Alien Life an Almost Certainty?

Astronomers are now estimating that there is a minimum of 100 Billion planets in our galaxy alone and a majority of these are earth sized.  Match that with a conservative 500 billion other galaxies in the Universe

Stephen Kane—at NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at CalTech in Pasadena wrote in a recent study:

• not only are planets common in the galaxy, but there are more small planets than large ones.

This means that even if an amazingly small percentage of these small planets could harbor life, by just the sheer amount of these planets means that life is all but a certainty.  

It almost comes down now to life vs intelligent life.  

Check out the great Gizmodo article here

Cassini find something strange on Titan?

Tim Sayell just wrote in with an article that I have been seeing a lot of lately. From Yahoo News

comes a report that NASA's probe Cassini has found something strange on Saturn's moon Titan. The new data rekindles speculation that Titan may harbor some sort of life all its own.

Chemical analysis of data returned by Cassini suggested that hydrogen was flowing down through Titan's atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. First thing is that this really shouldn't be taking place, second, what IS then causing the discrepancy. Some scientists speculate that there may be a strange life form responsible.

From the article:

• Another study investigating hydrocarbons on Titan's surface found a lack of acetylene, a compound that could be consumed as food by life that relies on liquid methane instead of liquid water to live.

Of course there are many explanations on what these could be. Read the Yahoo News article and you decide.

Mars' Methane Levels may Prove That Life Still Thrives on the Red Planet!

As in the earlier article (http://wrfrbeameup.blogspot.com/2009/12/mars-rock-may-indeed-contain-signs-of.html) many scientists are of the opinion that life on the red planet may have very likely have existed at some point in the past.

Now according to a new article in Physorg online sent in by Shaun Saunders, there is compelling evidence to suggest life still flourishes beneath the surface. The article centers around the levels of Methane on Mars. Many scientists believed that the levels were being maintained through meteor impacts. But recent research shows that the amount of impacts is not sufficient to maintain methane at its current level. Methane is very short lived. In Mars' harsh environment, it is broken down in just a few hundred years. But instead of dissipating, the gas is being replenished and the levels are being maintained higher than can be supplied by meteor impacts.

From the article:

• This leaves only two plausible theories..... Either there are microorganisms... that are producing methane gas ... or methane is being produced as a by-product of reactions between volcanic rock and water.

Read complete article

Mars Rock May Indeed Contain Signs of Early Life on the Red Planet!

Remember the Mars rock that was discovered in 1996 that was thought to contain signs of fossilized life? Controversy as to the veracity of the findings put the rock quite literally on the back shelf.

According to an article in the Short Sharp Science blog sent in by Shaun Saunders, the original argument against the rock containing fossilized life was that the chemical deposition could have been brought about by heat and pressure over time. Good news though! According to the article:

• Now a fresh analysis by McKay and colleagues rules out the carbonate decomposition explanation.
  

The article is a bit of a slow read but the gist is that McKay makes a compelling argument for life. Very very exciting!

Could Jupiter's Europa harbor fish-sized life?

According to the latest National Geographic,  the Jovian moon Europa -hundreds of millions of miles from the sun- may host something fishy. Something alive—right now. Below its icy crust Jupiter's moon Europa is believed to host a global ocean up to a hundred miles (160 kilometers) deep...an ocean currently being fed more than a hundred times more oxygen than previous models had suggested, according to provocative new research.

That amount of oxygen would be enough to support more than just microscopic life-forms: At least three million tons of fishlike creatures could theoretically live and breathe on Europa, said study author Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona in Tucson. 

""There's nothing saying there is life there now," said Greenberg, who presented his work last month at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's   Division for Planetary Sciences. "But we do know there are the physical conditions to support it."  Full Article Here.
Photo: NASA/JPL/UArizona/UColorado