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Origin Of Life
Yes, NASA's Perseverance rover found organics on Mars. So did Curiosity. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean anything in the search for life.
There's an extremely good chance that there is, or at least was, life on Mars. But is it native to Mars, or did it originate from Earth?
The emergence of life in the universe is as certain as the emergence of matter, gravity, and the stars. Life is the universe developing a memory, and our chemical detection system could find it.
John Templeton Foundation
Probably not. Even though we're still investigating the origin of life, the evidence suggests that cells came much later.
Was there ever life on Mars? Is there life on Mars now? Did it originate there or here, on Earth? All possibilities are fascinating.
Shortly after planet Earth formed, life took a permanent hold on our surface. But just how common is such an outcome?
The James Webb Space Telescope finally could answer the age-old question of whether we are alone in the universe.
Finding out we're not alone in the Universe would fundamentally change everything. Here's how we could do it.
The Miller-Urey experiment showed that the building blocks of life could form in the primordial soup. But it overlooked one key variable.
How the search for alien life is taking place right here in our own Solar System. If you want to understand the origin of life in the Universe, you have three […]
The largest moon in our Solar System, often overlooked, is a water-rich world. Does that mean life? Here on Earth, life took hold very early on in our planet’s history, and […]
And could Earth-based life provide the seeds for biology elsewhere? Today, on Earth, there’s an enormous variety and diversity of life on our planet. Every single surviving lifeform appears, in […]
How many potentially habitable planets are there? We sincerely don’t know. One of the most compelling scientific goals humanity has set for itself is to find extraterrestrial life: biological activity originating […]
The history of the Universe is forever imprinted in our own bodies. We can learn a lot about the history of the Universe just by looking at each of our own […]
There’s a lot left to understand, ponder, and investigate. And there always will be. For hundreds of thousands of years — nearly all of human history — we had no definitive answers to some of […]
It’s not just for Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. Not even close. Shortly after Earth first formed first formed, life quickly took hold, thriving ever since. Both reflected sunlight on a […]
Is there life beyond Earth, even in our Solar System? This mission might be humanity’s best hope of finding it. The biggest question facing humanity might be, “Does life exists beyond […]
In 1789, William Herschel discovered this unique moon around Saturn. 230 years later, its secrets are more promising than ever. Today marks the 230th anniversary of the discovery of Enceladus, one […]
We’re a long way from the beginnings of life on Earth. Here’s the key to how we got there. The Universe was already two-thirds of its present age by the time […]
We know that life is possible on an Earth-like world around a Sun-like star. But can it find a way on a Super-Earth? When it comes to the origin of […]
It took more than 9 billion years for Earth to form: the only known planet housing life. But it could have happened much, much sooner. The cosmic story that unfolded following […]
Finding the ingredients for life is a very different prospect than finding the products of life. Perhaps the greatest quest in science today is to find life that originated beyond Earth. […]
Intelligent aliens, if they exist in the galaxy or the Universe, might be detectable from a variety of signals: electromagnetic, from planet modification, or because they’re spacefaring. But we haven’t […]
It took the Universe 9.2 billion years to create the Earth, and another 4 billion for complex life. Could we have gotten there faster? The story of how the Universe came […]