Alien Life

Alien Life:

The Journal of Cosmology has published a piece that claims it may be proven.

Official Statement from Dr. Rudy Schild,
Center for Astrophysics, Harvard-Smithsonian,
Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Cosmology.

We believe Dr. Hoover's careful analysis provides definitive evidence of ancient microbial life on astral bodies some of which may predate the origin of Earth and this solar system.

This is not shocking if you have been following the debate about life forming under pressure.

One of the more novel suggestions comes from American chemist and biologist Stanley Miller (of the famed Miller-Urey experiment in the 50s, which created amino acids by exposing inorganic chemicals to UV radiation), who claims that life was not the result of heat, as many think, but rather ice. In 1997, Miller began defrosting a 25-year-old ammonia and cyanide-filled vial that had been kept at a temperature matching that of Jupiter's moon Europa. Amazingly, and contrary to all assumptions, Miller discovered that the concoction in the vial now contained the familiar signs of complex polymers made up of organic molecules. Since then, further evidence supporting Miller's on-the-rocks hypothesis has come to light.

If life generates naturally when the right pressure and chemical balance is made, it's not surprising to find it on meteorites. If this kind of life is broadly similar to ours -- carbon based, amino acids -- we may be able to extend our thoughts on the Order of Reason much more broadly than to horses or higher animals.

That, of course, remains to be seen: there may be truly "alien" kinds of life as well! As an initial sketch, though, the idea that the universe has life as well as reason embedded in it is well-traveled ground: contemporary philosophers will think at once of Hegel, but I think the neoplatonic picture is stronger. Either model gives adequate theoretical support for it (as might some other models); but it would tend to undermine moral relativists of the stronger type (i.e., those who believe that all morality, as opposed to some morality, is culturally relative).

UPDATE: Dr. Schild's website lists a number of his papers, with abstracts. Cassandra's point about 'confirmation bias' may be relevant here, as he's written several things predicting a universe full of life: naturally, then, he'd be a good person to go to if you wanted a big-name, Harvard astrophysicist likely to be open to the idea.

He's also arguing for a different kind of object similar in many respects to black holes, called a MECO (massive eternally collapsing object).

This MECO is also a collapsed object with 3 billion suns mass, but unlike a black hole it is surrounded by a strong magnetic field anchored to the rotating core, and is a solution of the General Relativistic Einstein-Maxwell equations in which Quantum Electrodynamic and Dark Energy forces prevent the formation of a true event horizon.

The illustration answers the long-standing puzzle: if Black Holes have an Event Horizon beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape, how can it be that they are the most luminous objects in the universe at optical, X-ray, and radio wavelengths? My telescopic studies of these objects at centers of gravitationally lensed quasars have shown thet the strong emissions are caused by the sweeping magnetic fields acting on infalling matter to produce the structure shown.

It's a good question, and a puzzling one. You can read about x-ray emissions from what may be the best known 'black hole' candidate here. There is still quite a lot we don't understand about what is going on out there.