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Monthly Archives: October 2011
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We’ve seen two posts addressing the question “why study astrobiology?”, here and here. My take is very simple. There are three basic questions that any community of self-aware beings will eventually ask themselves, for reasons both practical and profound: How did we get here? Where are we headed? Are we alone? The most direct way to answer these questions is exploration. To our ancestors, this meant exploring the next valley or the lands across the seas. To us, it means.... |
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Shawn here: the following is a comment made by Julia DeMarines on Dimitra’s post on “Why Astrobiology.” Betül asked Julia to re-post is as a “PaleBlue.you” entry… beating me to the punch, as I was going to ask her to do the same thing. Anyways, here’s one good, enthusiastic take on “why astrobiology.” ————————— Betül Arslan (a friend, colleague and Pale Blue Blogger) has requested that I re-post my response to Dimitra Atri’s post earlier this week. Because I think she is.... |
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“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Ep. 12 We’ve seen this quote a lot in recent days, thanks to the “speeding neutrino” report. It is a favorite phrase whenever a spectacular new finding generates intense skepticism. Carl Sagan famously invoked it in his TV series Cosmos, when discussing the possibility that the Earth might have been visited by intelligent aliens. The phrase has a nice ring to it. But… Does it make sense? I hesitate to question the.... |
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Neutrinos are the most unsocial of known subatomic particles. They hardly interact with matter, and most neutrinos can pass through the entire Earth without undergoing any collision! They have a very low mass, no charge and as textbooks say, they travel with the speed of light. But do they? The new experimental results from the OPERA collaboration were posted on Arxiv recently: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 where the neutrino speed was found to exceed the speed of light by ~0.0025 %. When you.... |
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“Citizen-scientists” recently discovered two planets overlooked by the professionals. You can, too! |
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David is also a person I’ve looked up to for years, as he achieves a good balance of research with outreach. He is a well-respected and productive member of the Venus research community and yet also writes books for the general public, organizes teacher workshops, and participates in many other worthy endeavors. I’m really excited to have David as part of the PaleBlue.blog team, as he epitomizes the type of scientist I think we need more of in this era.... |
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Astrobiology Magazine Top Story |
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