Space and Science

Scientists have been scanning the heavens for signs of alien life for 50 years now and there's no sign that anyone is out there. Some are starting to wonder if it is a waste of time while supporters say we've only begun to search a tiny fraction of the universe.

The guy who started it all, Frank Drake, is still around and has ambitious plans to continue his mission to seek out new life and civilizations, no matter how quixotic it might seem.

Drake, and others, say that one of the reasons we may not be detecting any radio signals and why no one may detect ours is that we're gradually switching over to digital forms of communication which don't propagate into outer space.

Our best bet for finding life, albeit not of the intelligent variety, remains in our own solar system. The usual suspects for such discoveries are Mars, Titan and Europa, but a new candidate is getting some attention and that's Saturn's moon Enceladus. Sounds like a world that's ready for the Ben Bova treatment!

An American physics professor has supposedly drawn up a list of scientific guidelines for scriptwriters so that they don't violate scientific facts a little less often than they do now. He proposes no more than one major transgression per film or TV show. Sadly, a lot of science fiction movies and TV shows violate the laws of science multiple times per half hour of screen time.

But does it really make sense to limit these transgressions to a set number? Why only one? Why not two? Maybe three would be okay if it really made the story more entertaining. As this writer points out, it makes no sense to try to limit these sort of things to some sort of formula.

There are plenty of arguments that bad science in sci-fi stories is hurting real science, but some argue that it's bad education that is leading people to not know their science well enough to write about it accurately.

The professor, who is named Sidney Perkowitz, actually wrote a book a few years back about how Hollywood depicts science in the movies.

Ever wondered what life was truly like in space? You can watch the excellent hi-def video above or read this fascinating interview with an astronaut who's living aboard the ISS that was conducted by science fiction author Bruce Sterling.

The interview was actually conducted by email and if you were ever wondering how they send electronic messages from space, the astronauts used Microsoft Outlook, although not in the same way that you or I do.

Sterling's interview was with Nicole Stott, who you might have guessed from her name, is a woman. These days, we don't think twice about female astronauts, but at the beginning of the space age, they were unheard of. There were some pioneering women back then that tried to break the gender barrier, but didn't succeed. They are famously known as the Mercury 13, but, unlike the Mercury 7, their male counterparts, they never made it into space.

And if you ever wondered whether or not astronauts are science fiction fans, you'll need more evidence than this. Mission Control recently used the theme song from Firefly to wake up the shuttle crew.

Many a science fiction novel is based on the assumption that life has evolved on other worlds around other stars. We still don't know if such life exists. We don't even know how life began on this planet.

The most popular theory is that lightning and ultraviolet radiation from the sun cooked chemicals in the early Earth atmosphere to generate amino acids which eventually organized themselves into replicating organisms. It's a nice theory, but at least one scientist things that life might have actually arisen in the depths of the ocean around hydrothermal vents.

If proven true, that theory would certainly add weight to the thought that life might exist in the dark oceans of Jupiter's moon Europa.

Another hope for life within our own solar system is on Jupiter's moon Titan. The discovery of lakes of liquid methane have prompted one suggestion that future robot probes explore the world by boat.

Too late for boat travel is Mars, but there is growing evidence that it was once a watery world. If the life arose in the ocean depths theory holds water (no pun intended), then maybe we should be looking for evidendence of life on Mars in the areas where the former ocean bottoms lie.

Other oceans in this solar system that certainly won't harbour for life, but would be incredibly cool is the oceans that lie beneath the clouds of Uranus and Nepute. Some scientists think they have ocean of diamonds.

And then there's Jupiter. Is it possible that having a protector like that gas giant is a necessary prequisite for the origin of life on a planet like Earth? Some theorize that it's massive gravity acts as a sort of vacuum cleaner for big chunks of rock that might hit smaller worlds and exterminate any life that is evolving there.

So much for man's return to the moon. The United States government will scrap the Constellation program with its newest budget which is pretty much what I predicted would happen the day the program was announced. How could the U.S. afford to run a huge deficit and finance two ruinous wars and still be able to send people to the moon? Obviously, they cannot.

NASA has said that the program's cancellation won't stop them from sending people to the moon, but will instead outsource the transportation of astronauts to private companies and they will themselves work on spacecraft that can take astronauts even farther.

There are no shortage of people with suggestions of how NASA should be run. A former astronaut who now works for Google suggests the space adminstration take the same approach as Silicon Valley companies and launch early and launch often which means try lots of smaller projects and not get bogged down in a few megaprojects. It sounds like the new budget might have them moving in that direction.

It was an approach that was used recently with their unmanned projects that had the agency launching a lot of cheaper, less complicated probes. There were some failures, but a lot more hits, such as the Mars rovers which were designed to last a mere 90 days, but are now going on six years of operation and even though one of them is now permanently stuck in a sand trap they still hope to continue to perform scientific observations with it.

Some are suggesting NASA bring back its "crazy idea factory" to work on projects that are truly revolutionary. One of those crazy ideas is to build an interstellar spaceship. As crazy as it sounds, there are some theories as to how such a ship might move out of the pages of science fiction into the pages of science fact.

The most interesting part of these budget announcements is the decision to rely more on private companies to build manned spaceships. Perhaps one of the many companies working on sending tourists into space will be ready for the challenge. If someone can come up with an economic reason for visiting the moon, you can bet that we'll be back there in no time.

The Royal Society will meet to discuss whether or not aliens are living here on Earth, right under our very own noses. No, they don't actually think that there are lizards from other worlds wearing skin suits to disguise themselves. What they are considering is the possibility that microscopic alien lifeforms may live on our planet in a sort of shadow biosphere that has never been detected.

It's the Bulgarians who believe that the skin-suit-wearing aliens are already here spying on our every move and conducting research on humans. How do you translate Fox Mulder into Bulgarian?

Another possibility of alien life being discovered here is on a trio of Martian meteorites that may contain evidence of pre-historic bacteria that may have hitched a ride on rocks blown from some massive impact on our neighbouring planet. Some NASA experts think that evidence wil be revealed this year.

Many people would be excited to learn whether or not alien life exists, but this writer explains why he hopes we never find ET.

Our planet won't be habitable forever and not necessarily through any fault of our own. As our sun ages and changes the habitable ring around it will push further outward so why not move to Mars now and beat the rush? We already know there's water there. Some people are already thinking ahead. Someone's  designed a robot that will help us raise terrestrial plants there.

Of course, the perfect place for us to set up camp is near Asimov Crater, a recently-named landmark on the Martian surface. It's named after sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov. I'm surprised Ray Bradbury wasn't so honoured, but he's already got an asteroid named after him and a lunar crater named after one of his books.

Before we go to Mars, we'll probably try to camp out on the moon, our nearest celestial neighbour. Water was recently discovered there also. It lurks in the permanent shadow of craters in the southern highlands. Some are wondering, though, if we can even drink the stuff.

If the water source works out that means we won't have to haul a huge quantity of it to supply would-be colonists. Transporting all those building supplies they'd need is another matter, but rather than schlep construction materials to build habitats, some thinkers are suggesting we move into lunar lava tubes. Sounds like a smart move.

If none of those places work out, there's always Titan. A lot of scientists are excited about how much it resembles a young Earth and whether or not it is a life laboratory. Sounds neat, but I'd guess the methane rain would get to be a drag after a while if anyone ever moved there.

And then there's Venus. While it is probably to inhospitable for humans, it may also be another candidate in our solar system as a habitat for life, most likely in its upper clouds.

Thirty-five years ago, astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake used the Arecibo radio telescope to send a coded message to the stars in the hopes that an alien civilization would intercept it. We never did get an answer, but to commemorate the event, someone decided it was time to send a new message, but this time to put more thought into it. Here is the two-part story of how they formulated their message and how they had to improvise with an iPhone to actually send it.

Other scientists have their own thoughts on better ways to encode messages that could be deciphered by extraterrestrial intelligences.

It seems unlikely that anyone will ever receive those signals, but the search for ET continues. All sorts of techniques have been proposed and practiced over the years, but one new approach is to look for signs of the pollution that they emit, not the chemical kind, but the light pollution that is emitted from their planets. Of course, that presumes that they artificially light their cities. What if they can "see" across all wavelengths?

Closer to home, researchers are working on techniques for humans to communicate with each other in space by creating an internet-like network that will move data packets between satellites in orbit. I wonder if those ETs will ever be able to spot that.

The Large Hadron Collider has a starring role in FlashForward, but the real-life particle accelerator has yet to work properly. One theory is that it is being sabotaged from the future. No, it's not some time-travelling commandos doing the job. If nature abhors a vacuum, it may also abhor the Higgs boson particle, although I like the commando theory better.

While we're pondering theoretical physics, some believe that we live in a multiverse. Readers of Michael Moorcock's books will be well familiar with the idea. The question is if there are multiple universes, just how many of them are there?

We may have lots of time to ponder the question. Ray Kurzweil believes that we will be immortal within two decades. In response to that statement, another scientist thinks the more likely scenario is that mankind will evolve into two separate species - the ultra-rich who can afford advanced life-extending and body-altering technologies and then there will be the rest of us morlocks.

NASA is about to test the new rocket that is meant to take astronauts back to the moon, but the accountants don't think the space agency is making a very good business case for the project. Man, it's a good thing they weren't around during the Apollo era or we never would have got there.

Now some experts are telling the U.S. president that he should skip the moon altogether and send the next generation of astronauts to asteroids instead. It would be cheaper.

One of the biggest obstacles facing the manned space program is not money, but rather our aversion to risk. We don't want people to get hurt out there. Realizing that makes proposals to send astronauts on one-way missions to Mars seem totally unlikely.

However, that might not be necessary since a Canadian company says it is working with NASA on a new rocket engine that will cut the travel time to Mars from six months to 39 days. We've certainly come a long way from when we weren't even sure what shape rocket ships should be.

If the technology lets us go faster and faster, just what are the limits to how far an astronaut could go in a lifetime?

Until those days come, we'll probably be sending more unmanned probes out into space. If you've ever wondered where we've been with them, here's an excellent graphic that summarizes missions to explore our solar system.