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How to break bad habits
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Cameras on spacecraft and landers have scouted the surfaces on Mars, asteroids and now even a moon in the outer solar system -- Titan, orbiting Saturn. But the Martian surface is dry and Titan's surface is drenched in liquid methane, though so far devoid of life. Jupiter's moon Europa may host seas of liquid water beneath its frozen surface. So liquid water may not be so rare a commodity in the outer solar system, raising expectations that one day life may be found...
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81 reads
MORE IDEAS ON THIS
"But microbes are not going to call home. Now that individual planets are being detected, astronomers are planning on dissecting the light from them to hunt for chemistry that could support or indicate life. Spectral hints of ozone or chlorophyll might be picked up, but these will need precise ob...
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86 reads
"In 1961, Frank Drake wrote down an equation for the probability of a contactable alien civilization living on another planet in the Milky Way. This is known as the Drake equation. It tells us that there is a chance that we may coexist with another civilization but the probability is still quite ...
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92 reads
"The detection of life elsewhere in the universe would be the greatest discovery of all time. Physics professor Enrico Fermi wondered why, given the age and vastness of the universe, and the presence of billions of stars and planets that have existed for billions of years, we have not yet been co...
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"Chatting with his colleagues over lunch in 1950, Fermi supposedly asked, 'Where are they?' our own galaxy contains billions of stars and there are billions of galaxies in the universe, so that is trillions of stars. If just a fraction of those anchored planets, that's a lot of planets. If a frac...
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95 reads
Science fiction, fiction as science
Science fiction is flanked by science, without ever neglecting fantasy. You get to a point where you can't tell where science ends and science fiction begins.
Then your fantasy appears and you begin to gallop in a universe you do not know and you are prey to the wildest imagination.
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352 reads
How to feel like a microbe
Whenever an astronomy book comes into my hands, I feel faint. Actually, I feel like a microbe. This is a series that in 50 different ideas, words or themes, the author develops in her research.
If you take a look at the tags / labels I have chosen to classify this book you will realize wha...
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224 reads
"How would you go about searching for signs of life? The first way is to start looking for microbes within our solar systems. Scientists have scrutinized rocks from the Moon, but they are inanimate basalt. It has been suggested that meteorites from Mars might contain the remnants of bacteria, but...
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75 reads
"More than half a century after Fermi asked his question, we have still heard nothing. Despite our communication systems, no one has called. The more we explore our local neighborhood, the lonelier it seems. No concrete signs of any life, not even the simplest bacteria, have been found on the Moo...
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80 reads
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Structure
The composition of jupiter is similar to that of the Sun - mostly hydrogen and helium. Deep in the atmosphere, pressure and temperature increase, compressing the hydrogen gas into a liquid.
This gives Jupiter the largest ocean in the solar system—an ocean made of hydrogen instead of water....
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