7/8/2023 0 Comments New alien news 2015![]() ![]() ![]() In the same vein as the study of icy moons in our solar system, the ongoing exploration of 'primitive' bodies like comets and asteroids is unlikely to suddenly produce evidence of life, but it is revealing an amazing rich history in the environments surrounding the Sun. It won't find life, but it might find the planets that we eventually detect life on. In 2015 though, I think one to watch is the 'MEarth' project - an innovative ground-based survey for precisely these worlds. These will become prime candidates for biosignature searches with the next generation of telescopes like JWST and the mammoth ground based observatories coming online over the coming decade. Some of the most important exoplanet data over the next couple of years will be detections of potentially habitable worlds around cool, lower-mass stars in our immediate cosmic neighborhood. How the extended Kepler 'K2' mission works (Credit: NASA Ames/W Stenzel) These flagships would not be able to explicitly search for life, but they could revolutionize our understanding of some of the most alien, yet promising, environments right in our own solar system. I wrote about this in detail for Sky & Telescope this year, but the bottom line is that we already suspect that altogether the solar system harbors at least 15 times the volume of Earth's oceans in liquid water beneath the surface of bodies like these, including Ganymede, Titan, and perhaps even Pluto or Eris.ΔΆ015 will be a year of further planning and study for missions like NASA's Europa Clipper and ESA's JUICE. Or for that matter any ice shrouded body that might harbor deep, dark oceans of water - places where life could perhaps exist. We also keep finding reasons to go and visit places like Europa or Enceladus. Yet it does hinge on just how extraordinary we presume something to be in the first place, and we do like to think that life is truly extraordinary - even though we don't really know if that's true. It was Carl Sagan who stated that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" - and it's a critical standard to hold ourselves to. But we need to be careful that it's not overly conservative, holding back progress. We demand extremely high standards from any data to prove the existence of something as important as life. This scientific caution systematically lowers the statistical weight we wittingly, or unwittingly apply to a result like Curiosity's methane detection. In the past 50 years we've gone from imagining alien life as a near certainty to something far more unknown, more precious. The other tricky part, in my opinion, is to do with whether or not we're being overly cautious in interpreting data like this. On a practical level, for the rover to perform an isotopic analysis to provide further clues it will have to expend a lot of power and time, and hit it lucky with another surge in methane at its location. There's also a final catch-all "other" category which the government says "we may require additional scientific knowledge to successfully collect on, analyze and characterize.Mars (Credit: NASA/JPL/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken ) entities " and "foreign adversary systems," from Russia, China or other countries. Those are "airborne clutter," including birds and balloons "natural atmospheric phenomena," including ice crystals or thermal fluctuations "USG or industry developmental programs," meaning "classified programs by U.S. The government has said that UAP "probably lack a single explanation," but that it classifies them into five categories. Those include sections about "common shapes" and "less common/irregular shapes" reported by observers of the phenomena. The entire sections about the shapes are redacted. The most heavily redacted parts of the report published by The Black Vault are from pages and sections that do not appear on the initial unclassified version at all. That description is consistent with previously published video of the UAP, including some that was declassified by the Pentagon in 2020, as Fox News previously reported.
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