We’ve found 4000 exoplanets but (almost) zero are right for life

Kepler-452b is almost the only exoplanet that might to harbour life – and that is a maybe. Image courtesy of NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle.




Joel Kontinen

“We have found more than 4000 planets orbiting distant stars, but it turns out that probably none of them have the right conditions for life to evolve, making Earth even more special than we thought.”

“We normally consider a planet capable of hosting life if its surface is the right temperature for liquid water. This depends on how close it orbits its star – too far and any water will freeze, but too close and it will boil.”

But there are other ways of looking at exoplanets. for instance, complex life might require a very narrow habitable zone.

And then hot exoplanets challenge planet-formation theories, and our nearest exoplanet might be too hot.

Some planets are impossible they break secular planet forming theories.

The majority of exoplanetes don’t harbour life, for instance red dwarfs don’t do it. And the Sun and our big moon make our planet a welcome home.

And, then, the goldilocks zone is getting smaller.

One think that most near Earth investors do not find, is a lack of phoshorus (P), that is one of our planet’s general chemical elements. Without it we would not have RNA, DNA and even even not ATP, and thus we would not have life.

It is also a problem of seekers of extraterrestrial life.

Source:

Crane, Leah, 2019. We’ve found 4000 exoplanets but almost zero are right for life. New Scientist (22 March).

Space Flights Can Produce Illnesses That We’re Familiar With Here

Bruce McCandless II, Image courtesy of NASA.



Joel Kontinen

It is good that we have the good old Earth as a shield against hazards to our immunology.

An article in Popular Science states:

“A new study published last month in Frontiers in Microbiology reports that herpes viruses lying dormant inside the body become reactivated in more than half of all astronauts sent into space, potentially exacerbating what is already a high-risk environment.”

These symptoms were no dreaded space illnesses but rather memories of what the astronauts suffer from down here:

The article went on to state:

“NASA scientists have been studying the effects of spaceflight on the immune system for over 20 years,” says Satish Mehta, a scientist at the agency’s Johnson Space Center and the senior author of the new study. “It is believed that stressful life situations cause the lowered immunity, which causes viral reactivating.” And there are obviously very few situations that induce more stress on the human body than living and working in space.

53 percent of astronauts who underwent space shuttle missions and 61 percent of astronauts who had gone on long stays on the ISS were shedding herpes viruses at much higher rates through their saliva and urine. The four herpes viruses detected include the three aforementioned types, in addition to the HSV type that causes oral and genital herpes.”

But then, it seems the foreign elements brought about illnesses.


Source:

Patel, Neel V 2019, Most of us have viruses sleeping inside us, and spaceflight wakes them up. Popular Science (22 March).

Are Aliens Ignoring Us? Maybe We're Already Their Captives in a 'Galactic Zoo'

Image courtesy of Amazing Stories October 1957, Public Domain.




Joel Kontinen

Aliens have moved into the science world. We keep to getting tips and mostly illogical ways of what to do or think about them.

The announcements are not built on science but rather science fiction with a great dose of evolutionary thinking. When high-tech civilizations can come up with imagenary solutions, we’re the ones who might suffer from the consequences of fake science news.

Writing in live science, Mindy Weisberger suggests: “Why hasn't Earth received any messages from extraterrestrials yet? Perhaps because we're already unwitting inhabitants in a so-called galactic zoo.

But if there are intelligent extraterrestrials out there, where are they, and why haven't we found them yet? This conundrum, posed in 1950 by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, is known as Fermi's Paradox, and it still stymies experts today.”

Then she goes on to explain:

“One explanation that scientists explored at the METI meeting, is that aliens are aware of Earth and are observing us as we would observe animals kept in a zoo, METI President Douglas Vakoch said in a workshop. If this is the case, humans should increase their efforts to create messages capable of reaching our ‘keepers', to demonstrate our intelligence, Vakoch explained.

And:

“It's possible that extraterrestrials are actively isolating us from contact for our own good, because interacting with aliens would be "culturally disruptive" for Earth, meeting co-chair Jean-Pierre Rospars, honorary research director at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), said in a workshop.”

Source:

Weisberger, Mindy.2019. Are Aliens Ignoring Us? Maybe We're Already Their Captives in a 'Galactic Zoo' Live Science (25 March).

Trilobites Formed During the Cambrian Explosion

Trilobites. Image courtesy of Moussa Direct Ltd, CC BY-SA 3.0.



Joel Kontinen

For some supporters of evolution, the Cambrian explosion was really the most important biological “event after the origin of life,” which was absurd.

Now, some folks have ben saying that it wasn’t - and some scientists have repudiated them, saying that it was.

A case study in PNAS seeks to solve the issue, It is about trilobites, who they assume were brought to life some 521 million years ago”.

They were 100 per cent trilobites (no evidences of evolution) at the beginning and hence were subject to “evolutionary stasis throughout the remainder of the Cambrian.”

The Cambrian Explosion was an enormous dilemma for Darwin, and it still baffles evolutionists, and, as evolutionary biologist Matthew Wills acknowledges, it can give them a real headache.

The trilobites had the wonderful eyesight that can’t be denied. so, now evolutionists have to grapple with who did the trick – oxygen or cancer some other feature unknown to us.

Source:

Paterson, John R. et al. 2019. Trilobite evolutionary rates constrain the duration of the Cambrian explosion. PNAS March 5, 2019 116 (10) 4394-4399.

Us Astronomer Posits That Aliens Might Shoot Lasers at Black Holes to Travel Our Galaxy

Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltec.



Joel Kontinen

”An astronomer at Columbia University has a new guess about how hypothetical alien civilizations might be invisibly navigating our galaxy: Firing lasers at binary black holes (twin black holes that orbit each other).

The idea is a futuristic upgrade of a technique NASA has used for decades.

Right now, spacecraft already navigate our solar system using gravity wells as slingshots. The spacecraft itself enters orbit around a planet, flings itself as close as possible to a planet or moon to pick up speed, and then uses that added energy to travel even faster toward its next destination. In doing so, it saps away a tiny fraction of the planet's momentum through space — though the effect is so minimal it's pretty much impossible to notice.

In a paper published in the preprint journal arXiv on March 11, David Kipping, the Columbia astronomer, proposed that an interstellar spacecraft could fire a laser at the gravity mirror of a fast-moving black hole in a binary black hole system.”

This research posits that alien life exists. However, we haven’t had a chance to look into it yet. Even the famous wow signal was false and the same goes for Tabby Star. Likewise, all subsequent attempts have been false.

All news from the aliens are bogus. The extra-terrestrial evidence doesn’t look like 'Oumuamua.

However, many intelligent people look on aliens are real. As they believe in evolution, they also seem to think that our solar system was not unique.

Source:

Letzter, Rafi. 2019. Aliens Might Shoot Lasers at Black Holes to Travel the Galaxy. Live Science (15 March).

How Did Tyrannosaurus Rex Cope With Dumbing Down Its Brain?

How Did Tyrannosaurus Rex Cope With Dumbing Down Its Brain?


Joel Kontinen

Tyrannosaurus rex has a reputation for being one of the biggest and fiercest dinosaurs ever to have lived. But it probably wasn’t the brightest: it had a simpler brain than an earlier, smaller tyrannosaur. The change could be a consequence of growing so large.

Fossils suggest that T. rex could reach 12 metres in length and between 8 and 14 tonnes in weight. It belonged to a family of dinosaurs called the tyrannosaurs – but not all of them were large, for instance, the Dilong paradoxus which was 1.6 m (5ft 2 inches) in length. However, this specimen was a juvenile and would have become 2 m (6 feet) fully grown.

Now, the solution that New Scientist has for this dinosaur, is that it “dumbed down” its brain.

Did not know that dinosaurs had that faculty.


Source:

Ye, Yvaine. 2018. T. rex evolved into a monster predator by dumbing down its brain. New Scientist (3 October).

Darwinian Claim: “Chickens Peck Intruder Fox to Death, Because They're Dinosaurs”

Image courtesy of Otto Scheuerer (1862–1934), public domain.



Joel Kontinen

A young fox, probably about 6 mounts old, got into a chicken coop or hen house at a farm school in Brittany, in northwestern France.

And that’s when Charles Darwin takes over.

This coop held 3,000 hens. “As soon as the sun set and the light-controlled, automatic hatch door closed behind the fox, the birds channeled their inner Tyrannosaurus rex and attacked the fox.”

Chicks can be fiery. And this time, they attacked to fox, leaving him dead. The last time a fox got into the coop, the chickens were not so successful.

This is how Darwinian just so stories have become mainstream.

Source:

Geggel, Laura. 2019. Chickens Peck Intruder Fox to Death, Because They're Dinosaurs. Live Science. (13 March).

If an Alien Spaceship Left Its Trash Near Earth, Here’s Want It Would Look Like

Image courtesy of George Kristiansen. CC BY-SA 3.0.



Joel Kontinen

All attempts to listen to alien sounds have turned out to be false. for instance, an interstellar cloud destroys belief in aliens and all subsequent attempts have been futile.

However, the SETI branch is not giving up. They want to guide you to do the job for them.

Now, Science reports on a person who does alien hunting for a living; The extra-terrestrial evidence doesn’t look like 'Oumuamua.

“Iridium flares are a familiar sight for sky watchers: The brilliant flashes take place when sunlight bounces off the solar panels of the 66 low-orbiting satellites in the iridium communications system.
A researcher involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence wonders what similar flashes farther out might mean—perhaps a shiny alien artifact or spacecraft? “

Science doesn’t tell his name, but he has published in the arXiv preprint server. Now, the aliens have kept silent: “But the fact that we haven’t seen such flashes yet suggests any alien visitors—if they are out there—are doing a good job of cleaning up after themselves.”

Source:

Clery, Daniel. 2019. If an alien ship left its trash near Earth, here’s what it might look like. Science (15 March).

Designed By Man, Not Evolved

Image courtesy of Chandrasekharpatnaik5, CC BY-SA 4.0.



Joel Kontinen

How do you spot what’s made by humans and what’s is not? A number of stone structures are hidden away in the Western Sahara, they all employ signs that what are man-made:

A story in Live Science tells us what happened:

“Hundreds of stone structures dating back thousands of years have been discovered in the Western Sahara, a territory in Africa little explored by archaeologists.”

The story goes on to say;

“The stone structures are designed in a wide variety of ways. Some are shaped like crescents, others form circles, some are in straight lines, some in rectangular shapes that look like a platform; some structures consist of rocks that have been piled up into a heap. And some of the structures use a combination of these designs. For instance, one structure has a mix of straight lines, stone circles, a platform and rock piles that altogether form a complex about 2,066 feet (630 meters) long, the archaeologists noted in the book.”

Here's what Evolution News say about the matter:

“All Darwinians accept the appearance of design, but they have limited themselves to undirected causes by embracing methodological naturalism (MN). They may as well limit themselves to wind and erosion to explain the structures in the Western Sahara — or Mount Rushmore, for that matter.”

It is not all too uncommon for sceptics to claim that design in nature is merely an illusion. Richard Dawkins, for instance, assumes that “the illusion of purpose is so powerful that biologists themselves use the assumption of good design as a working tool.”

Source:

Evolution News, 2019. Where Design Explains, Darwinism Explains Away. Evolution News & Science Today (11 February).

Jarus, Owen. 2019. Hundreds of Mysterious Stone Structures Discovered in Western Sahara. Live Science (4 February).

Big Bang is Losing Its Dark Energy

Gravitational lens mirage around a galaxy, Image courtesy of NASA.



Joel Kontinen

Dark matter is a big problem for the big bang. In 2012, researchers found no evidence of it. The same case was repeated in 2016, when they finally said that dark matter was dead.

The years following have also been troublesome for one of the big bang’s favourites that was supposed to contain 83 per cent of the universe’s mass. Its absence is a great loss for the big bang.

A study in 2018 also showed the there was not a whiff of dark matter.

The big bang has also got other problems, for instance a star is older that the universe.

And dark energy is an illusion, say its an illusion.

Juri Smirnov is vaunting for a different approach:

“One well known attempt to get rid of the need for dark matter is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), which suggests that Newton’s law of gravity becomes irregular when the gravitational pull is very weak – as is the case in the outer regions of the galaxy. But this theory, although successful in many respects, hasn’t passed the same stringent tests as our standard model of cosmology, which includes dark matter.”

So the problem continues:

“One well known attempt to get rid of the need for dark matter is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), which suggests that Newton’s law of gravity becomes irregular when the gravitational pull is very weak – as is the case in the outer regions of the galaxy. But this theory, although successful in many respects, hasn’t passed the same stringent tests as our standard model of cosmology, which includes dark matter.”

Source:

Smirnov, Juri, 2019. Dark matter may not actually exist – and our alternative theory can be put to the test. The Conversation (31 January).

"500- Million-Year" Old Worm Superhighway Revealed in Ancient Seafloor

Image courtesy of Kennethcgass, CC BY-SA 3.0.



Joel Kontinen

The Cambrian era poses great challenges for evolutionists. It was thought that almost nothing walked the Earth before this stage, but then animals started to flourish.

But some of the animals sorted the best eyes of all time. And some, for instance the tardigrates, are still living today.

The Cambrian Explosion, which used to be a dilemma for Charles Darwin, is still a real headache for evolutionists.

Now, a superhighway was detected in Canada by two scientists. It gave them the reason to guess that the worms who made its highway may have given more oxygen to the Earth.

“The tunnels that the worms left behind in the weathered rock weren't visible to the naked eye, and were detected purely by chance, says lead study author Brian Pratt, a professor of geological sciences with the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada and co-author Julien Kimmig.”

The tunnels measured 0.5 to 15 millimetres (0.02 to 0.6 inches), made by worms barely a millimetre in length.

The findings were published online in the March issue of the journal Geology.

Source:

Weisberger, Mindy. 2019. 500 Million-Year-Old Worm Superhighway Revealed in Ancient Seafloor. Live Science (4 March).

Complex Life Might Require a Very Narrow Habitable Zone

Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, and D. Player (STScI).



Joel Kontinen

Today, we have heard of more exoplanets than ever before. Now, “3,917 planets have been confirmed in 2,918 star systems, while 3,368 await confirmation. Of these, about 50 orbit within their star’s circumstellar habitable zone (aka. “Goldilocks Zone”), the distance at which liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface."

However, recent research has suggested that we consider a habitable zone is too optimistic a concept. “According to a new study that recently appeared online, titled “A Limited Habitable Zone for Complex Life“, habitable zones could be much narrower than originally thought. These finds could have a drastic impact on the number of planets scientists consider to be “potentially habitable”.

The study’s head was “Edward W. Schwieterman, a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at the University of California, Riverside, and included researchers from the Alternative Earths Team (NASA Astrobiology Institute), the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS), and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.”

Some have even posted that “100 billion billion” is the right number.

"To illustrate, the team used Kepler-62f as an example, a super-Earth that orbits a K-type star (slightly smaller and dimmer than our Sun) located about 990 light years from Earth.

When it was discovered in 2013, this planet was thought to be a good candidate for extraterrestrial life, assuming the presence of a sufficient Greenhouse Effect. However, Schwieterman and his colleagues calculated that it would take 1,000 times more carbon dioxide (300 to 500 kilopascals) than what existed on Earth when complex lifeforms were first evolving (ca. 1.85 billion years ago, as evolutionists like to admit)."

"In 2019 alone, research has been conducted that shows how red dwarf star systems may not have the necessary raw materials for life to form, and that red dwarf stars might not provide enough photons for photosynthesis to occur."

This years and the past years also, have might not been profitable for extraterrestrial sightings, as more often have turned out to become failures. Some exoplanets have challenged planet forming theories.

The easy ones have turned into failures .However our home planet turns out to be unique and also very effective.

Source:

Williams, Matt. 2019.Complex Life Might Require a Very Narrow Habitable Zone. Universetoday.com (3 March).
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Frog Choruses Inspire Wireless Sensor Networks

Image courtesy of Brian Gratwicke, CC BY 2.0. CC BY 2.0.



Joel Kontinen

Darwinian evolution does not look ahead. It does
not do any planning. So, where does the very effective design that we see in nature come from?

Biomimicry or biomimetics has recently become a success, that is, copying amazing design seen in nature, has become a flourishing research field.

Here’s a Phys.org story about frogs.

“If you've ever camped by a pond, you know frogs make a racket at night; but what you might not know is how functional and regulated their choruses really are. Frogs communicate with sound, and amid their ruckus is an internally orchestrated system that lets information get through more clearly while also permitting collective choruses and time to rest. Researchers from Osaka University and University of Tsukuba sought to leverage this amphibious acumen for mathematical and technological aims. “

The story also says;

"We found neighboring frogs avoided temporal overlap, which allows a clear path for individual voices to be heard," study co-author Daichi Kominami explains. "In this same way, neighboring nodes in a sensor network need to alternate the timings of data transmission so the data packets don't collide."

Source:

Osaka University.2019. Frog choruses inspire wireless sensor networks Phys.org (21 January).

Why Modern Atheism Meets with The Occult?

All-Fiction Field, Inc. - Popular Publications / Lawrence Sterne Stevens, public domain.



Joel Kontinen

You can hear Mike Keas now on a new episode of ID the Future, with host Andrew McDiarmid . Keas, a historian of science, turns from the past to the future.He speaks about his new book Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion.

Despite some notable exceptions, especially C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, “modern day atheism is becoming more and more indistinguishable from the occult, and science fiction is a part of that,” Keas tells us.

And who are the gods of the new occult – they are space aliens? That atheism has learnt to take the creation story to the skies, believing that we are the sons of aliens.

George Herbert Wells was probably the one who brought Scientism into literature.

Most atheists and readers of sci-fly think that religion is an addition of facts, so they will cope for spirituality, instead. But that spirituality is infused with the occult.

Source:

Evolution News, 2019. Mike Keas: Modern-Day Atheism Meets the Occult. (26 February).

Transgenders Don’t Like Martina Navrátilová

Martina Navrátilová, 1986, Public Domain.




Joel Kontinen

Martina Navrátilová is the greatest woman tennis players of all time. The winner of 18 grand Slam Titles, she reached the Wimbledon singles final 12 times, including for nine consecutive years from 1982 through 1990, and won the women's singles title at Wimbledon a record nine times.

She has written that “It was "cheating" to allow allow transgender women to compete in women's sport as they had unfair physical advantages.”

“Athlete Ally, an LGBT athletic group, removed her from their advisory board and have publicly disassociated from her. Rachel McKinnon, who last year became the first transgender woman to win a world track cycling title, called the comments ‘disturbing, upsetting and deeply transphobic’.”

Navrátilová lives as a lesbian – even when it wasn’t socially acceptable to be one in 1981. However, she has repeatedly voiced her complaint on male sportsmen trying to complete with women. She also added "It's insane and it's cheating.”

Source:

Stonestreet, John & Roberto Rivera. 2019. Breakpoint: Navratilova, identity politics, and Intersectionality. Breakpoint .(27 February).