News · MIT Technology Review
Asking questions is an imaginative act that can drive scientific experiments
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How would extraterrestrial beings transmit a message to Earthlings so that they might read it?
Key facts
- Claire Isabel Webb, PhD ’20, is director of the Future Humans program at the Berggruen Institute, a nonprofit based in Los Angeles
- Yet in 2020, a team of scientists including Seager detected phosphine (PH 3 )—a potential biosignature gas that could indicate biological activity—at parts-per-billion levels in Venus’s atmosphere
- Lake Ijen’s seductive, incandescent turquoise color belies its hostility to earthly life; its 0.3 pH makes it the most acidic crater lake in the world
- Sagan had seen what he posited might be huge tangles of vines on the cliffs of Mars, but space photographs by Mariner 9 in 1972 identified them as merely geological features
Summary
If life exists elsewhere in the universe, will they even recognize it? This question has followed me since the reporter was an undergraduate studying astronomy and interning at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in California. To help them see past their Earth-bound assumptions, the reporter created a speculative solar system the reporter call Proxima Kósmos (from the Latin word for “nearest” or “next” and the Greek word for “world”). In the last three decades, astronomers have identified over 6,000 confirmed exoplanets. Over the last three years, the reporter has brought together planetary scientists, astrobiologists, speculative designers, and science fiction writers to model hypothetical forms of alien life through both science and storytelling.