Is There Extra-Terrestrial Life In The Universe, Teen Opinion Essay, extraterrestrial life essay.3/29/2017 But life must first survive this planet. The longevity of civilizations is the final factor in the Drake equation, the haunting letter L. Humans in their modern anatomy have been around only 125,000 years or so. It is not clear yet that a brain like ours is necessarily a long-term advantage. We make mistakes. We build bombs. We ravage our world, poison its water examples of essay body, foul its air. Our first order of business, as a species, is to make L as long an interval as possible. Having dropped in on a couple of UFO conventions and visited Roswell, New Mexico and its UFO museum, I've come to the conclusion that it's not possible to wing an argument about space aliens. True believers and skeptics rarely go over to the other side. I think it's fair to say, however, that flying-saucer aliens lack scientific stature. If they insist on being so jumpy, if they insist on abducting people in the middle of the night when no one else can verify their presence, they have no right to enter a reputable natural history museum. But it's also true that the data are scarce, and this is still a territory for, among others, philosophers and theologians. What does it mean to be "intelligent"? When we "think" or "feel" or "love," what is it that we are doing? When we ask if we are "alone essays my family kids," we really want to know if there are others out there in the universe who are, in key aspects, very much like ourselves. We seek the communicators,—Drake's fc. creatures who have the technology to send signals—storytellers, ideally. Just as I was thinking how much this cave resembled the human nasal cavity, we came to the snottites (Boston is lobbying to have the word recognized as a scientific term). Snottites are gelatinous structures formed by microbial wastes. They dangle from the ceiling. Boston and her team have been measuring their growth, trying to understand the metabolism of the microbes and their long-term effect on the geology of the cave. Dry weather since her last visit seemed to have inhibited the growth of the structures. And that kind of life has a big question: What else is alive out there? Lori Marino, a psychobiologist at Emory University, points out that dolphins appear to have undergone a dramatic increase in brain size in the past 35 million years, which may have a parallel in the quadrupling of brain size among hominids in the past few million years. By her reckoning, huge leaps in intelligence may be found among creatures on worlds everywhere in the universe. Contact with an alien civilization would be an epochal and culturally challenging event, but exobiologists would settle gladly for the discovery of a tiny fossil, a mere remnant of extraterrestrial biochemistry. One example. One data point to add to the one we have—Earth life. That's what we need to begin the long process of putting human existence in its true cosmic context. "We have discovered"—she means scientists in general—"organisms thriving in environments harsh to us but essential to them. It broadens your perspective. We all suffer to some extent from 'expertitis' in science. It's good for your soul, and good for your intellect, and good for your work to have your imagination stretched, to be open to the possibilities." But there are other truths that sustain the search for alien organisms. One is that, roughly speaking, the universe looks habitable. Another is that life radiates information about itself—that, if nothing else, it usually leaves a residue, an imprint, an echo. If the universe contains an abundance of life, that life is not likely to remain forever in the realm of the unknown. There are those who argue passionately that alien life would be nothing like us—in Fred Hoyle's novel The Black Cloud the alien is a gaseous cloud that decides to feed on our sun—and there are others who say the biology of the Earth is probably a pretty good example of what's out there. Taking a break back on the surface, Boston placed some of her cave work in context. No one knows when—or if—one of these investigations might make a breakthrough. There's a fair bit of boosterism surrounding the entire field, but I'd bet the breakthrough is many years better essay write, if not decades, away. The simple truth: Extraterrestrial life buy term papers college, by definition tips for writing a synthesis essay, is not conveniently located. Could it be that they're observing us but not interfering? (The zoo hypothesis.) Did they come and leave artifacts and get bored and go away? (This is the "ancient astronauts" idea that posits the aliens as builders of pyramids and so forth." Or could it be that for all intelligent species, interstellar travel is too expensive and time-consuming? (It's just less than 25 trillion miles [40.2 trillion kilometers] from Earth to the nearest stars beyond the sun.) Mars is in the midst of a full-scale invasion from Earth, from polar landers to global surveyors to rovers looking for fossils. A canister of Mars rocks will be rocketed back to Earth in the year 2008, parachuting into the Utah desert for scrutiny by scientists in a carefully sealed lab. In the coming years probes will also go around and, at some point, into Jupiter's moon Europa. That icy world shows numerous signs of having a subsurface ocean—and could conceivably harbor a dark, cold biosphere. We all have our suppositions, our scenarios. The late astronomer Carl Sagan estimated that there are a million technological civilizations in our galaxy alone. His more conservative colleague Frank Drake offers the number 10,000. John Oro, a pioneering comet researcher, calculates that the Milky Way is sprinkled with a hundred civilizations. And finally there are skeptics like Ben Zuckerman, an astronomer at UCLA, who thinks we may as well be alone in this galaxy if not in the universe. Millions of people believe in aliens like this prop in the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico. There is no conclusive evidence of any life beyond Earth, but there is hope: If microbes can live in the pores of rock deep beneath the Earth or at the rim of a scalding Yellowstone spring, then they might find a place like Mars not so shabby. Life has a way of being obvious—it literally scampers by, or growls locke essay concerning human understanding, or curls up on the windowsill—and yet it's notoriously difficult to define in absolute terms. We say that life replicates. Life uses energy. Life adapts. Some forms of life have developed large central processing networks. In at least one instance, life has become profoundly self-aware. The NASA team made a dramatic presentation, complete with graphics and the first, startling images of the microfossils, one of which looked like a worm (others a bit like Cheetos). But then came a dissenter, UCLA's J. William Schopf, who said that on a scale of one to ten of increasing probability of biological origin, he could only grant the alleged Martian fossils a two. So began, that day english essay on love, an enduringly divisive scientific debate. Freeman Dyson mary shelley frankenstein essay, a physicist, has argued that humans may engineer new forms of life that will be adapted to living in the vacuum of space or on the surface of frozen moons and comets and asteroids. In Dyson's universe, life is mobile, and planets are gravitational traps inhibiting free movement. Exobiologists go to the worst places on Earth, or at least the most extreme—the driest, coldest, most Mars-like or Europa-like environments they can find. Whatever it's called, this is a science infused with optimism. We now know that the universe may be aswarm with planets. Since 1995 astronomers have detected at least 22 planets orbiting other stars. NASA hopes to build a telescope called the Terrestrial Planet Finder to search for Earth-like planets, examining them for the atmospheric signatures of a living world. In the past decade organisms have been found thriving on our own planet in bizarre, hostile environments. If microbes can live in the pores of rock deep beneath the earth or at the rim of a scalding Yellowstone spring, then they might find a place like Mars not so shabby. Within our solar system the Earth may be in a fairly narrow habitable zone, not too hot and not too cold, just the right distance from the sun that water can splash around on the surface in a liquid state. And there may be many other things that make life on Earth possible. The tectonic activity recycles the planet's carbon. Mars has no such mechanism, and this seemingly minor deficiency may be the reason Mars lost most of its atmosphere. Eventually we reached the deepest, largest chamber, known as the Great Hall. Midges flitted, spiders spun webs, bats zagged and zigged just over our heads an essay on life, emitting their high-pitched sonar. Red rock walls were covered with green slime, black muck, gooey white gypsum paste, and limestone in the process of being dissolved by sulfuric acid. The place to find Penny Boston is in the nastiest cave imaginable. I tagged along with Boston on one of her trips to a wet, bat-ridden cave in southern Mexico called Villa Luz. Boston has been studying the microbes that thrive there—in environments where a human being not wearing a gas mask would perish. When the Viking landers descended to the Martian surface in 1976, they found no compelling sign of life and indeed discovered that the surface contains no trace of organic molecules. Though the mission was a fantastic triumph of science and technology, the absence of detectable life on Mars put exobiology in a two-decade funk. If life sprang up through natural processes on the Earth, then the same thing could presumably happen on other worlds. And yet when we look at outer space, we do not see an environment teeming with life. We see planets and moons where no life as we know it could possibly survive. In fact we see all sorts of wildly different planets and moons—hot place, murky places community service work essay, ice worlds, gas worlds—and it seems that there are far more ways to be a dead world than a live one. The alien may not speak to that part of our consciousness that we deem most important—our spirit, if you will. It may have little to teach us. The great moment of contact may simply remind us that what we most want is to find a better version of ourselves—a creature we will probably have to make argumentative essay write, from our own raw elements, here on Earth. Every day astronomers are listening for any kind of noise that could indicate another world trying to contact us. The only impediment to this is that if a civilization exists, the nearest one to Earth might be thousands of light years away. Communicating would take a long time and the radio wave might not reach its destination because of the estimated distances from one civilization to the next. Meanwhile, other scientists think that if comets and asteroids brought life to Earth, why has it not appeared in our vicinity? Still, many scientists are convinced that the seeds of life fell from space to our planet and the same must have occurred somewhere else in the cosmos. The Possibilities of E.T. Life Another question remains: If we ever received a signal, could we decipher it? But even more intriguing is this question: Could we communicate through words or by other means? Some astronomers and exobiologists have high hopes that we could. They are looking at how some animals, like the gorilla, are being taught to speak American Sign Language in order to communicate with us. Humans are now able to communicate with dolphins, elephants, domesticated animals, etc. If humans and animals can now understand each other, with animals having less intelligence, it is very probable we could do the same with intelligent E.T. life. The Seeds Of Life Some believe that billions of years ago, comets and asteroids hit the Earth, bringing the seeds of life. The seeds formed in space's interstellar reaches and became part of these comets and asteroids. According to Herman von Helmholtz, a scientist, this is how life began on Earth and how it must also have begun in other solar systems through random chemistry.
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