IN BRIEF

Technical advances in space exploration and science are driving the increased likelihood of making contact with extraterrestrial life. Contact with alien life, especially if it happens soon, has the potential to transform humanity entirely.

TECHNICAL ADVANCES DRIVING CONTACT

Both the most cynical person on Earth and the world’s greatest optimist could easily look at everything around them and ask: could this truly be all there is in the universe? Whatever your reason for posing the question, you may have an answer sooner than you think — and that answer is likely to be “no.” Science writer and comedian Ben Miller posits in his book The Aliens Are Coming! The Extraordinary Science Behind Our Search for Life in the Universe that one of the most powerful forces shaping science today is the growing search for life in the universe fueled by the belief that we are not alone. He believes that because of our current technologies, we’ll know about life on the Earth-like planets closest to us within the next ten years.

It’s easy to see why he thinks so. Scientists have identified an exoplanet that they’ve described as the best candidate for life as we know it — perhaps an even more important a target for planet characterization within habitable zones in the future than either Proxima b or TRAPPIST-1, and these have also recently been discovered. Speaking of Proxima b, the James Webb Telescope is likely to give us the images that will clarify its potential for supporting life, as it will do for other exoplanets.

In recent months scientists have stated that the fast radio bursts we’ve intercepted from outer space may well be evidence of alien life. Now they’re working to discern whether alien technology could be their source. Scientists also now believe that life might exist on Europa, one of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons. Recently, NASA’s plans to send a lander in search of biosignatures that might signal the presence of extraterrestrial life within its warm core have sprung into action; Europa may be home to a subterranean ocean, making it an ideal place to search for alien life.

Kepler-186f, pictured here in an artist's concept, is the first Earth-size planet to be discovered in a star's habitable zone.

ILLUSTRATION BY NASA AMES/JPL-CALTECH/T. PYLE

In 2016, researchers made improvements to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array that could make finding water on celestial bodies easier. These improvements were specifically directed toward the ongoing search for alien life, as was the partnership between Breakthrough Initiative to find alien life and the National Astronomical Observatories of China. China’s team uses the 488 meter (1,600 foot) FAST telescope, and now it is being used in partnership with the world’s other largest radio telescopes, including the Parkes Observatory in Australia and the Green Bank Telescope in the US, to seek out extraterrestrial life. In 2016 scientists also adopted more accurate methods for studying gravitational pull of distant stars, making it easier to gather data on the size and brightness of the star, the likelihood of water oceans, and possibility of life being present.

AN UTTERLY CHANGED HUMANITY

Why are we so enthralled with this search for other life in the universe? It’s far more than an AV geek, sci-fi con hangover, if that’s your suspicion. Contact could mean extraordinary things for humanity if it happens soon — some of the possibilities are daunting, but most of them are promising.

Stephen Hawking is one of the best-known and most reputable voices who cautions against making first contact with alien life. His argument is simply that we have no way of knowing what’s out there, and that, historically speaking, as more advanced civilizations have come into contact with less advanced cultures, the latter has typically been oppressed and aggressed against, the former seeing it as less valuable. However, it’s worth noting that when we speak historically we are, by necessity, limited to our own recorded human history. What we’re observing may not be a pattern common to all life; it may simply be a pattern common to human cultures.

In contrast, the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute is populated by people who feel we have little, if anything, to lose by seeking out other forms of life. SETI has now given birth to METI International (Messaging Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), which is actively seeking out contact. Douglas Vakoch, a professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology at the California Institute for Integral Studies and the president of METI International, strongly disagrees with Hawking. He thinks it is illogical to hide our existence as a species since we have already leaked transmissions from radio and television broadcasts in the form of electromagnetic radiation for almost 100 years. Vakoch concludes that any culture with the technological sophistication to master interstellar travel can already perceive our leaked signals, and are therefore already aware of us, waiting for us to make the first move.

METI, led by Vakoch, is now working to target star systems within 20 or 30 light-years with repeat messages as part of an effort to accumulate data in order to test the Fermi Paradox and the Zoo Hypothesis. Ideally, within a few decades, Vakoch and his team hope that they will generate a testable hypothesis with enough data and standard peer-review methods.

As for Miller, he’s not on Team Hawking, and thinks that the benefits of contact outweigh the risks. The potential to learn about advanced technology for space travel, repairing our planet’s environment, and many other applications is an obvious benefit to contact. For Neil deGrasse Tyson, the big benefit to contact is more profound: right now, our understanding of life is extremely limited, and that is because we only have our own, terrestrial sample of life to study. The notion that we have an understanding of the tremendous diversity of life is somewhat silly when you think of it in this context; our entire set of observations all share a single origin and an encoded existence that transmits heredity and mediates replication via nucleic acids.

Our current understanding of life is too much like the infamous legal definition of pornography — the classic “I know it when I see it” — which, for Tyson, lacks scientific rigor (and to clarify, he is not responsible for that icky analogy). But our explorations of the galaxy to find contact with other forms of life could give us other examples and samples, and a truer sense of what life truly is. This kind of knowledge has the potential to change everything else we think we know, most likely for the better.

Each week we uncover the most interesting and informative articles from around the world, here are 10 of the coolest stories in science this week.

Life in the Rocks

Microscopic images of geyserite taken from the Dresser Formation in Australia provide evidence for microbial life that lived 3.48 billion years ago. The ripply "palisade" texture could have been formed when long filaments of bacteria were entombed by the silica from the mineral-rich water from a hot spring.

Credit: Tara Djokic

Ancient rocks found in a remote stretch of Western Australia may contain the world's oldest known evidence of life on land, a new study finds.

The findings hint that early life may have gotten its start in hot springs on land, as opposed to deep inside ocean hydrothermal vents, as is commonly believed, Djokic told Live Science. [Read more about the oldest evidence.]

Sunbathing Toddlers

**Credit: Orange County Sheriff’s Department**

A group of more than a dozen great white sharks were spotted swimming in the surf off a Southern California beach, but beachgoers shouldn't panic, say shark experts.

These are not bloodthirsty predators, but rather a group of "toddlers," said Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at California State University, Long Beach. They are babies and 1- and 2-year-olds, probably 5 to 7 feet (1.5 to 2 meters) long, that are likely moving into the shallow waters because the area is safe and there's plenty of their favorite food, stingrays, Lowe said. [Read more about the swarming sharks.]

Early Printing Specimen

**This 540-year-old page, ripped from a medieval priests' handbook, was found in a library at the University of Reading.**
**Credit: University of Reading**

A librarian in England has stumbled upon a rare page from the early days of book printing.

The double-sided page has black-letter typeface and red paragraph marks that gave it away as an early western European printing, according to the university. [Read more about the ancient text.]

AI Struggles

**World Chess champion Garry Kasparov (left) ponders a chess move during the sixth and final game of his match with IBM's Deep Blue computer on May 11, 1997.**
**Credit: Roger Celestin/Newscom**

When the IBM computer Deep Blue beat the world's greatest chess player, Garry Kasparov, in the last game of a six-game match on May 11, 1997, the world was astonished. This was the first time any human chess champion had been taken down by a machine.

Despite those incredible computations, however, machines still fall short in other areas. [Read more about artificial intelligence.]

Mystery Solved

**Archaeologists have reached the burial chamber of the 3,800-year-old pyramid discovering the remains of a poorly preserved sarcophagus and a wooden box inscribed with three lines of hieroglyphs.**
**Credit: Courtesy of Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities**

Inside a 3,800-year-old pyramid at the site of Dahshur in Egypt, archaeologists have discovered a burial chamber that may have held the mummy of a princess named Hatshepset. A wooden box inscribed with hieroglyphs was also found within the chamber.

The wooden box is inscribed with "Hatshepset," which likely does not refer to the pharaoh Hatshepsut but rather someone else with a similar name, the researchers said. Last month, another inscription, written on an alabaster block, was also found in the pyramid. [Read more about the discovery.]

Poop Diet

Studies in mice have garnered attention for a remarkable result: When the feces of one mouse was transplanted to another mouse, the recipient mouse either gained or lost weight.

All of the patients in the study received stool from OpenBiome, a company that provides stool from healthy donors who have healthy BMIs, said Dr. Valery Muenyi, a resident physician in internal medicine at the University of Miami and the lead author of this study. [Read more about the strange procedure.]

Open and Shut

**This illustration, based on computer models, shows how the hanging wall (right) of a thrust fault can twist away from the foot wall (left) during an earthquake.**
**Credit: Harsha Bhat**

Like a crocodile's jaw opening and snapping shut, Earth's crust can rip apart and then violently close back up during an earthquake, a new study finds.

The study focused on a particular paradox associated with thrust faults, a crack in Earth’s crust, where geologic forces are slowly pushing a huge slab of continental crust up and over an oceanic layer. [Read more about the mega-quakes.]

Marijuana and Memory

Marijuana's main psychoactive compound, THC, may improve memory, according to a new study in mice.

Previous research in people — in teens and young adults — as well as in young animals has suggested that THC may actually impair cognition, but it was not clear how the compound might affect the aging brain in older individuals. [Read more about the mind-altering blend.]

What Lies Beneath

**Forrest Follet from the Cobb Institute of Archaeology at Mississippi State University, removes the soil from the lid of one over 35 graves uncovered during construction in 2013.**
**Credit: The University of Mississippi Medical Center**

An estimated 7,000 bodies are thought to be buried under The University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC), according to radar scans of the campus grounds.

Exhuming and reburying 7,000 bodies could be very expensive — about $3,000 per corpse, or a total of about $21 million — and UMMC is currently investigating options that could relocate the bodies and create both a memorial center and a dedicated lab for analyzing the remains, UMMC representatives added. [Read more about the buried secrets.]

Ghostbusting Dinosaur

An ankylosaur discovered in Montana in 2016 looks eerily like Zuul, a fictional monster from the movie "Ghostbusters."

Credit: Brian Boyle/Copyright Royal Ontario Museum; Columbia Pictures Corporation

What's as long as a pickup truck, as heavy as a white rhinoceros and as weird-looking as Zuul, the monster from the 1984 "Ghostbusters" movie? A newfound species of ankylosaurus.

Like Zuul in "Ghostbusters," Z. crurivastator has a short, rounded snout, large horns and a gnarled appearance, the researchers said. They found the beast in 2016 in Montana's Judith River Formation, a site known for its vast array of dinosaur fossils. [Read more about the ghostly dino.]

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