biosignature – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "biosignature"

DailyDirt: Detecting Signs Of Life

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Looking for extraterrestrial life has been a largely fruitless task for many decades. There have been a few times when people thought they might have found evidence of life that wasn’t from Earth, but upon further analysis, those discoveries weren’t so clear cut. Still, the search for ETs is on-going, and here are just a few links on some ways to find alien friends.

• Spectroscopic biosignatures could be detected in light reflections off of alien planets. Reflected sunlight is polarized when it bounces off the Earth, and plant life on Earth absorb specific bands of light — so alien worlds may exhibit similar phenomena (if only we could detect it). [url]
• In the 1970s, there was some speculation that cellulose could be detected in interstellar space. However, it’s not so easy to figure out how to detect biopolymers in the vast vacuum of space. [url]
• The Drake Equation estimates how many alien civilizations might exist in our galaxy. It’s just an estimate, and there are a lot of unknown variables… [url]
• Moqui marbles are unusual spherical rocks that have a rusty iron oxide exterior and a sandy interior — and were formed with the help of microorganisms. So if we find similar rocks on other worlds, we might be able to infer that extra-terrestrial microbial life also exists. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: aliens, biosignature, cellulose, et, extraterrestrial, interstellar space, life, moqui marbles, seti, spectroscopy