Life | Hard Science Fiction

Jun 10 2021

Surprising candidates for extraterrestrial life

When astronomers look for places outside Earth where life might exist, they often first check the habitable zone of star systems. After all, the Milky Way alone is home to 100 to 400 billion stars and at least that many planets. Habitable means that water should exist there in liquid form. Water, as far as we know, is the elixir of life. It has made life on Earth possible and is essential for the continuation of all living systems on the planet. This explains why scientists are constantly searching for evidence of water on other solid bodies in the…

Water oceans in the crust of icy planets

Life

May 30 2021

Water oceans in the crust of icy planets

A pressure 200,000 to 400,000 times that of Earth's atmosphere, plus temperatures around 1500 Kelvin - these sound like uncomfortable conditions. They prevail where, in water-ice planets of the size of Neptune, the ice merges into the rocky core. Does liquid water exist under these conditions, and if so, how does it interact with the planet's rocky seafloor? New experiments show that on water-ice planets between the size of our Earth and up to six times that size, water selectively leaches magnesium from typical rock minerals. An international team of researchers led by Taehyun Kim of Yonsei University in Seoul,…

Where water will be easiest to find on Mars

Life

Feb 8 2021

Where water will be easiest to find on Mars

The more resources we have to transport to our neighboring planet, the more expensive a manned mission to Mars will be. Current concepts therefore rely on the human inhabitants using the resources that Mars makes available to them. On the one hand, there is the carbon dioxide atmosphere, from which methane can be obtained as fuel for the return flight - and on the other, there are water and ice deposits from which oxygen and drinking water can be obtained. It is already known that Mars is not completely dry. While the atmosphere is available everywhere (although it becomes…

I welcome our future rulers, the Artificial Superintelligences

Astrophysics

Jan 12 2021

I welcome our future rulers, the Artificial Superintelligences

An artificial intelligence that is smarter than humans is one of the favorite subjects in science fiction. There are researchers who claim that such an AI is technically impossible. Others believe it is inevitable. If that could be the case, humanity faces a difficult problem. Can we somehow ensure that this superintelligence is benevolent to us? Can we control it? Because if we can't, the survival of humanity would be in its hands alone. A conception, which can please us so little that we would have to do then everything to prevent its emergence. An international team of researchers…

Life

Jan 3 2021

Intelligent life in the Milky Way is slowly dying out

Mankind is pretty late and pretty far out. That's the conclusion of a study that statistically examines the development of intelligent life in the Milky Way. In it, the authors look at a whole range of factors that they think influence the evolution of intelligent life, such as the frequency of Sun-like stars hosting Earth-like planets, the frequency of civilization destroying supernovas, the length of time it takes for intelligent life to evolve (if conditions are right), and the tendency of advanced civilizations to self-destruct. The researchers incorporated these factors, with varying values, into a simulation of the Milky…

Enceladus

Dec 22 2020

Richly covered menu in the Enceladus ocean

Life needs energy for its existence. The more extensive and diverse the supplies of a potential ecosystem are, the more stable the communities that develop there can be. For Saturn's moon Enceladus, a new study now indicates that a diverse metabolic menu could support a potentially diverse microbial community in the liquid-water ocean beneath the moon's icy skin. Using data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, scientists at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have modeled the chemical processes in the subsurface ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Before its deorbit in September 2017, Cassini studied the cloud of ice grains and water…

Life

Dec 21 2020

Mysterious Signal from Proxima Centauri

"Towards the end of the 21st century, a call for help reaches Earth from the star closest to the sun, Proxima Centauri," begins the blurb for "Proxima Rising." The end of the century is still far off, but an apparently non-natural radio signal from the red dwarf has already reached us. The Guardian was the first to report it, and now the story is going around the world. The data in question was collected by the Parkes Observatory in Australia back on April 29, 2019. "This is the most exciting signal we've discovered in the Breakthrough Listen project," says…

Spiders in Space: Light as a Substitute for Gravity

Life

Dec 9 2020

Spiders in Space: Light as a Substitute for Gravity

The University of Basel has just issued a very nice story in a press release. It's about spiders, and the following is probably only great for those who like the useful animals at least a little bit. But let the (translated) press release have its say. On earth, spiders form asymmetrical webs, whose center is shifted towards the upper edge. In resting state the spiders sit upside down, because they can move faster in the direction of gravity towards freshly caught prey. But what do arachnids do in zero gravity? In 2008, NASA wanted to get high schools in…