Posts tagged aliens

Mathematician: From time to time, people like asking us questions such as “Why?”, while steadfastly refusing to explain what the heck they are talking about. The best example of this was a naked guy who approached our “Ask a Mathematician / Ask a Physicist” booth at Burning Man. In an attempt to respect everyone’s right to not explain themselves, we’ll make a series of guesses about what those folks might be trying to get at, and briefly respond to each of these possible questions.

1. “Why do we exist?”

Mathematician: We exist because our ancestors were at least slightly better at passing down their genetic material than other people. If the environment of earth happened to be just a tad bit different, then other genes besides our own would have been favored, and we would not be here today. If the environment had been a little more different still, then not only would we not be here, but the human species would not even be here. Some other creatures (possibly of great intelligence) would now be romping around this planet. In conclusion, we exist because the process of evolution works, because our planet happened to have the right conditions for evolution to begin, and because conditions changed over time such that human genes (and more specifically, our ancestor’s genes) happened to be favored for survival. We all got very, very lucky.

Physicist: If the many-worlds hypothesis holds (it totally does), then everything that’s possible happens in some version of the universe.  If you can ask the question “Why do we exist?”, then you’ve already restricted your attention to the (possibly very small) set of universes where intelligent life exists.  This argument is called the “anthropic principle“.  So the reason we exist is because there is at least some vanishingly small chance that we could.

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     You are hovering some planet in a galaxy far far away, uncertain whether it is made of matter or antimatter and hence whether or not it will be safe to land. The planet is inhabited by friendly aliens with whom you have made radio contact. They are very intelligent and understand you, and being advanced, know all about matter and antimatter.

     Naturally, they insist that they are made of matter; after all, it would be surprising if anyone chose to define their own stuff as ‘anti.’ How can we decide if their dictionary and ours coincide? What questions will unambiguously reveal whether they are made of the same stuff as us, or are anti-aliens?

     If matter and antimatter were always perfectly symmetrically counterpoised, there would be no way to settle the issue, other than gambling with a close approach of firing a tiny unmanned probe and seeing what  happens when it hits the atmosphere or anti-atmosphere. However, we know that there is an asymmetry, small but measurable, and that is what the electrically neutral variety of K mesons can reveal. They do so when they decay, producing a pion that is either positively or negatively charged accompanied by an electron or positron respectively. If matter and antimatter were perfect opposites, these two decays would also be precisely matched, the chance of each being the same. In reality, they are slightly different.

     The neutral K and anti-K are welded together in nature in such a way that they sometimes die quickly, but at other times live longer. The two possibilities are quite distinct and are known as the short- and long-lived versions. Each of these shows an asymmetry between matter and antimatter, but it is the long-lived one where the effect is biggest, they decay that leads to a positron being slightly more likely to happen than giving an electron: out of every two-thousand examples, on the average, 1,003 will give a positron and 997 give an electron. Now at last we have something to discuss with the alien.

     First, identify the K. It is no use giving its name, since the alien will certainly call it something else, but we can identify it by something we will agree about: its mass. It weighs in at slightly more than half the mass of a proton or antiproton and there are no other particles than can be confused with it. So tell the alien that we are interested in a particle whose mass is slightly more than half that of the massive particle that exists in the ‘nucleus’ at the center of the alien’s simplest atom, the proton in the hydrogen atom (or antiproton in an atom of antihydrogen.) That identifies the K.

     In addition to the neutral K, with no electric charge, there are also a K-plus and K-minus with positive or negative charge. So we much make sure that the alien and we are talking about the electrically neutral version. We must say that the property that holds the atom together is what we call ‘charge’ and that we are interested in the K that has no charge. The alien will be aware that this neutral K has two forms: one with a short life and one with a relatively long one. It is the latter that we will focus on.

     Now we come to the critical bit. In our world of matter, when the long-lived K decays into a pion and an electron or positron, it is the positron mode that is the most likely. So we ask the alien: ‘Is the lightweight particle that is produced most often in these decays the same as you find in your atoms, or is it the opposite?’ If the alien answers that it is the same, it is a positron, the alien is made of antimatter and we should look but not touch. If the alien replies that it is the opposite, an electron, then we are all made of matter and it is safe to land.

Antimatter, Frank Close

By now you may have heard the report that as many as 1/4 of all the sun-like stars in the Milky Way may have Earth-like worlds. Briefly, astronomers studied 166 stars within 80 light years of Earth, and did a survey of the planets they found orbiting them. What they found is that about 1.5% of the stars have Jupiter-mass planets, 6% have Neptune-mass ones, and about 12% have planets from 3 – 10 times the Earth’s mass.

This sample isn’t complete, and they cannot detect planets smaller than 3 times the Earth’s mass. But using some statistics, they can estimate from the trend that as many as 25% of sun-like stars have earth-mass planets orbiting them!

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By Alan Boyle

Researchers suggest that vegetation on an alien planet like Tatooine in “Star Wars” might well look black or gray to human eyes. But they probably wouldn’t seem devoid of color to the eyes of the aliens — assuming they have eyes, that is.

The conjecture comes from a paper presented by the University of St. Andrews’ Jack O’Malley-James at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Wales. O’Malley-James is working on a Ph.D. project to assess the potential for photosynthetic life in multiple-star systems with different combinations of sunlike stars and red dwarfs.

On Earth, the leaves of plants generally look green because two types of chlorophyll absorb the reddish and bluish wavelengths in the visible-light spectrum. Those red and blue wavelengths drive the photosynthetic process by which plants convert the sun’s energy into chemical energy. In contrast, the green wavelengths are reflected into the RGB optical sensors known as our eyes.

Scientists surmise that the birds and bugs may see plants quite differently, with greater sensitivity to different shades of green and the ability to sense ultraviolet wavelengths as well.

O’Malley-James suggests that in different corners of our galaxy, plants could evolve to take advantage of different combinations of wavelengths, depending on the light coming from their parent sun … or suns. The possibilities become particularly intriguing for a planet in a multiple-star system — like Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s fictional home planet in the “Star Wars” movie saga.

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(source: incomprehensibleuniverse)

By Alan Boyle

Last updated 2:15 p.m. April 2:

Arsenic life
This talk came exactly four months after researchers shook up the scientific world with claims that they were able to get the cellular machinery of microbes from California’s Mono Lake working with arsenic instead of phosphorus. That’s an amazing result, because arsenic is supposed to be poisonous to living things. If organisms on Earth could be tweaked in such a dramatic way, perhaps life could arise in other environments that don’t seem conducive to life as we know it … the Saturnian moon Titan, for example.

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(source: incomprehensibleuniverse)

A GIVEN? 

BY

DAVID H. HALSEY, P.E. BES

We are trapped inside our own bodies. The only way we can communicate with the outside world is by using our senses: sight; smell; hearing; taste; and touch. The level of sophistication to which senses have evolved, genetically and/or learned, will determine how well we can understand not how life began but how life, in the classical and quantum worlds in which we find ourselves, got to this particular spot in the Universe.

The classical laws of physics are obviously friendly to life because we exist! But, the fact that “living” cells exchange information may be the definition of the quantum world. Thus the quantum theory just may turn out to be the theory of information and “is not really physics at all”[1]. Within the quantum world a virus is enormous whereas in the classical world the Universe has that distinction.

The microbes that NASA found in California’s Mono Lake (2010) appear to have evolved by substituting arsenic for phosphorous as a nutrient to survive. This is one more clue that life is very resilient. The more knowledge we gain about the “particles of life” the more we are led to conclude that the Universe was designed to accommodate and sustain life. This paper presents some of these arguments.

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