Alien Life Forms
Is there life in outer space? Was there life on Mars? Did a collision of an asteroid and the primordial Mars blow tiny precursors of present day life forms to Earth billions of years ago?
After all, the Tagish Lake meteorite, which landed in British Columbia in January 2000, carried organic molecules from the time of the creation of the solar system. A meteorite that was probably blasted off of the surface of the planet Mars about 16 million years ago by an impact with an asteroid and traveled through space to the earth, where it landed on Antarctica about 13,000 years ago. Some scientists believe that the rod-shaped structures across the top and center of this image may be tiny fossilized bacteria. Many other scientists believe that the structures were formed by processes other than life.
Most scientists now agree that life probably exists in other solar systems. The chemical elements for carbon based life like the life forms on Earth are common in the Universe, so maybe life forms like ourselves are numerous in the Galaxy.
Yet what might alien life be like? How likely are we to find humanoid
aliens? How about intelligent aliens? How likely are the various aliens we
meet in Aliens or Predator? It seems doubtful that humanoid shapes would
be as common as so often imagine them to be, though. Could half-human /
half-alien hybrids ever exist? It seems almost impossible, but with
recombinant DNA, our scientists have already created interspecies
hybrids.
Alternate Universes
Alternate or parallel universe is a copy of our universe, but with a different timeline. In the movies, Aliens and Alien3, Newt and Hicks die. In the Dark Horse comics, they still died in Alien3, but there are still chronicles of them saving an Alien-infested Earth after Aliens.
One of the problems of alternate universes is how to test the idea. No one
has yet devised an experiment that could prove or disprove the validity of
it.
Colonization
Each planet is a product of the unique conditions of its formation. The planets that have been discovered around other solar systems are quite different than those in this solar system.
The only planets in the solar system with gravity greater than Earth's are the gas giants Jupiter and Neptune, which have no solid surfaces and are so unlikely targets for future prospects for colonization. On the Moon and Mars, gravity is 1/6 and 1/3 Earth's, so we'd have a feeling of enhanced strength there. However, should permanent settlements be established, any children born on those worlds may never be able to risk visiting the home planet. Scientists reported indications of water, the breath of life, on Mars. By 2010, a consortium of experts from leading universities and research institutes will present NASA with a "go" or "no-go" recommendation on a Mars mission.
In the future, we may see a form of gravitational segregation, as our
species divides into various tribes, adapted to zero, fractional, and one
gravity.
Extra-Solar Planets
Planets are quite hard to detect because they're much smaller than star and they shine only by catching and reflecting a small portion of their star's light.
The first extra-solar planet orbiting a sun like star was discovered in 1995. It is a huge gas giant half the size of Jupiter and revolves around the star in 4.2 days, at only 1/8th in the distance from Mercury from our sun. That close, the planet would be heated to 1900o.
The discovery of 15 new planetary companions to solar-type stars have been confirmed. The discovery also includes two new multiplanet systems.
About one out of every twenty stars studied has a planet. This means that
about 10% of all stars have planets. Thus, the Milky Way alone would be
home to 20 billion solar systems. 2 billion of these solar systems would
have planets.
Immortality
There appears to be a gene, nicknamed the "suicide gene," that is activated in order to terminate cell growth. Some cells seemed to be designed to divide and reproduce a certain number of times. The control of cell growth is an important function of every cell; when cell reproduction proceeds in an uncontrolled fashion, cancer is often the result (cancer is defined in terms of uncontrolled cell reproduction). Cells also simply "wear down" over time, like any complex machinery that operates continuously.
Scientists have cloned six cows that show none of the worrisome premature aging reported for Dolly the sheep. In fact, the cows' cells seem to have a surprisingly prolonged youth, appearing as young as the cells of newborn calves. Unlike Dolly, the cows were cloned from cells nearing the end of their life span.
This is the first very dramatic proof that people's very old cells could one day be rejuvenated for tissue engineering by having their "aging clock" essentially rewound.
Cells can divide only a certain number of times before they die - about 70 times for human cells; around 60 times for cows. All chromosomes have protective tips called telomeres that prevent a cell's genetic code from fraying during this cellular division. But each time the cell divides, the telomere gets a little shorter. It eventually becomes too short to protect the chromosome, so the cell can no longer divide and eventually dies.
Dolly was the first large
animal to be cloned from genetic material extracted from an adult cell.
She seems healthy. But last year, scientists discovered her telomeres were
too short - while she was just 3, her genetic material was aging at the
rate of the 6-year-old sheep from which she was cloned. Not only did that
suggest Dolly could age and sicken prematurely, it meant any cloned cells
one day developed as medical treatments might be too old to last in the
body and fight disease. The six new cloned cows have telomeres
significantly longer than regular cows the same age - in other words, the
cells look far younger than expected. When cloned cow cells were put in a
lab dish, they divided more than 90 times before dying. The cow cloning
process is done a little differently than Dolly was cloned. The sheep was
cloned from a cell that temporarily stopped dividing, not a terribly old
cell. In contrast, Lanza let cow cells divide in a dish for several months
until they were at the very end of their life span, a period called
senescence. He cloned only the oldest of these old cells, ones with
incredibly short telomeres.
One theory: Putting super old genetic material into an egg - the next step
in cloning - may prompt the egg to overreact and ensure it produces an
embryo with extra long telomeres, Shay said.
Psionics / Telepathy
In earlier ages, manifestations were classified as occult or sorcerous. Those who possessed such putative talents were either worshiped or burned. In the Industrial Age, with its strong urge to plumb the unknown, psychic phenomena cane under the critical eye of science. Are there senses beyond he traditional five?
Paranormal psychic abilities are roughly classified into 4 groups:
- Telepathy: reading thoughts
- Clairvoyance: knowledge without sensory input, aka remote viewing
- Precognition: sensing future events
- Psychokinesis: manipulating matter with the mind (telekinesis, teleportation, firestarting, distant healing)
What they all have in common is perception or exertion of force at a
distance without recruitment of the known resources contained within our
bodies, but by sole use of our thoughts.
Time Travel
![[Time Travel]](term/term.jpg)
If alternate universes are constantly splitting off from our universe, a trip backward in time could land a traveler in an alternate universe - ever so slightly different from the past recorded.
This theory solves a paradox: if you traveled back in time to kill your
father when he was a young man, you would never have been born; therefore
you couldn't have traveled back in time to kill your father. So, with this
theory, killing your father in the past would not have any effect on your
birth in the present; you would simply never be born in the universe your
father was killed.
Transplants
This is a relatively recent development in medical science. Dr. Christian Barnard performed the first successful human heart transplant in 1967. It is also possible in some cases to transplant organs from other mammals into humans, a process called xenotransplantation. In 1984, a baboon heart was transplanted into a young girl with an irreparable heart (but her body rejected it eventually).
The creation of artificial blood and organs has been a goal of medical
research since the 1970's. By utilizing electronic sensor technology and
recent breakthroughs in our understanding of the physiology of vision,
medical scientists are close to creating artificial eyes that could be
directly linked into the brain's optic nerve.
Reproduction
All senses are connected to sexual attraction, but smell, the most primitive one, is primary. A human nose can pick up a scent of one molecule in a billion - and human noses are actually insensitive compared to those of a bloodhound.
Males of all mammalian species know instantly which female is in estrus (heat) and at what stage her cycle she is. Humans males cannot.
There is a connection of the nose to the gonad. If deprived of their sense of smell, humans also become sterile. Female mice that lack the sense of smell never go into heat.
Not surprisingly, sight is also involved in mate selection. Recent studies among vertebrates have shown that members of both sexes will prefer in a prospective mate whatever external appearances denotes good health.