Astrobiology don't you know… sort of
Most people prefer a good Tyrannosaur to a lowly duck. It’s a matter of choice of course, but when thinking about dinosaurs you probably have visions of ruthless predators with teeth the size of meat cleavers, or titanic herbivores bigger than small buildings, whereas ducks tend to float around in ponds inquiring after handfuls of bread.
However palaeontologists and biologists have revealed evidence that the humble duck may have triumphed over the mighty dinosaurs.
In a previous post I wrote about how we discovered the age of the Earth, and I mentioned that our planet formed at the same time as the other rocky bodies in our Solar System.
I didn’t say HOW this happened though. So now I will.
Happy now?
Imagine that intelligent alien life exists, that its discovered humanity, and that it has the technology to reach us. What would first contact between humanity and aliens be like?
In the first post in this series I looked at the idea that advanced alien civilisations might be totally indifferent to our existence and would simply choose to ignore us.
In the other scenarios in this series I’ll assume that they are interested in us, and in this post, that they arrive on Earth, but in a rather covert fashion.
A lot of people don’t like the 2009 Star Trek re-boot directed by J.J. Abrams. A lot of these people are Star Trek fans.
I think they’re insane though. It’s a great film and a great way to revitalise a frankly tired franchise.
There’s a lot to like about Star Trek, but Abrams realised what its best asset was, and consequently hit the nail square on the head when he made his film…
In this series of posts I’ve looked at planetary bodies in our Solar System that could support life, from the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, to the cloud layers of Jupiter itself, to the ephemeral-once-jungles of Venus, I’ve even looked at Earth itself.
Now one of my favourites, Mars, the Red Planet.
This is a piece I’ve written for SciFi Now, a brilliant British magazine dedicated to, you guessed it, SciFi. But also horror, fantasy, games and stuff. Go to their website right now.
They’ve asked for people to submit their own stories about their Star Wars memories and love of the franchise. Mine’s about my earliest experience with Star Wars and it’s deep Christmas meaning. I’m not sure if they’ll use it, but fingers crossed.
In a couple of previous posts I looked at the possibility of life existing on some of Jupiter’s moons, including Europa, and then the possibility of life existing on Jupiter itself.
In this post we’ll head further out into the solar system and look at two of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus and Titan.
Continue reading ‘Life in our Solar System – Titan and Enceladus’
One of my favourite tropes in science fiction is the one where mankind creates artificial intelligence only to see it rebel against its maker, and usually either enslave or destroys us. Probably because its both a fantastic but also quite realistic idea, at least in my humble opinion.
It’s been done a hundred times or more, in a huge variety of settings, but one of my favourite is the film Colossus: The Forbin Project.
In a previous post I talked about the possibility of life existing on, or in, some of the moons of Jupiter, with Europa being the best candidate.
But how about life existing within Jupiter itself?
This is great a three and a half minute video that covers the basic ideas in genetics:
It’s made by a guy called David Murawsky, see his Vimeo channel here
Astrobioloblog 
