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This is devastating news. The BBC is reporting that ExoMars — a joint program between NASA and the European Space Agency with Martian missions scheduled for 2016 and 2018 — is on the ropes, owing to America's budgetary woes. More »
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What would non-carbon-based life really be like? What would it want from us? Bruce Dorminey, science journalist and author of "Distant Wanderers: The Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System," interviews NASA astrochemist Max Bernstein about the possibility of silicon-based life, in an article from Universe Today. More »
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Meteors may have seeded the planet with life-giving ammonia. More »
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Some astronomers think detecting an extraterrestrial radio signal is a matter of when, not if. What goes on in the immediate aftermath of such a discovery? Here's what happened the last few times we thought we'd heard from E.T. More »
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Our search for intelligent alien life depends on picking up the radio waves of a reasonably advanced extraterrestrial civilization. We had assumed these aliens would be biological life like us - but logic says that's probably not the case. More »
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Although we have yet to detect an alien ping, improvements in technology have encouraged us to think that, if transmitting extraterrestrials are out there, we might soon find them. That would be revolutionary. But some, Stephen Hawking included, sense catastrophe. More »
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If life exists on Saturn's hydrogen- and methane-rich moon Titan, there will be two sure signs: hydrogen depletion near the lunar surface, and less acetylene than we'd expect. The Cassini probe has found both. So...could there be life on Titan? More »
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Our probes and landers still look for life "as we know it." But we're already aware that even terrestrial life goes beyond what we once considered possible. We should use that experience, or we may literally step on alien life. More »
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Welcome to the strange, lush world of Snaiad, home to a future Earth colony. Currently it supports a variety of shocking fauna, which creator Nemo Ramjet has meticulously documented, also providing maps and a geopolitical history of the planet. More »
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New evidence has come to light that the vast, ice-encrusted oceans of Europa may be harboring Earth-like life that lives on the oxygen-rich waters. Time to plan your extraterrestrial fishing trip? Maybe. More »
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In case you thought V's storyline, in which the Catholic Church embraces the alien visitors as "God's creatures," was too far fetched, the Vatican held a conference on exo-biology this week. Which occasioned this awesome image from the Telegraph newspaper. More »
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If you thought the stranded aliens in District 9 looked disturbing in the film, just check out some of the designs designer David Meng came up with first. New concept art also includes guns, spaceships, and more creepy signs. More »
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The Phoenix Mars Lander will touch down on the Martian surface on May 25, where it will probe the soil for signs of past life and touch Martian water (in the form of subsurface ice) for the first time in human history. At a press conference I attended this morning, NASA's engineers explained how they are rocking it old-school, using tech from some of the scrapped Mars missions earlier in this decade and dropping to the surface with thrusters and landing legs instead of air bags. Phoenix gives new meaning to the term "retro rockets." More »
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The first extraterrestrial life we spot will probably be plant life, but what will it look like? There's a good chance it will be blue, purple, red or even black. A team of scientists examined what makes Earth plants green, then modeled the evolution of plants on worlds with different kinds of stars or atmospheres. The answers they came up with could help astronomers detect planets beyond our solar system with flora. More »
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It's bigger than Mercury, has dune seas like Tatooine (or Arrakis) and has the coolest name of any moon: Titan. The Cassini spacecraft is still revealing many of its secrets, with another flyby scheduled just a few weeks from now. Here are five reasons to get excited about Saturn's largest satellite. More »
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It's a big, dumb, empty universe, according to a new formula that estimates our chances of meeting non-human intelligent life. The odds have been estimated before, most famously by the Drake Equation, but now a British scientist has tried to throw a wet blanket over exobiologists and scifi writers by claiming that intelligent life is vanishingly rare. Here's why he's wrong. More »
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Scientists have known for a while that the building blocks of Earth life, amino acids, are also found in space. Traces of amino acids have been studied in countless meteorites. But now Arizona State researcher Sandra Pizzarello says Earth amino acids also share the same basic structure with those from distant space. This discovery, announced yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could mean that extraterrestrial life would share other structural similarities with Earth life — like symmetrical bodies, for instance — especially if that life had developed from amino acids the way we did. More »
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