Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagMars (evidence for life)

digital-painting-of-the-planet-neptune-and-triton-stockpack-adobe-stock
digital painting of the planet Neptune and Triton

Search for Extraterrestrial Life 13

A surprising candidate in the search for life in our solar system is Neptune’s moon Triton

In our universe: The invisible numbers of the universe: At Scientific American, “Invisible Numbers Are the Most Beautiful Part of Every ‘Space’ Image”: “We are drawn to breathtaking images of the heavens, but there is beauty in the numbers those images hold … Scientists are trained to understand reality through the interface of models. To an astronomer, a graph with a meandering curve that constitutes proof of a gravitational wave rippling through a detector can be as exciting as seeing a movie visualizing the merger of two black holes.” (Fabio Pacucci, November 16, 2022) Asked by Laurence Tognetti at Universe Today: What if we are truly alone? “The astronomer Carl Sagan was famous for his quote in his book and Read More ›

amazing-exoplanets-stockpack-adobe-stock
Amazing Exoplanets

News From the Search for Extraterrestrial Life 4

Just as much promising data about habitable planets is streaming in from the telescopes, pioneer ET astronomer Frank Drake has died

Lots of places to look: From Universe Today: To date, 5,084 extrasolar planets have been confirmed in 3,811 planetary systems, with another 8,912 candidates awaiting confirmation. (Matt Williams, September 9, 2022) Planets with water have been in the news: According to a new study, “… it turns out that water-rich worlds are far more common in the Milky Way Galaxy than we first thought… ” – Jerusalem Post (Aaron Reich, September 9, 2022) The paper requires a fee or subscription. “A new type of exoplanet — one made half of rock and half of water — has been discovered around the most common stars in the universe, which may have great consequences in the search for life in the cosmos, Read More ›

mars-stockpack-adobe-stock
mars

Remember When Mars Was Going To Land?

Today, now that we can reach Mars, we hope for mere fossils of bacteria

Sadly, the Mars meteorite, favored in recent years, has showed no evidence of life Whether there has ever been life on Mars is a different question from what the specifically meteorite shows (we would need to search the whole planet to be sure about life). But here is some recent disappointing news about the meteorite: Organic molecules found in a meteorite that hurtled to Earth from Mars were synthesized during interactions between water and rocks that occurred on the Red Planet about 4 billion years ago, according to new analysis led by Carnegie’s Andrew Steele and published by Science. The meteorite, called Allan Hills (ALH) 84001, was discovered in the Antarctic in 1984 and is considered one of the oldest Read More ›