Human beings came from another planet, not Earth, new book claims

Dr Ellis Silver offers arguments, based on human physiology, that suggest we may not have evolved alongside other life on Earth – but arrived from elsewhere.

A balloon returned from a high-altitude flight this year covered in microscopic life forms which seemed not to be of this world – and reignited the debate over whether life on Earth actually began here, or somewhere else.

This year, other scientists have argued that life originated on Mars, due to a mineral found in Martian meteorites, thought to be crucial to the genesis of life. Another experiment showed that amino acids could have arrived in impacts with comets – which suggests life might be widespread in the solar system.

But a new book by American ecologist Dr Ellis Silver argues that humans may well not be from Earth – and may have arrived separately. Silver offers arguments, based on human physiology, that suggest we may not have evolved alongside other life on Earth – but arrived from elsewhere, brought here by aliens as recently as a few tens of thousands of years ago.

Silver, an environmentalist  who is currently working with the effort to clean plastic debris from the Pacific, says his book aims to provoke debate – and is based on scientific work on the difference between humans and other animals.

“The Earth approximately meets our needs as a species, but perhaps not as strongly as whoever brought us here initially thought,” Silver said in an interview with Yahoo news.

“Lizards can sunbathe for as long as they like – and many of them do. We can just about get away with it for a week or two. But day after day in the sun? Forget it. You might as well just lie down on the freeway and wait for a bus to hit you.” We are dazzled by the sun, which is also odd, says Silver – most animals are not.

Silver claims that some chronic illnesses that plague the human race – such as bad backs – could be a sign we evolved on a world with lower gravity. Silver points to other unique human traits – such as the fact that babies’ heads are so large that women have trouble giving birth – in earlier eras, this was often fatal for mother, child or both.

“No other truly native species on this planet has this problem,” he says. Silver also points out to the “extra” 223 genes in human beings, which are not found in any other species, and to the lack of a fossil “missing link”.

Silver chose not to publish in a scientific imprint, wanting to inspire open debate. Reviewers have compared Silver to other space-gazing theorists such as Erich von Däniken, while others have said, “it is possible to drive a coach and horses through several of his arguments.”

Silver also claims that the human race has defects that mark us out as being possibly “not of this world”.

“We are all chronically ill,” says Silver. “Indeed, if you can find a single person who is 100% fit and healthy and not suffering from some (perhaps hidden or unstated) condition or disorder (there’s an extensive list in the book) I would be extremely surprised – I have not been able to find anyone.”

“I believe that many of our problems stem from the simple fact that our internal body clocks have evolved to expect a 25 hour day (this has been proven by sleep researchers), but the Earth’s day is only 24 hours. This is not a modern condition – the same factors can be traced all the way back through mankind’s history on Earth.”

Silver does not suggest one answer – but a possibility that early pre-humans such as homo erectus were crossbred with another species. He also suggests several possible origins, including Alpha Centauri.

“Mankind is supposedly the most highly developed species on the planet, yet is surprisingly unsuited and ill-equipped for Earth’s environment: harmed by sunlight, a strong dislike for naturally occurring (raw) foods, ridiculously high rates of chronic disease, and more. Plus there’s a prevailing feeling among many people that they don’t belong here or that something “just isn’t right”.

“This suggests (to me at least) that mankind may have evolved on a different planet, and we may have been brought here as a highly developed species. One reason for this, discussed in the book, is that the Earth might be a prison planet – since we seem to be a naturally violent species – and we’re here until we learn to behave ourselves.”

“Humans are not from Earth was published mainly to gauge reaction from readers and to provoke thought, particularly among those who might not have considered such a possibility before.”

Ellis hopes that readers will contact him with more evidence for a more extensive follow-up work.

The claim that bacteria are arriving from space has also caused controversy – and revived the idea of “panspermia”, where life from Earth might have “pollinated” other planets nearby..

“There is probably truth to the report that they find curious stuff in the atmosphere,” Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA told SPACE.com in an interview. “The jump to the conclusion that it is alien life is a big jump and would require quite extraordinary proof.”

Professor Wainwright and his colleagues at the University of Sheffield aim to conduct further tests.

“In the absence of a mechanism by which large particles like these can be transported to the stratosphere, we can only conclude that the biological entities originated from space,” Wainwright added.

“Our conclusion then is that life is continually arriving to Earth from space, life is not restricted to this planet and it almost certainly did not originate here.”

Silver’s more radical idea is presented as polemic, intended to inspire argument – “Initial reaction has been positive, although one reviewer thought it was a parody, while another found the writing style heavily dictatorial,” he admits.

The debate over the origin of life looks set to intensify. Simulations on supercomputers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the U.S. have found that amino acids, the building blocks of life, could have arrived on Earth via comets.

This would suggest that life might be found elsewhere in our solar system – or even beyond.

Nir Goldman suggests that the simple molecules found in comets (such as water, ammonia, and carbon dioxide) could have supplied the raw materials, and the impact with early Earth could have “ignited” a prebiotic reaction.

A series of experiments where projectiles were fired into a cometary ice mixtures formed amino acids – the building blocks of life.

“These results confirm our earlier predictions of impact synthesis of prebiotic material, where the impact itself can yield life-building compounds,” Goldman said. “These results present a significant step forward in our understanding of the origin of the building blocks of life. This increases the chances of life originating and being widespread throughout our solar system,” Goldman said.

Silver wants to pose the question of whether humans arrived separately, “Recent scientific reports suggest that life itself might not be from Earth but might have arrived here on meteors or comets. This primitive form of life then evolved over billions of years into what we find on Earth today.

“My thesis proposes that mankind did not evolve from that particular strain of life, but evolved elsewhere and was transported to Earth (as fully evolved Homo sapiens) between 60,000 and 200,000 years ago.”

“Little in the book can be proven – it can only be supposed or suspected. But there is more than enough indisputable evidence to make further study worthwhile.”

Rob Waugh - yahoo News

If a UFO cannot be explained would you suspend disbelief?

Could you even imagine an airship originating from another world – autonomous, or maybe flown or guided by an alien creature? Even our Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly called drones, you probably haven’t seen, unless you live in Yemen — not a welcome sight, I’m sure. Even if seen, our – and by “our” I mean Earthling — drones are a little different in that their years away, would take over 50 years, assuming they could travel around .8 the speed of light.

When such aliens get here, do they hang around Earth and our solar system for a few years before they return to children who now look more like parents after aging 50 years while they age five, for example? If they experience our technology, are they weightless for 40 years, body deteriorated beyond repair?

I would say no to all of these questions. That is the point. Anyone who can travel light years to investigate our technology our science fiction writers can only speculate about, not even totally imagine. For all of us, pertinent questions will arise. Can they render their crafts massless? Can they break our speed limit of light-speed? Can they create gravity on their space (warp space)?

We are slowly emerging out of the cloud of superstition and ignorance that our forbears experienced. We are beginning to understand – perhaps not visualize – that the context of a truly advanced world is beyond our own context. Our religions create fantasies that fill in the details of a realm our feeble minds cannot imagine in order to explain the unknown.

Rather than embrace and try to understand the unknown, do we scoff at it and scorn those who give it credence.

Is that where we are in our advanced civilization?

ocjim - Nolan Chart

A New Strategy to Search for Aliens

Discovering life beyond Earth might just be the holy grail of science. And even though we have yet to find evidence for little green men or blobs of bacteria, astronomers continue to search for elusive signs of life.

A novel strategy may help astronomers better target extraterrestrial intelligent life. Dr. Michael Gillon, of the University of Liege in Belgium, proposes an approach that would monitor the regions of nearby stars to search for interstellar communication devices.

The most common method in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (abbreviated as SETI) is the use of giant radio dishes to scan the stars, listening for possible faint signals coming from distant civilizations.

While the seti institute has been hard at work since 1959 we haven’t chanced upon a signal yet. But that doesn’t mean we’re alone or that we should stop looking.

Even without a confirmed extraterrestrial signal, most astronomers would argue that recent discoveries have strongly reinforced the hypothesis that extraterrestrial life may just be abundant in the Universe. With the help of the Kepler Space Telescope we have learned that planets are plentiful throughout the Milky Way. With most stars harboring at least one planet, it’s conceivable that a few of those planets will have the right conditions for life.

So why haven’t we detected extraterrestrial intelligent life? Why do we have this glaring Fermi Paradox — the apparent contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial civilizations’ existence and the lack of contact with such civilizations?

One hypotheses to explain the famous Fermi Paradox is that self-replicating probes could have explored the whole Galaxy, including our Solar System, but we just haven’t detected them yet. A self-replicating probe is one sent to a nearby planetary system where it would mine raw materials to create a replica of itself that would then head towards other nearby systems, continuing to replicate itself along the way.

While our own technological civilization is less than two hundred years old, we have already sent robotic probes to a large number of bodies in our Solar System and beyond. Our furthest-reaching probe, Voyager 1, just made it to interstellar space. But it took it over 40 years.

“We are still far from being able to build an actual self-replicating interstellar spaceship, but only because our technology is not mature enough, and not because of an obvious physical limitation,” says Gillon.

While we cannot currently send self-replicating probes to the nearest stars in a reasonable amount of time, nothing excludes this as a reachable future project, or a project already completed by extraterrestrial intelligent life.

This study further proposes that probes from neighboring stellar systems could use the stars they orbit as gravitational lenses to communicate efficiently with each other.

This artist’s concept shows the general locations of NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft. Voyager 1 (top) has sailed beyond our solar bubble into interstellar space, the space between stars. Its environment still feels the solar influence. Voyager 2 (bottom) is still exploring the outer layer of the solar bubble. Image Credit: NASA

The coordination of probes to explore the Galaxy would be very inefficient unless they had the ability to directly communicate with one another. The vastness and structure of the Milky Way makes this seemingly impossible. By the time a signal reached a very distant star it would be highly diluted.

However, any star is massive enough to bend and amplify light. This process, gravitational lensing, is extremely powerful. “It means that the Sun (and any other star) is an antenna much more powerful than we could ever build,” says Gillon.

Based on this method, interstellar communication devices will exist along the line that connects one star to another. We now know exactly where to look, and even where to send messages.

Could this novel idea provide a new mission for SETI?

“A negative result wouldn’t tell us very much,” explains Gillon. “But a positive result would represent one of the most important discoveries of all time.”

The paper has been accepted for publication in Acta Astronautica and is available for download.

SHANNON HALL - Universe Today

Is there anybody out there ?

Of course it is possible that UFO’s really do contain aliens, as many people believe, and the government is hushing it up. I couldn’t possibly comment!”

- Professor Stephen Hawking, at the White House Millennium Council, 2000

Intelligence in Science

Within the paradigm of our western culture, if something cannot be demonstrated and tested by repeatable scientific experimentation, then that something is probably not a real phenomenon. Much of what is termed supernatural for example simply means that it falls outside of the paradigms ability to test it.

For the phenomenon we call intelligence, the scientific community does not have a clear definition of what the phenomenon actually is. Whether we are looking at natural intelligence or artificial intelligence – the question of what intelligence is cannot be defined beyond a set of rules more akin to economics – where an organism attempts to allow itself to survive.

An additional problem in searching for the signs of intelligence is that the method of philosophical reasoning used in science is deemed incompatible with deciding if a phenomenon is intelligently caused:
“The statements of science must invoke only natural things and processes.”

- Rule of Methodological Naturalism, National Academy of Science, Donald Kennedy et al., 1998

From this perspective the concept of seeking out the signs of intelligence in scientific data can only be an arduous if not impossible task.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

In a culture that relies of the philosophical reasoning of science to tell us what is real, how are we to identify whether a signal is the result of extraterrestrial intelligence and not some natural phenomenon?

Geoff Marcy is an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley. He is looking through the vast amount of data returned from the Kepler Space Observatory to look for signs of an advanced extra-terrestrial civilization.

While NASA’s Kepler mission itself is concerned with looking for evidence of exoplanets, Marcy is searching through the data in the hope of finding large objects radiating energy in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

It was British theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson who first considered that “within a few thousand years of its entering the stage of industrial development, any intelligent species should be found occupying an artificial biosphere which completely surrounds its parent star”.

This hypothetical artificial structure is known as a Dyson Sphere. Variants of this idea include a mega structure in the form of an orbiting solar-powered array of satellites meant to completely encompass a star, capturing most, if not all, of its energy output.

The question one has to ask is, what happens if Marcy finds an object fulfilling that criterion?

At what point will he be free to publish his findings, if he believes he has found evidence of a Type II Extraterrestrial Civilisation?

Pioneering Radio Astronomy

In 1899 Nikola Tesla built his Magnifying Transmitter in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This device was designed to conduct experiments in the wireless transmission of electrical power and telecommunications. That same year he began hearing signals from it that he eventually came to believe emanated from an intelligent civilisation on the planet Mars:

“Twenty-two years ago, while experimenting in Colorado with a wireless power plant, I obtained extra-ordinary experimental evidence of the existence of life on Mars. I had perfected a wireless receiver of extra-ordinary sensitiveness, far beyond anything known, and I caught signals which I interpreted as meaning 1–2–3–4. I believe the Martians used numbers for communication because numbers are universal.” – Nikola Telsa, 1922

It has been argued that Tesla may have mistaken the origin of the signals as being from Mars when it is likely that he was listening to singlet, doublet and triplet signals from periodic HF radiation that is known be emitted by Jupiter.

The Rise of SETI

The origin of the seti program goes back to the work of radio astronomer Frank Drake at the Green Bank observatory in West Virginia in 1951. His “Project Ozma” was the first systematic attempt to detect artificial radio signals from nearby stars.

Drake used the 21-cm spectral line of hydrogen which he considered to be the best natural frequency to with which intelligent species may try to communicate with and he listened to two nearby, Sun-like stars epsilon Eridani and tau Ceti for six hours a day using an 85ft radio telescope at Green Bank.

“Ozma”, incidentally, was a reference to the character Princess Ozma in L. Frank Baum’s the series of books about the Land of Oz, appearing in all the books except the first – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Drake is most well-known for formulating a mathematical equation to estimate the number of detectable extra-terrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. It is an often citied equation that he first came up with while at the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center in the US in 1961.

The Drake Equation: N = R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L
N: The number of civilizations in our galaxy that communication might be possible
R*: The average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
fp: The fraction of stars with planets
ne: The average number of planets that can possibly support life (per star with planets)
fl: The fraction that can go on to support life
fi: The fraction that can go on to support intelligent life
fc: The fraction of civilizations that develop technology detectable from space
L: The length of time a civilization goes on to release detectable signs into space

The value of N is highly uncertain given that our civilisation is not in a position of know most of the variables with any degree of accuracy. Until recently the only variable that could be estimated with any degree of confidence was R (rate of star formation in the Milky Way) which is thought to be in the order of one star per year.

Recent discoveries of extra-solar planets have reduced the uncertainty in other factors: fp (fraction of stars with planets) and ne (avg. no. planets per star that could support life). As of October 13th, 2013, 998 exoplanets have been discovered in 759 planetary systems including 169 multiple planetary systems.

According to Drake, the average of people’s “best estimates” suggested that there are about 10,000 technically advanced civilisations spread across our galaxy.

This concept gave rise to the seti program.

The Wow Signal

During the 1960’s, spurred on by Drakes work, Soviet scientists began using unidirectional antennae to listen to a large region of sky rather than narrow regions used by the western astronomers.

In the early 1970′s NASA’s Ames Research Center began looking at the technology required to implement an seti search and by the late-1970′s programs had been established at both NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

In a 1955 issue of Scientific American, astronomer John Kraus described a concept to scan the cosmos for natural radio signals using a flat-plane radio telescope equipped with a parabolic reflector. Two years later his concept had been approved for construction by Ohio State University. The radio telescope built in Delaware, Ohio was called Big Ear and it later began the world’s first continuous seti program.

It was this Ohio State University seti program that became well known when, on August 15, 1977, a project volunteer witnessed a startlingly strong signal received by the telescope. Volunteer, Jerry Ehman quickly circled the indication on a printout and writing the phrase “Wow!” in the margin. The signal did not repeat and has never been detected since.

Could the “Wow” signal have been a radio signal from an artificial, extra-terrestrial source?

Attempting to resolve this question using only the tool of science alone leaves us forever looking to eliminate “natural” mechanisms as being the source of this signal. Science cannot answer this question alone.

Anyone can attempt answer the question using other tools in the philosophical toolbox. However, if a scientist attempts this they would leave them open to making a mistake; so on the whole they simply do not attempt to make statements like this through fear of personal and professional repercussions.

Signal LGM-1

A decade before the “Wow” signal, at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory in Cambridge, England, astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell and her colleagues discovered an anomalous radio transmission:

“We did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission.”

“It is an interesting problem—if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe, how does one announce the results responsibly?”- Jocelyn Bell Burnell

The signal became known as Signal LGM-1, (“little green men”) and the hypothesis was only abandoned once a second pulsating source was discovered in a different part of the sky.

When all else fails…

A year later in 1968 astronomer Thomas Gold proposed an alternative hypothesis for the source of LGM-1 which became known as a pulsar:

“A neutron star emits two opposed beams of synchrotron radiation confined to a narrow cone about the star’s magnetic axis. We then perceive pulses as the beams swing by us if we happen to be in the cone that they sweep out.”

However, at a conference on Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI) in the Soviet Union, the well-known astronomer Carl Sagan suggested that certain radio emissions may be potential intelligently caused signals:

“The very serious current energy problems both in quasar and in gravity wave physics can be ameliorated if we imagine these energy sources beamed in our direction. But preferential beaming in our direction makes little sense unless there is a message in these channels. A similar remark might apply to pulsars.

“There are a large number of other incompletely understood phenomena, from Jovian decameter bursts to the high time-resolution structure of X-ray emission which might just conceivably be due to ETI.

“Perhaps, in the light of Doctor Marx’s presentation, we must ask if the fine structure of some fluctuating X-ray sources is due to pulsed X-ray lasers for interstellar spaceflight. But Shklovsky’s principle of assuming such sources natural until proven otherwise, of course, holds. Extraterrestrial intelligence is the explanation of last resort, when all else fails.” – Carl Sagan

Erring on the side of caution

Johannes Kepler (17th century astronomer) wrote in his novel Somnium:

“When things are in order, if the cause of the orderliness cannot be deduced from the motion of the elements or from the composition of matter, it is quite possibly a cause possessing a mind.

“If you direct your mind to the towns on the moon, I shall prove to you that I see them.

“In the spotted parts of the moon the perfectly round shape of the hollows, and their arrangement or a certain equality of the distances between them, are artificial and produced by some architectural mind. For that scooping out into the form of a circle cannot be accomplished by any motion of the elements.”

Kepler however was in error when he suggested that circles, as seen on the moon, cannot be created by natural means. Both meteor impacts and electrical discharge arcing can produce circular patterns.

Eliminating All Natural Causes

The scientific method does not allow inference to intelligent causes until all natural causes have been eliminated. However, exhausting all natural causes is a logical impossibility.

From this perspective science is not able to infer that either Stonehenge or the Great Pyramids of Giza were intelligently caused. It can only continually attempt to eliminate new natural causes as being responsible for the configuration of the stones within the structure.

Regarding Geoff Marcy’s search for “Dyson Spheres”; how does he eliminate all the possible natural causes that could account for a large astronomical object in space found to be radiating perhaps only in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum?

Whether the potential extraterrestrial artefacts under investigation are radio signals, physical objects or even alien spacecraft – a scientist would essentially need to ignore the rules and the methodology of science in order to make statements about it. Otherwise they “couldn’t possibly comment”.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt up in your philosophy”

Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 1, Scene 5

By Anthony Beckett B.Sc. (hons) M.Sc.

Anthony Beckett lives near Keighley, West Yorkshire. He studied Chemistry at Loughborough University graduating in 1997 and continuing his studies with a M.Sc. in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Huddersfield in 1998. He went on to work in the Pharmaceutical Industry as an Analytical Scientist until 2006. He is currently a software engineer and in his spare time he is the executive producer of Exopolitics Great Britain, an organisation which has been hosting the UK’s UFO Disclosure and Exopolitics Conferences since 2009.

© Anthony Beckett 2013

anthony - UFO Digest

We Are The Aliens – Human Beings Came From Another Planet

A balloon returned from a high-altitude flight this year covered in microscopic life forms which seemed not to be of this world – and reignited the debate over whether life on Earth actually began here, or somewhere else.

This year, other scientists have argued that life originated on Mars, due to a mineral found in Martian meteorites, thought to be crucial to the genesis of life. In another discovery dna and amino acid molecules found in an interstellar gas cloud. Which means that important building blocks for dna and amino acids can ‘seed’ newly-formed planets with the chemical precursors for life.

But a new book “Humans are not from Earth: a scientific evaluation of the evidence We Are The Aliens Human Beings Came From Another Planet ” by American ecologist Dr Ellis Silver argues that humans may well not be from Earth – and may have arrived separately. Silver offers arguments, based on human physiology, that suggest we may not have evolved alongside other life on Earth – but arrived from elsewhere, brought here by aliens as recently as a few tens of thousands of years ago.

Silver, an environmentalist who is currently working with the effort to clean plastic debris from the Pacific, says his book aims to provoke debate – and is based on scientific work on the difference between humans and other animals.

“The Earth approximately meets our needs as a species, but perhaps not as strongly as whoever brought us here initially thought,” Silver said in an interview with Yahoo news.

“Lizards can sunbathe for as long as they like – and many of them do. We can just about get away with it for a week or two. But day after day in the sun? Forget it. You might as well just lie down on the freeway and wait for a bus to hit you.” We are dazzled by the sun, which is also odd, says Silver – most animals are not.

Silver claims that some chronic illnesses that plague the human race – such as bad backs – could be a sign we evolved on a world with lower gravity. Silver points to other unique human traits – such as the fact that babies’ heads are so large that women have trouble giving birth – in earlier eras, this was often fatal for mother, child or both.

“No other truly native species on this planet has this problem,” he says. Silver also points out to the “extra” 223 genes in human beings, which are not found in any other species, and to the lack of a fossil “missing link”.

Silver chose not to publish in a scientific imprint, wanting to inspire open debate. Reviewers have compared Silver to other space-gazing theorists such as Erich von Däniken, while others have said, “it is possible to drive a coach and horses through several of his arguments.”

Silver also claims that the human race has defects that mark us out as being possibly “not of this world”.

“We are all chronically ill,” says Silver. “Indeed, if you can find a single person who is 100% fit and healthy and not suffering from some (perhaps hidden or unstated) condition or disorder (there’s an extensive list in the book) I would be extremely surprised – I have not been able to find anyone.”

“I believe that many of our problems stem from the simple fact that our internal body clocks have evolved to expect a 25 hour day (this has been proven by sleep researchers), but the Earth’s day is only 24 hours. This is not a modern condition – the same factors can be traced all the way back through mankind’s history on Earth.”

Silver does not suggest one answer – but a possibility that early pre-humans such as homo erectus were crossbred with another species. He also suggests several possible origins, including Alpha Centauri.

“Mankind is supposedly the most highly developed species on the planet, yet is surprisingly unsuited and ill-equipped for Earth’s environment: harmed by sunlight, a strong dislike for naturally occurring (raw) foods, ridiculously high rates of chronic disease, and more. Plus there’s a prevailing feeling among many people that they don’t belong here or that something “just isn’t right”.

“This suggests (to me at least) that mankind may have evolved on a different planet, and we may have been brought here as a highly developed species. One reason for this, discussed in the book, is that the Earth might be a prison planet – since we seem to be a naturally violent species – and we’re here until we learn to behave ourselves.”

“Humans are not from Earth was published mainly to gauge reaction from readers and to provoke thought, particularly among those who might not have considered such a possibility before.”
Ellis hopes that readers will contact him with more evidence for a more extensive follow-up work.

The claim that bacteria are arriving from space has also caused controversy – and revived the idea of “panspermia”, where life from Earth might have “pollinated” other planets nearby..

“There is probably truth to the report that they find curious stuff in the atmosphere,” Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA told SPACE.com in an interview. “The jump to the conclusion that it is alien life is a big jump and would require quite extraordinary proof.”

Professor Wainwright and his colleagues at the University of Sheffield aim to conduct further tests.

“In the absence of a mechanism by which large particles like these can be transported to the stratosphere, we can only conclude that the biological entities originated from space,” Wainwright added.

“Our conclusion then is that life is continually arriving to Earth from space, life is not restricted to this planet and it almost certainly did not originate here.”

The debate over the origin of life looks set to intensify. Simulations on supercomputers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the U.S. have found that amino acids, the building blocks of life, could have arrived on Earth via comets.

This would suggest that life might be found elsewhere in our solar system – or even beyond.

Nir Goldman suggests that the simple molecules found in comets (such as water, ammonia, and carbon dioxide) could have supplied the raw materials, and the impact with early Earth could have “ignited” a prebiotic reaction.
A series of experiments where projectiles were fired into a cometary ice mixtures formed amino acids – the building blocks of life.

Silver wants to pose the question of whether humans arrived separately, “Recent scientific reports suggest that life itself might not be from Earth but might have arrived here on meteors or comets. This primitive form of life then evolved over billions of years into what we find on Earth today.

“My thesis proposes that mankind did not evolve from that particular strain of life, but evolved elsewhere and was transported to Earth (as fully evolved Homo sapiens) between 60,000 and 200,000 years ago.”

Galactic Connection

Mysterious Unexplained Short Signals From Outside Our Galaxy Baffle Astronomers

These signals are very short and originate from outside of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

They are baffling astronomers and the nature of the objects remains unexplained.

Are the signals natural or artificial in origin? Is it possible an extraterrestrial civilization is sending them or are we witnessing an unknown astronomical phenomenon?

We have previously discussed the possibility raised by astrophysicists that some extraterrestrial civilizations could send us signals by manipulating starlight. This means that there could alien messages concealed in the stars.

Several years ago, we picked up a mysterious signal from outer space that has never been explained. The signal was heard on three different occasions and originated in a region of space between the constellations Pisces and Aries.

We can assume that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations can appreciate the benefits of transmitting into space, as a good means of establishing communication with other intelligent alien life-form.

Humans are eager to learn about other alien civilizations and one way to contact other alien cultures is through interstellar signals. However, we should ask ourselves if transmitting radio messages into space pose a risk to human civilization?

Space is filled with sound that we cannot easily identify. It is a very complex task to determine what is of natural or artificial origin.

In July, 2012, an international team using the CSIRO Parkes 64 metre radio telescope in Australia detected mysterious bursts of radio waves coming from billions of light years away.

The burst energetics indicate that they originate from an extreme astrophysical event involving relativistic objects such as neutron stars or black holes.
“A single burst of radio emission of unknown origin was detected outside our Galaxy about six years ago but no one was certain what it was or even if it was real, so we have spent the last four years searching for more of these explosive, short-duration radio bursts,” said Dan Thornton at the University of Manchester.

This brings us to the astronomical phenomena known as “fast radio transients”, which are objects and events that emit radio waves on ultra-short timescales.

These objects could include flares coming from stars, collisions between black holes, lightning on other planets, and RRATs – Rotating RAdio Transients, pulsars that only fire up when they feel like it. More speculatively, some scientists believe extraterrestrial civilizations could be flashing fast radio beacons into space.

While searching for pulsars back in 2007, astronomer Duncan Lorimer accidentally came across something unexpected and unexplainable – a burst of radio waves appearing to come from outside our galaxy, lasting just 5 milliseconds but possessing as much energy as the sun releases in 30 days.

A pulsar is a rotating neutron star. Neutron stars are the collapsed remains of massive stars which have mass greater than 4 to 8 times that of our Sun. After these stars have finished burning their nuclear fuel, they undergo a supernova explosion.

Neutron stars are on average only about 30km in diameter, but they have hugely powerful surface magnetic fields, billions of times that of our Sun. Sometimes it can be very difficult to decide whether astronomers detected unusual pulsar or alien signals.

The so-called Lorimer bursts are very strange. The very short signals come from an unknown region of space. Scientists are convinced the signals are coming from well beyond the Milky Way.

“The awareness of these short signals has long existed,” said Andrew Siemion, who searches the time domain for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence at seti. “But it’s only the past decade or so that we’ve had the computational capacity to look for them.”

Scientists are speculating what these burst may be. Some think it is new kind of source. Other theorists suggest that it was a primordial black hole evaporating or a ‘spark’ from a superconducting cosmic string.

Could they be signals sent from an extraterrestrials civilization that is searching the galaxy for other intelligent species? Duncan Lorimer, professor of physics at West Virginia University is doubtful the bursts are artificial.

“I think that becomes unlikely now that there’s more than one of them. With one source, you could always think about it as some sort of single civilization. But now, you’re seeing them, essentially, at different parts of the sky. It’s very unlikely that different civilizations would be sending things in exactly the same way.

So I think it’s something natural in origin, and that – it’s really the time scale is the biggest clue to the size of the object, because it’s only a few milliseconds in size. The emitting region can only be a few light-milliseconds across. And so that points to some sort of compact, star like a black hole or a neutron star where, potentially, there’s large amounts of energy can be released,” Lorimer said.

The Lorimer bursts are difficult to study. “The radio telescopes that found them have very small fields of view, and the bursts themselves don’t last very long. And it’s becoming clear from these recent results that the bursts could be going off in – over the entire sky about once every 10 seconds,” Lorimer said.

Astronomers have yet another mystery to add to their list of fascinating phenomena. The mysterious radio bursts from deep space remain unexplained for the time being. “It’s quite a puzzle as to what’s producing these events so often, ” Lorimer said

Message To Eagle

An Astronomer and Two Students Witness UFOs at Syracuse University’s Holden Observatory

On the winter’s night of February 20, 1947, five months before the famous Roswell UFO incident, two classmates of Syracuse University along with an astronomer reportedly witnessed strange elliptical or circular objects crossing across the horizon, covering the stars as they passed at tremendous speed. The two classmates were walking around 10:15 PM on the school campus and noticing that the dome doors of Holden Observatory were not close.

Not only that the dome doors were left opened they also discovered that entrance door of the small building was also open as they passed it. Out of curiosity, the two classmates wandered into the ground floor and they noticed a 6 or 7-foot long refracting telescope that was suspended around 12 feet above the floor. It was used by a man who walked it back and forth rapidly in the length of the dome opening. When the astronomer noticed the two students as they climbed the platform, he was thanking God that the two were there. He invited them to take a look of his found to tell others that he was not crazy.

The man told the two students that he had been witnessing something not usual in the night sky. He then let the two to take a look what he’d been watching without giving them a clue. One of the two students grew in NEW YORK City so, he only had a chance to appreciate the beauty of the stars in the night sky on campus, especially using a telescope. He was in awe of the bright star field and then noticed a light passed his view in the dark sky. He then observed more after 20 or 30 seconds. He counted approximately twelve mysterious lights. After being puzzled of what he had seen, he then gave the telescope to his pal. After a few minutes, his pal looked as puzzled as him and the astronomer. The three men agreed that they had seen the same objects.

The three men were able to witness the details of these objects through the telescope. They all witnessed the same objects that appeared to have a greyish bottom, slightly lighter than the dark sky background. The objects had thin bright yellow orange trailing edge which appeared slightly rippling. All men noted that some of the objects appeared to be brighter than others. The astronomer assured the students that he had never seen anything like the mysterious objects.

After a couple of minutes, the students bid the astronomer a good night. That was the first and only time they met the astronomer. The two students have talked about the incident a number of times for many years.

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