the time when the first lights (early stars and galaxies) appeared in the cosmic void.

As opposed to the Keck Telescopes' ten-meter, 36-segment main mirror, the TMT will sport a huge, 30-meter, 492-segment mirror.  This is more than one order of magnitude above, and the difference will be enough to allow scientists to peer into things such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the telescope's team says.  In addition to the University of California system, other institutions participate in the $970-million project, including the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Canada, Japan, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.  The latter contributed about $200 million to the project.

Softpedia

Solar Sailing to The Stars

"We're back!" said Louis Friedman, Executive Director of The Planetary Society. "With an even more ambitious solar sail program than our last venture." The Planetary Society today announced LightSail, a plan to sail a spacecraft on sunlight alone by the end of 2010. The new solar sail project, boosted by a one-million-dollar anonymous donation, was unveiled on the 75th anniversary of the birth of Planetary Society co-founder Carl Sagan, a long-time advocate of solar sailing.

LightSail is an innovative program that will launch three separate spacecraft over the course of several years, beginning with LightSail-1, which will demonstrate that sunlight alone can propel a spacecraft in Earth orbit. LightSails 2 and 3, more ambitious still, will reach farther into space.

"We are going to merge the ultra-light technology of nanosats with the ultra-large technology of solar sails in an audacious new program," said Friedman.

Taking advantage of the technological advances in micro- and nano-spacecraft over the past five years, The Planetary Society will build LightSail-1 with three Cubesat spacecraft. One Cubesat will form the central electronics and control module, and two additional Cubesats will house the solar sail module. Cameras, additional sensors, and a control system will be added to the basic Cubesat electronics bus.

"To get sunlight to push us through space, we need a large sail attached to a small spacecraft. Lightsail-1 fits into a volume of just three liters before the sails unfurl to fly on light. It's elegant," exclaimed Planetary Society Vice President Bill Nye. LightSail seeks to create and prove solar sail technologies that in a few years can:

* monitor the Sun for solar storms,
* provide stable Earth observation platforms, and
* explore our solar system without carrying heavy propellants.

Sailing on light pressure (from lasers rather than sunlight) is also the only known technology that might carry out practical interstellar flight, helping pave our way to the stars. "Sailing on light is a pathway to the stars, but on that path are also some very important scientific and engineering applications that help us understand and protect our own planet and explore other worlds," remarked Planetary Society President Jim Bell.

Reflected light pressure, not the solar wind, propels solar sails. The push of photons against a mirror-bright surface can continuously change orbital energy and spacecraft velocity. LightSail-1 will have four triangular sails, arranged in a diamond shape resembling a giant kite. Constructed of 32 square meters of mylar, LightSail-1 will be placed in an orbit over 800 kilometers above Earth, high enough to escape the drag of Earth's uppermost atmosphere. At that altitude the spacecraft will be subject only to the force of gravity keeping it in orbit and the pressure of sunlight on its sails increasing the orbital energy.

Lightsail-2 will demonstrate a longer duration flight to higher Earth orbits. LightSail-3 will go to the Sun-Earth Libration Point, L1, where solar sails could be permanently placed as solar weather stations, monitoring the geomagnetic storms from the Sun that potentially endanger electrical grids and satellite systems around Earth.

Sagan's widow and collaborator, Ann Druyan – whose Cosmos Studios was the Society's partner and principal sponsor of Cosmos 1 – serves as Chief Advisor to the current project. Web: www.planetary.org. Druyan commented, "Carl and I once wrote 'We have lingered too long on the shores of the cosmic ocean. It's time to set sail for the stars.' We are celebrating his birthday by announcing the maiden voyages of a fleet of ships conceived to fulfill that mythic imperative. I think I know what this would have meant to him."

Space Ref

Pluto 2015: Journey to the Rim of the Solar System

An epic 10-year, 3-billion-mile journey from Cape Canaveral to the rim of the solar system is almost halfway complete, and in 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will allow us to lay eyes directly on the mysterious, beloved Pluto for the first time.

“Every time that we go to a new kind of place, we find out stuff that just blows our minds,” said planetary scientist Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, leader of the New Horizons Mission.

When the spacecraft launched in 2006, NASA called it the beginning of “an unprecedented journey of exploration to the ninth planet in the solar system.” Of course, after Pluto’s official demotion from planet to dwarf planet, the mission can no longer claim to be exploring the final planet frontier. But regardless of the controversy, Pluto remains an intriguing object that astronomers and the public alike can’t wait to learn more about.

And after conducting the first in-depth, close-up study of Pluto and its moon Charon, the unmanned spaceship will venture even further into the Kuiper Belt, a vast strip of icy objects that sit just outside of Neptune’s orbit, roughly 50 astronomical units from the Sun.

When Pluto was first discovered in 1930, it just looked like an oddball,” Stern said. “We had the four rocky, terrestrial planets and the four big gas giants, and then we had this odd thing Pluto. But with the discovery of the Kuiper Belt in the 1990s, scientists discovered that the small, icy orb was hardly unique. “We found out that there are a lot of Plutos,” Stern said. “In fact, it’s the dominant class of planets in the solar system. This transformed our view not only of the solar system, but also of the importance of sending a spacecraft to Pluto. We realized that we had never sent a spacecraft to the most common type of planet.”

In 2001, a special committee from the National Academy of Sciences met to advise NASA on its 10-year goals for planetary exploration, and the group picked exploration of the Kuiper Belt, including Pluto and Charon, as its highest scientific priority.

Part of the motivation for exploring the Kuiper Belt was the recognition of just how little we know about this cold, dark region at the fringe of our solar system. Stern expects that the most exciting result of our mission to the Kuiper Belt will be something that we can’t possibly predict ahead of time. “No one expected Venus to be the poisonous hell that it is, or Mars to have the river valleys that it does,” he said.

But launching an unmanned spacecraft on a 3-billion mile journey to a planet with a surface temperature of -387 degrees Fahrenheit is no easy task. Initially, the New Horizons engineers were also racing against the clock: By getting a gravity kick from Jupiter, the spacecraft could shave three years off its total mission time. But to get this slingshot boost, New Horizons had to launch right on time — being just a few days late could have extended the 10-year mission to more than 13 years.

In February 2007, New Horizons got the necessary push from our solar system’s biggest planet, snapping a few beautiful pictures of the red giant along the way. Currently, New Horizons is midway through its eight-year “interplanetary cruise” from Jupiter to Pluto. During most of this trek, the spacecraft is in hibernation mode, with all but the most critical electric equipment turned off to conserve energy. During these periods of “sleep,” New Horizons is powered by a single radioisotope thermoelectric generator and uses less power than a pair of 100-watt household light bulbs.

Once a year for about 50 days, the spacecraft turns back on for a checkup and recalibration. So far, Stern says, NASA engineers have had to do very little in the way of trouble-shooting. “You know, it’s amazing,” he said. “Everything on the spacecraft works, and we’re not using any backup systems. We’ve had some software glitches and put up some software patches, and there are some differences in the way we run it compared to how we expected to run it. But overall, we are right on course and right on schedule.”

Once New Horizons reaches Pluto, she’ll use her seven different scientific instruments to map the surface of the dwarf planet and characterize its unique atmosphere, which is thought to contain trace amounts of carbon monoxide and methane gases. All data collected by the spacecraft will get beamed back to Earth using a radio transmitter and an 83-inch diameter radio antenna.

It will take months to get it all home, and I’m sure it will take years to digest it all,” Stern said. “But we will likely have great pictures and other kinds of data sets even on the first day. Of course, that first day isn’t for another five and a half years — a long time to wait if you’re one of the eager Plutophiles who wants to see your favorite dwarf restored to its former planet status. For Stern, however, 2015 seems right around the corner. “I’ve already been waiting since 1989,” he said, “so five and a half years sounds like we’re almost there.”

Interscans

In Today's Space Race, Watch Out For China

When China decided to test an anti-satellite missile in 2007, the impact shattered not just the target satellite but any illusions that China did not have military intentions in space and the capabilities to achieve them.

The United States is still ahead in space development, but China has been making impressive progress in expanding its own program — and it has not gone unnoticed.

"I think anyone who's familiar with the space business, and particularly the history, our history in the space business over the years, would have to be absolutely amazed at the advancements that China has made in such a short period of time," said Gen. Kevin Chilton, head of the U.S. Strategic Command, which is in charge of the military's space operations.

"They certainly are on a fast track to improve their capabilities," Chilton said in early November. "They're to be commended for the achievements that they've done in such a short period of time." China's intentions in space are a matter of great interest to the United States.

The Pentagon is trying to encourage more transparency by the communist country and last month hosted a delegation that included Gen. Xu Caihou of China's Central Military Commission. Xu met with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and toured various U.S. installations, including STRATCOM, which oversees space, cyberspace and nuclear military operations.

"Where they're heading, I think, is one of the things that a lot of people would like to understand better," Chilton said. He would not speak in detail about any of the discussions between U.S. and Chinese officials. Any hope for transparency will be tough to come by. China itself may not have a handle on its intentions, said Roger Cliff, a Chinese military analyst . Cliff said there is an internal struggle within the Chinese military for who will control the space mission.

China's president has said its space efforts are "peaceful." But a top Chinese military official spoke of offensive and defensive capabilities in space because "only power could protect peace," Chinese air force Cmdr. Xu Quiliang told the Xinhua news agency. "It is not clear, and in part the reason for that is because China isn't clear where it is going in space, because they are still arguing it out," Cliff said. Also, transparency is in the eye of the beholder, Cliff noted. For China, transparency "is a luxury of the superior military power."

What has become increasingly apparent is that China views having a powerful presence in space as crucial to both its military and its commercial interests. China has launched satellites for communications, reconnaissance and global positioning systems. It is on track to launch more satellites in 2009 than the United States.

It has performed a spacewalk and aims to land a rover on the moon in 2012 and place a manned space station in orbit by 2020, according to a Defense Department report to Congress about China's military capabilities. It also is testing the Long March V Rocket, the world's largest, to lift heavy payloads into space and double its current capabilities. China is also developing microsatellites that weigh less than 100 kilograms.

CNN International  

Moon Water: Will Lunar-Base Humans be Able to Drink It?

Scientists recently solved some longstanding lunar mysteries, including how the Moon is producing its own water. While it turns out that the Moon is not made out of Swiss cheese (disappointing, I know—that would have been a food source for lunar explorers), it does act like a big sponge of sorts. The lunar surface is a loose collection of irregular dust grains, known as regolith.

Basically, the regolith absorbs electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. These electrically charged particles interact with molecules of oxygen that are already present in lunar dust, and voila, you have H2O. Incoming protons are trapped in the spaces between the grains, absorbed, and then interact with the oxygen in the lunar regolith to produce hydroxyl and water.

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   FEATURE STORY

The Billion-Year Technology Gap: Could One Exist? 

Are we the lone sentient life in the universe?  So far, we have no evidence to the contrary, and yet the odds that not one single other planet has evolved intelligent life would appear, from a statistical standpoint, to be quite small.  There are an estimated 250 billion (2.5 x 10¹¹ ) stars in the Milky Way alone, and over 70 sextillion (7 x 10²² ) in the visible universe, and many of them are surrounded by multiple planets. Meanwhile, our 4.5 billion-year old Solar System exits in a universe that is estimated to be between 13.5 and 14 billion years old.  Experts believe that there could be advanced civilizations out there that have existed for 1.8 gigayears (one gigayear = one billion years).

The odds of there being only one single planet that evolved life among all that unfathomable vastness seems so incredible that it is all but completely irrational to believe.  But then "where are they?" asked physicist Enrico Fermi while having lunch with his colleagues in 1950.

Fermi reasoned, if there are other advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, then why is there no evidence of such, like spacecraft or probes floating around the Milky Way.  His question became famously known as the Fermi Paradox.  The paradox is the contradiction between the high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and yet the lack of evidence for, or contact with, any such civilizations.

Given the extreme age of the universe, and its vast number of stars, if planets like Earth are at all typical, then there should be many advanced extraterrestrial civilizations out there, and at least a few in our own Milky Way.  Another closely related question is the Great Silence, which poses the question: Even if space travel is too difficult, if life is out there, why don't we at least detect some sign of civilization like radio transmissions?

Milan Cirkovic of the Astronomical Observatory in Belgrade, points out that the median age of terrestrial planets in the Milky Way is about 1.8 gigayears greater than the age of the Earth and the Solar System, which means that the median age of technological civilizations should be greater than the age of human civilization by the same amount.  The vastness of this interval indicates that one or more processes must suppress observability of extraterrestrial communities.

Since at this point, there is no direct and/or widely apparent evidence that extraterrestrial life exists, it likely means one of the following:

We are (A) the first intelligent beings ever to become capable of making our presence known, and leaving our planet.  At this point, there are no other life forms out there as advanced as us.  Or perhaps extraterrestrial life does exists, but for some reason extraterrestrial life is so very rare and so very far away we’ll never make contact anyway—making extraterrestrial life nonexistent in a practical sense at least.

Or is it (B) that many advanced civilizations have existed before us, but without exception, they have for some unknown reason, existed and/or expanded in such a way that they are completely undetectable by our instruments.

Or is it (C) There have been others, but they have all run into some sort of “cosmic roadblock” that eventually destroys them, or at least prevents their expansion beyond a small area.

Then ancients once believed that Earth was the center of the universe.  We now know that Earth isn’t even at the center of the Solar System.  The Solar System is not at the center of our galaxy, and our galaxy is not in any special position in contrast to the rest of the known universe.  From a scientific viewpoint, there is no apparent reason to believe that Earth enjoys some privileged status.

Since Earth’s placement in space and time appears to be unremarkably random, proposition “A” seems fairly unlikely.  Assuming humans evolved like other forms of life into our present state due to natural selection, then there's really nothing all that mystical, special or remarkable about our development as a species either.  Due to the shear numbers, there are almost certainly other planets capable of supporting at least some form of life.  If that is so, then for Earthlings to be the very first species ever to make a noticeable mark on the universe, from a statistical perspective, is incredibly unlikely.

For proposition “B” to be correct would defy all logic.  If potentially thousands, or even millions of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations exist in the known universe, then why would all of them, without exception, choose to expand or exist in such a way that they are completely undetectable?  It’s conceivable that some might, or perhaps even the majority, but for all of them to be completely undetectable civilizations does not seem likely either.

Proposition C in some ways, appears to be more likely than A or B.  If “survival of the fittest” follows similar pathways on other worlds, then our own “civilized” nature could be somewhat typical of extraterrestrial civilizations that have, or do, exist.  Somehow, we all get to the point where we end up killing ourselves in a natural course of technological development and thereby self-inflict our own “cosmic roadblock”.

“Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Fermi Paradox is what it suggests for the future of our human civilization.  Namely, that we have no future beyond earthly confinement and, quite possibly, extinction.  Could advanced nanotechnology play a role in preventing that extinction?  Or, more darkly, is it destined to be instrumental in carrying out humanity's unavoidable death sentence?” wonders Mike Treder, executive director of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN).

Treder believes that some of the little understood new technologies now being developed such as nanotech, and others, could well be either our salvation or just as likely end up causing our ultimate destruction.

“Whatever civilizations have come before us have been unable to surpass the cosmic roadblock.  They are either destroyed or limited in such a way that absolutely precludes their expansion into the visible universe.  If that is indeed the case—and it would seem to be the most logical explanation for Fermi's Paradox—then there is some immutable law that we too must expect to encounter at some point.  We are, effectively, sentenced to death or, at best, life in the prison of a near-space bubble,” suggests Treder.  “Atomically-precise exponential manufacturing could enable such concentrations of unprecedented power as to result in either terminal warfare or permanent enslavement of the human race. 

Of course, that sounds terribly apocalyptic, but it is worth considering that the warnings we heard at the start of the nuclear arms race, and the very real risks we faced in the height of the Cold War, were but precursors to a much greater threat posed by an arms race involving nano-built weaponry and its accompanying tools of surveillance and control.”

When we consider the chronological history of life on Earth, humans have only existed for a small fragment of time and our existence has always been precarious.  The entire time we’ve existed, we been banding into various groups and attempting to kill each other—or at least are constantly in the process of developing more effective ways of killing each other—just in case.  The US government, for example, spends on “Defense” (including “preemptive” warfare) and Homeland Security, 8 times what it spends on educating the next generation.  There is enough nuclear weaponry in storage around the world to kill every living creature on the planet several times over.  Clearly, we’re a species with poor odds of surviving indefinitely.

Our self-destructive natures aside, curiosity may end up killing more than the cats.  The faster technology is advancing, the more our “leap now, look later” nature appears to grow as well.  If evolution on Earth serves as a somewhat typical template for evolution of other life forms, then becoming a truly advanced civilization must be a very daunting task indeed and a very rare, if not impossible, achievement.

In fact, Sir Martin Rees, Great Britain's Astronomer Royal and respected professor of astrophysics at Cambridge University has estimated that humans have only a 50-50 shot of making it through the 21st century.  If Rees is right, and our standing on the planet is as precarious as he and others believe it is, then we may be alone due to a built-in evolutionary self-destruct button.  Others have come before and others will exist after, but the cosmic roadblock may be an innate, finite nature, which only allows sentient life forms to exist for a very small window of time—windows of life which may be too small for our civilization to match up with the small windows of other civilizations that have been before or will come after.

In a contrary point of view, Milan Cirkovic believes that highly efficient city-state type of advanced technological civilizations could easily pass unnoticed even by much more advanced SETI equipment, especially if located near the Milky Way rim or other remote locations.

Daily Galaxy.

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 == IN THE SKY THIS WEEK ==

The full Moon is Wednesday December 2.  In the morning, Mars is readily visible in the eastern sky.  Red Mars moves from the constellation of Cancer into the constellation of Leo.  It is a distinct gibbous disk in a small telescope, and becomes bigger and brighter during the week.  Saturn is low in the morning sky this week, but is now readily visible before twilight sets in. 

Mercury returns to the evening sky, it can be seen above the south-western horizon half an hour or so after sunset, below the 'hook' of stars that is the tail of Scorpius, the scorpion.  Jupiter is easily seen as the brightest object in the western evening sky.  Jupiter's moons are readily visible in binoculars or a small telescope.  On Tuesday December 1, the Moon passes in front of the Pleiades cluster around 11:00pm local daylight saving time, Alice Springs and Darwin will have the best views.

ABC Science Updates

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ASTRO PIC OF THE WEEK

The Haunting Beauty of NGC 3190

This magnificent galaxy forces us, again, to ask: does advanced life exist there? The fact that we have no proof of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe may simply mean that intelligent civilizations have all too finite lifetimes. NGC 3190 is a spiral galaxy of unbearable beauty in the constellation Leo. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1784. In 2002, astronomers uncovered one supernova in March in the southeastern part and then another team uncovered a second supernova on the other side two months later -sure destroyers of vicinity-based life.

Daily Galaxy

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