My Top Astronomical Anomalies: A List

The Universe is filled with mystery. There are a myriad of things that are, but shouldn’t be, or probably shouldn’t be. Adequate explanations are not only lacking, but even the wildest possible theoretical explanations are rather thin on the ground. There often tends to be a massive divide between observation and theory. These anomalies run the range from the Universe as a whole, down to your local neck of the woods, well the solar system anyway. Here are a few my favourite astronomical anomalies.

THE BIG BANG EVENT: This is no doubt a concept that nearly everyone has heard about, and swallowed hook, line and cosmological sinker because scientists present this creation of the Universe scenario as fact. It’s not fact; just the most viable theory of many theories and it has serious flaws. The accepted theoretical account of the creation or event that kick-started our Universe off not only has that event a something that created all of matter and energy, but all of time and space as well, and this creation event, to boot, all took place in a volume less than that of a pinhead (something in the realm of the quantum) and for no apparent reason at all. First there was nothing; then there was something. Wow!

At best observations that support this are indirect being made some 13.7 billion years after-the-fact. Those indirect observations that provide evidence for the Big Bang event are the fact that the Universe is expanding; the Universe has a temperature – the remnants from the hot Big Bang called the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) and the amounts and ratio of hydrogen to helium. In reality there are no direct observations as nobody was present at Ground Zero all those billions of years ago.

There are really a couple of anomalies present in the standard Big Bang account. 1) You have a violation of causality – something (space, time, matter and energy) created from nothing which is a violation of several conservation laws or relationships. 2) You have a violation of pure common sense that tells you that you can not stuff the contents of the entire Universe into the realm of the quantum, something actually way less in volume in fact than a pinhead. If that’s not anomalous, I don’t know what is!

ACCELERATING UNIVERSE: The anomaly here is quite straightforward in that there’s considerable observational evidence that the expansion rate of the Universe is accelerating. However, logic dictates that because of the overall gravity that the Universe has, the expansion rate of the Universe should be decelerating. The ‘antigravity’ energy required to accelerate the Universe’s expansion has to come from somewhere, and in ever increasing amounts to keep on keeping on the ever increasing rate of acceleration, yet, the Universe, almost by definition, already contains all there is and ever will be. If extra ‘antigravity’ energy is being created, it’s being created out of nothing. Something from nothing is a clear violation of the basic conservation laws and principles that form the bedrock of modern science.  

DARK ENERGY & DARK MATTER: When considering all things cosmological, it’s become apparent that astronomers only observe about 4% of the matter plus energy that should be present. That is, about 96% of the matter plus energy that should be present and detectable to account for the observed behaviour of our observable universe is missing! Now 1% might be understandable given measurement uncertainty (error bars), but hardly 96%! So, cosmologists have postulated concepts termed ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ to make up the deficit. However, nobody has the foggiest idea what exactly ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ actually is. Neither has actually been detected either out there on in the laboratory down here – obviously. The anomaly here is that ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ are both ad hoc theoretical concepts to make sense of various astronomical observations, but without benefit of any actual observation of ‘dark matter’ and/or ‘dark energy ’to back things up. That’s a rather slight-of-hand trick, and until cosmologists put actual observational money on the board where their theoretical mouth is, it’s all an anomalous pie-in-the-cosmic-sky.

MATTER-ANTIMATTER RATIO: In our Universe, there should theoretically be equal amounts of matter and antimatter created at the time of the Big Bang, but there’s not. We observe a Universe made out of matter. Our antimatter has gone walkabout. Why is it so? That question illustrates a big anomaly that doesn’t have a really satisfying answer. Mother Nature shouldn’t favour one form of matter over the other, yet apparently that’s the case. Perhaps that’s just as well. A Universe that’s 50% matter and 50% antimatter will ultimately become a Universe of just 100% radiation or energy, and thus no material you and no material me.

MONOPOLES: We all know about magnetic fields having two sides, whether it’s a bar magnet or the Earth’s magnetic field (or those part and parcel of many other astronomical bodies) – there’s a south pole and a north pole; a positive and a negative. It will probably come as a surprise that there should also be a monopole – a magnet with just one pole, north OR south; positive OR negative. That’s because one of the many Big Bang ‘in the beginning’ predictions of all things theoretical is the existence of magnetic monopoles – magnets with either a south pole or a north pole, but not both. Alas, we’ve never ever found and confirmed the reality of even one monopole, so theoretical prediction and observation are not in harmony. In other words, an anomaly exists.

QUASARS: Quasars are ‘quasi-stellar objects’. They are ‘stellar’ because they aren’t all that large (like a galaxy). They are ‘quasi’ because they give off energy way, way, way more times greater than any star known in any astronomical catalogue. They seem to be primordial objects – they formed long ago and are now far away.  Quasars, like stars or galaxies, are their own entities and if two or more show a very close and special causality relationships then they should show identical recessional velocities (since the Universe is expanding and they are part of the Universe and that expansion). Recessional velocities are measured by an object’s red-shift. Theory identifies red-shift with velocity. However, you apparently have some observations of causality connected quasar pairs with vastly differing red-shifts (measurements of their recessional velocities). The anomaly, in an analogy, is that you can not have a runner running at 15 miles per hour holding hands with another runner running at 3 miles per hour!

NEITH: Neith is, or was, the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t. now-forever-lost satellite of our twin planet (in size if nothing else), Venus. The anomaly here is that bona-fide professional astronomers, not one but numerous celebrated astronomers, including Giovanni Cassini (1625-1712), sighted, noted and logged the existence of the damn thing and wrote up their findings in their professional journals. Okay, the time period was the mid-1600s to mid-1700s, but the professional eyeballs and the professional equipment was good enough to verify one way or the other the presence or absence of a reasonably sized natural satellite in orbit around Venus.

Of over thirty sightings of Neith, the best known and verified were in 1645, 1672, 1686, 1740, 1759, 1761 and 1764 (multiple sightings on numerous days in March). Observations over that stretch of period would seemingly rule out the ‘satellite’ being a faint star or asteroid or outer planet like Uranus or Neptune that just happened to be way beyond Venus but in the direct line of sight. Sometimes the observed phase of Neith matched the phase of Venus, which again suggests that the object was in close proximity to the planet.

Venus, inward and closer to the Sun than Earth, is a very visible and prominent celestial object when viewed from Earth, commonly called the Morning and Evening ‘Star’. We’ve all seen Venus; in fact if you know exactly where to look it can be seen in the daytime sky. Venus is far enough away from the Sun that the Sun’s glare doesn’t drown out reflected light from Venus, and presumably any objects near or in orbit around Venus. A natural satellite of Venus of any reasonable size should be readily detectable with the astronomical equipment available at the time. And so it really didn’t raise any astronomical eyebrows when Neith was in fact discovered. The anomaly here is that all and sundry were wrong. Neith doesn’t exist. Venus has no natural satellite(s). Now either all and sundry were totally incompetent and wouldn’t know one end of a telescope from the other, or else Neith really existed but somehow exited the local neighbourhood. If that’s the case, then Neith wasn’t natural at all but under intelligent control, and not by any terrestrial intelligence. What Neith was, and where it disappeared to, are major anomalies. 

From the examples above, I conclude that it almost seems as if someone (something) is ultimately responsible for our Universe, but he / she/ it / they didn’t quite think things through sufficiently. Methinks an all knowing, all powerful supernatural God type being wouldn’t have stuffed things up. So either the Universe is naturally stuffed up, or it was created stuffed up!

Impossible, Improbable & Imaginary Extraterrestrial Geographies

Far away places with strange sounding names. Sometimes they exist; sometimes they exist but not quite in the way at times suspected or expected; sometimes they don’t exist at all. It’s the latter two categories I examine here.

Impossible, improbable or imaginary geographies are often located, as things turned out, off planet. Here are a few examples of those impossible, improbable & imaginary extraterrestrial geographies.

Vulcan: We all know that Mercury is the closest planetary object to the Sun. But that’s not celestial physics set in stone. There could be objects even closer in, though difficult to see in the intense glare of our parent star, just as many of us haven’t ever seen Mercury being too close to the Sun to be seen with the unaided eye unless conditions are absolutely spot-on. So, way back when, when astronomical instrumentation and technology wasn’t as good as today, coupled with expectations and the thrill of the chase, well it’s not too surprising that astronomers ‘found’ that there was a planet even closer to the Sun than Mercury. Such a planet would be hot property indeed, and so when looking for mythological names that were ‘hot’ with which to christen it, well Vulcan fit the bill. And so it came to pass that Vulcan was the planet closest to the Sun; Mercury relegated to next in line. Unfortunately, they were wrong. Wishful thinking trumped less than ideal observations and so Vulcan was created in the mind as opposed to being actually verifiable. Mercury was restored to first rock from the Sun status – Vulcan became imaginary real estate. But, as Star Trek fans all know, the name lives on as the (non-solar) home of Mr. Spock and kin. 

Neith: Venus, the Goddess of Love, should have a lover – a companion. Venus, the planet, should too have a companion. After all, Venus is the near twin of Earth in terms of size and proximity to the Sun (Venus is second rock out), and Earth has a natural satellite so it stood to reason that Venus should have one too. Alas, it was not to be, but not for lack of trying. Take Neith – companion (but in mythology not lover) to Venus the planet. As with the case of Vulcan, wishful thinking, plus perhaps less than ideal telescopes (relative to modern scopes) led to a flurry of sightings of that expected satellite of Venus, named Neith, so confident were the discoverers that this was no illusion but a physical object. Now there’s a slight problem here. Venus isn’t that close in proximity to the Sun that solar glare should have caused problems. It wasn’t just one professional astronomer who sighted Neith, but many. And while the optical equipment of the day wasn’t 2012 state-of-the-art, it was more than adequate, or should have been more than adequate, to see a reasonable sized satellite in orbit around Venus. So, one could argue that Neith was indeed an actual bit of celestial real estate that went walkabout. Natural satellites don’t have a habit of going walkabout and disappearing. Unnatural satellites on the other hand… Now, might our own Moon be such an unnatural satellite?

Spaceship Moon: Once upon a time there was no real scientifically satisfactorily explanation for the Moon, or rather how the Moon came to be our Moon. One idea that the Moon was an independent body in an irregular and rogue orbit that somehow in a just-so kind of way happen to get gravitationally captured by the Earth was really too implausible. The Moon could have formed jointly with the Earth out of the same cosmic interstellar dust cloud that gave rise to the rest of the solar system. Some bits of that cosmic dust clumped together to form the planets around the parent star, the Sun, and in like fashion other bits of that dust came together around the planets to form natural satellites. Alas, post Apollo, chemical analysis of Moon bits compared to Earth bits ruled that out. For a similar reason, as well as problems in celestial physics, the Moon wasn’t born of a rapidly spinning proto-Earth leaving behind the Pacific basin as its scar, in the same way water droplets would be flung off a globe that was rapidly spinning.

Enter stage left the far-out-star-scout alternative idea that the Moon had nothing to do with the proto-Sun and proto-solar system and proto-Earth. The Moon wasn’t a rogue object captured by the Earth’s gravity, but it was a rouge object that was deliberately steered into an Earth orbit. The Moon was actually a hollow artificially constructed spaceship, covered with lots of dust and rock debris as a natural shield against cosmic radiation and other cosmic bits that would now and again slam into this spaceship – hazards of an interstellar voyage. Anomalies like Transient Lunar Phenomena (strange glowing lights seen on an irregular basis on the lunar surface) are explained as artificial. The Moon’s aliens are the source of the UFO phenomenon. The reason for the aliens steering the artificial Moon into Earth orbit in the first place is that Earth provided all the close at hand next door resources the aliens could ever want.

Of course to spoil that good artificial hollow Moon theory, some bright scientist comes up with yet another natural lunar origin explanation that now fitted all of the facts – a rogue near Mars-sized planet slammed, albeit just a glancing blow, into the proto-Earth, and the resulting mixture of thrown off debris from the proto-Earth and the near totally destroyed smaller rouge planet came together under gravity in near Earth proximity to become, the Moon. So, alas, the artificial hollow Moon proved to be another bit of implausible geography.

Face on Mars: The ‘is there or isn’t there life on Mars’ game was set afoot when the American Viking space probes arrived in the Martian arena in 1976. On the scale of micro-organisms, that question still hasn’t been resolved. There are those who are convinced the Viking craft that landed on the Martian surface hit biological pay dirt. Most others say it was only chemical, not biochemical pay dirt. The fence is being sat on by others to this day. However, the other Viking craft that orbited Mars boldly detected not microbial life, but intelligent life on Mars. One photographed the ‘face on Mars’, and by Jove, that’s exactly what it looked like – one huge monolithic massive stone structure on the Martian surface that resembled down to exacting details, a human face. Well, appearances can be, and often are, deceiving. All of us, at one time or another has seen geometry and recognizable shapes, including faces, in the clouds or in rock formations or on toasted cheese sandwiches. Images of ‘Jesus’ appearing on all manner of things are regular fodder for the tabloids.  Anyway, the whole ‘face on Mars’ issue spawned an entire mini publishing boom, though sceptics were 99 & 44/100’s % convinced that it was all just an illusion. And so it came to pass that NASA went back to Mars post-Viking, and, under pressure, had a new orbiting probe take another look under differing lighting conditions. The score – sceptics one; ‘face on Mars’ advocates zero. It really was all just an illusion, a trick of those lighting conditions that when coupled with some wishful thinking produced another example of imaginary geography.     

Hollow Moons of Mars: But wait, we’re not quite through with Mars yet. Mars has two relatively tiny satellites discovered in 1877 and both named after offspring of Ares/Mars – the god of war - that orbit around it. The one farther out and smaller of the two is called Deimos (about 4 miles radius and over 12,400 miles altitude) and the other larger and closer moon is Phobos (about 7 miles radius; altitude 3700 miles from the Martian surface). Actually it would be more accurate to say that neither is a perfect sphere; potato-shaped is a more spot-on description.

Now it came to pass that some scientists monitoring the relative orbits of Deimos and Phobos noticed that they were shrinking much, much, faster that they should have been. The moons were spiralling in towards the planet, eventually destined to have a close encounter of the Ka-Boom impact kind. The very tenuous Martian atmosphere isn’t much of a drag to what must be solid rock moons. The only alterative explanation is that these satellites were hollow; much less dense than solid rock, and therefore, wait for it, artificial, probably relics of a long extinct Martian civilization. Well actually, there was another alternative explanation – the observations of the shrinking orbits were at the limits of resolution technology and were erroneous. Space probes that have since passed up-close-and-personal to and photographed these satellites, and show exactly what you’d expect – not gleaming metallic hollow space stations or the image of a Star Wars type of Death Star configuration, but irregular, potato-shaped, cratered hunks of rock.

Heaven: If you accept the literal truth of Biblical passages, you can draw no other conclusion other than that Heaven is a physical place not of this Earth since there are lots of passages relating beings ascending and descending twixt the two. Therefore Heaven must be located somewhere up there or out there and as the Bible points out, home to an assorted range of supernatural deities (Father, Son and Holy Ghost) and staff, presumably angels (or extraterrestrial officers and crew depending on point of view). Unfortunately, despite Heaven being physical geography, it ain’t been seen by man, telescope or space probe. Heaven would have to be fairly conspicuous – deities and staff don’t reside on a quarter acre block. Try something more like the Taj Mahal or Buckingham Palace or Angkor Wat all cubed.

Of course perhaps Heaven is located light-years away among the stars, but that would hinder rapid interventions by the Heavenly residents here on Terra Firma. Prayers can’t travel faster than the speed of light, and like radio broadcasts, rapidly fade according to the inverse-square law – twice the distance, one-quarter the strength; thrice the distance, one-ninth the strength, etc. So, Heaven, if it makes any sense at all, should be nearby, in cosmic terms. Maybe Heaven resides and is hidden within the cloud bands of Jupiter, though that’s hardly a tranquil or ideal location as is in fact most of the solar system’s real estate. Of course if Heaven were a spaceship, a large spaceship – think Buckingham Palace cubed again – well perhaps that explains Neith. It just moved from the Venus environs to a less conspicuous location like in the asteroid belt or within the rings of Saturn - hidden in plain sight as it were. The upshot is, until proven otherwise, Heaven must be considered a mythical place.

Perhaps we all should be satisfied with the geography we got for real, keeping in mind that the geography we know is but a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny (repeat several hundred more times) of the geography yet to be discovered and explored – the vast cosmos beckons.

Mythologies of the Solar System: Part One

The names of the moons, planets and of course the Sun itself are not just household names unassociated with anything but these celestial bodies, but bodies usually named after selected characters from ancient Greek and Roman mythology. There are tales to be told about them; some fleshing out to do. These are just a few of the highlights.

The planets of the solar system are named after gods and goddesses and are known by their Roman, not Greek names. Here I’ll put the Greek equivalents in brackets afterwards. The satellites of these planets for the most part tend to be the Greek names associated in one form or another with the parent body or the god/goddess in question. Moons (and major asteroids) are identified with an asterisk.

Now you need to understand that at the time of the ancient Roman or Greek pantheon, only eight of the solar system’s celestial bodies were known. There were the three major bodies, the Sun, Moon, and Planet Earth itself of course (thus, way back then, you’d expect a mythological relationship between these three bodies), and the minor five visible planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn which were just points of light to the ancients, though it’s not surprising the ancients matched celestial physics with the personalities of their gods and named them accordingly. Apart from our satellite, the Moon, no other moons were known to the ancients.

MYTHOLOGY AND THE INNER SOLAR SYSTEM

SOL (Helios) is obviously the god of the Sun. It surprises me that given the prominence and importance of this celestial object, our Sun, that the god of the Sun didn’t take pride of place as head of the gods. Be that as it may, Sol, a first generation Titan, was born of the god Hyperion and the goddess Theia, brother to Luna (Selene) and Aurora or Dawn (Eos). His job is to bring light to men and gods alike. He rides in the sky in a fiery chariot pulled by his team of fast horses. Sol, from his vantage point, sees and hears everything (which proved to be the undoing of an illicit relationship between Mars (Ares) and Venus (Aphrodite). The god Apollo later fused as one with Sol’s image though once they were two different deities. Sol’s son, Phaethon, by the ocean nymph Clymene, once tried to ride his father’s horse-drawn chariot, but lost control and had to be killed by Jupiter (Zeus) before the runaway Sun destroyed everything. 

VULCAN (Hephaestus) was once upon a time actually sighted by astronomers and as the closest planet to the Sun, it would of course be HOT, and thusly was named after the deity of fire and blacksmithing. Alas, Vulcan turned out to be as mythical as the deity it was named after.

MERCURY (Hermes) when observed from Earth goes around the Sun quick-smart. So, it was natural to name that body after the fleetest of the gods, the messenger god who flies through the skies on a winged helmet and winged sandals, Mercury. No great mystery there.

VENUS (Aphrodite) was, because of its celestial purity of face and brightness, a female goddess, and of course THE female goddess was the goddess of love. Alas, Venus the planet turned out to be more appropriate for the Christian ruler of the underworld than the goddess of romance. Venus is Hell personified and thus the reality turned out to be vastly different than the expectation, but the ancients couldn’t have known that back then. Venus (or Aphrodite) had an unusual birth, the offspring of Gaia, but fertilized by the blood/semen of Gaia’s son and lover, Uranus, when Uranus was castrated by Saturn (Cronus).

*Neith was the name given to the lone phantom satellite of Venus. I say phantom because, like Vulcan, it was a case of ‘now you see it, now you don’t’. It vanished from the sight of astronomers across the world, but prior to that some saw something. That’s water under the bridge now. The naming of the satellite Neith broke from tradition for Neith was the mysterious early Egyptian goddess of Sais. She was identified with war and hunting and the personification of the primordial waters of creation, though later on down the track she was associated with weaving, which is what Neith means. Wisdom was one of her strong points. She had no known male companion, so was known as a ‘Virgin Mother Goddess’.

GAEA (Gaia) otherwise known as Terra or Earth was one of the original deities ‘born’ out of the original state of the universe – Chaos. Given the relative lack of bed partners around then, she mated with any and all available males, including her asexually created children, like Uranus.

*Luna (Selene) was born of the god Hyperion and the goddess Theia, sister to Sol (Helios) and Aurora or Dawn (Eos). Luna crosses the night sky on a chariot pulled by two white horses. As with Sol and Apollo, the Roman goddess Diana (Artemis) is often associated with, and has melded with Luna (as the crescent-shaped Moon) as has the goddess of the underworld, Hecate (as the New Moon). Luna remains as the Full Moon in the night sky.

MARS (Ares) son of Jupiter (Zeus) and Juno (Hera or Mrs. Zeus) was the god of war, though if mythology be believed, he was rather a wimp of a god, got his butt kicked on several occasions and was rather disliked up on Olympus.

*Deimos: Ares (the god of war) had an extramarital fling with the goddess of love, Aphrodite (who was married to the god of fire, Hephaestus) and from this union produced two sons, one being Deimos, meaning ‘fear’.

*Phobos: That Ares and Aphrodite pairing also produced another son, Phobos, meaning ‘terror’. Both Deimos and Phobos often joined daddy on the battlefield. However, apart from that, they play no significant role in mythology.

ASTEROIDS: There are only four really main or large asteroids among the tens of thousands that exist, Ceres, Pallas, Vesta and Juno.

*Ceres (Demeter) was the goddess of agriculture, the harvest, and the one who controlled the seasons. Zeus had a bedroom fling with her that resulted in Persephone, who Zeus then promised to his brother Hades as his wife. Alas, Zeus didn’t inform either Persephone or Demeter about that decision, which had major repercussions down the track.

*Juno is Mrs. Jupiter, or in the Greek, the equivalent of Hera (Mrs. Zeus). In either case, Juno/Hera is the queen of all the gods and goddesses. She is perhaps noted most of all for her vindictiveness against some of the offspring produced by her husband’s extramarital relationships, most notably, Hercules.

*Pallas is named after Pallas Athena, an alternative name for the Greek goddess Athena. In another version Pallas was the daughter of Triton, who acted as foster parent to Athena. A friendly fight between the two goddesses went sour and Pallas was killed.  

*Vesta (Hestia) was the virgin goddess of the hearth and home or home fire, a real stay-at-home sort of deity and thus doesn’t feature much in mythological adventures and doings. In the Roman version Vesta was represented by a shrine with an eternal flame guarded by the Vestal Virgins who, as a condition of their employment and of remaining alive, had better remain pure, or else. The god of war, Mars, raped one, and from that involuntary union, sprang the twins Remus and Romulus, the latter the founder of Rome. 

To be continued…

Exobiology: Intelligent Life in the Solar System

Exobiology was the original term given to the sciences central to the question of life-in-the-Universe. It’s now been largely replaced by Astrobiology, but I’ll stick with the original. To investigate life-in-the-Universe perhaps we should start a bit closer to home and look to our own solar system. Apart from Planet Earth, we have no absolute proof positive to date that any simple life (i.e. – microbes), exists within the confines of our solar system. But what of intelligent life?

Over the years, there have been some speculations that our solar system plays host to advanced intelligent extraterrestrial beings.

The Moon (Luna): The Hollow and Inhabited Moon Theory: Once upon a time, not all that long ago in fact, there really wasn’t a satisfactory scientific explanation for the natural origin of our satellite, Luna. All the three major theories had fatal flaws. And thus, the possibility that the Moon wasn’t natural at all, but some sort of hollow world, perhaps a UFO base and colony ship, wasn’t all that implausible to some. However, some scientific genius came up with a fourth natural explanation that satisfied all the previous scientific stumbling blocks. Thus, using Ockham’s (or Occam’s) Razor as a guide, me-thinks the hollow Moon theory has proved to be a bit, well, hollow. Pity! However, if UFOs should prove to be space vehicles, the products of alien intelligence, then it logically follows that E.T. will have explored our Moon, maybe even have a base of operations there. That might account for part of the various Transient Lunar Phenomena (TLP) witnessed over many centuries.

The Moons of Mars: For a brief while there was some serious scientific speculation that the tiny twin Martian satellites, Deimos and Phobos, were, based on their orbital characteristics, hollow, and thus artificial. Well, close-up photography has put that to rest. It was the observations that were out of kilter, not the actual orbits of the Martian moons. 

The Face on Mars: An apparently gigantic ‘human’ face was photographed by the Viking Orbiting spacecraft. Alas, however wonderful this would have proved to have been, an obvious alien artefact, it really was just a mirage – a trick of light and shadow as shown by later photographs from other orbiting Mars spacecraft. It proved to be a case of wishful thinking, like the canals of Mars were, and a case of a mountain made unnecessarily out of a molehill.

The Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) hasn’t just focused on trying to detect artificial radio transmissions from E.T. There have been searches of the asteroid belt for obvious signs of astro-engineering (like aliens mining the asteroids for the resources they contain). No luck. There’s also been searches made of the Earth-Moon Lagrangian points – those areas of space where an object can ‘hover’ indefinitely in a fixed position relative to both the Earth and the Moon – sort of like being in geostationary orbit. Anyway, searches have been done at those locations for obvious alien relics or ships, but again, no dice.

I can’t quite leave this area without making reference to that way far out sub-genre of UFO buffs from the 1950s (their heyday) – the contactees. The contactees claimed to have had personal contact with and messages from angelic-like extraterrestrial beings, often called by the contactees our ‘space brothers’ who have come to Earth in their ‘flying saucers’. 

The contactees were often bucketed as total loonies back then (in the 50’s) by the mainstream, even mainstream people interested in extraterrestrial life and UFOs. That’s no less so today if someone is still foolish enough to mention them. But a question remains on the grounds of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ - and none of the contactees were ever convicted and imprisoned for outright fraud. But did the contactees (collectively) invent these angelic-like extraterrestrial beings with the intent of fraud; or to have some fun and hoax the public and pull the wool over their unsuspecting eyes; or perhaps they just, collectively, had some serious mental issues, say delusions of sorts. Or, perhaps the contactees were relating the truth as they thought they had experienced it, when perhaps the angelic-like extraterrestrial beings were being less than 100% honest with them.

In any event, the contactees spun the tale that these angelic-like ‘space brothers’ came from the other planets and bodies in our solar system (some we haven’t even discovered yet). Our Moon, Venus, Saturn, etc. were all home to these advanced extraterrestrials. The contactees rode in the ‘space brothers’ ‘flying saucers’ and visited their planetary homes, however preposterous that seemed back even then. Although then again, you have that angelic-like ancient Near Eastern goddess Inanna or Inana (Ishtar) identified with the celestial planet Venus, so who knows where the ‘gods’ have actually set up camp! Venus might be pure fire-and-brimstone hell to us, but then too we, using our technology, can survive in environments previously lethal to us – say under the sea or on the Antarctic icecap.

Just because there’s no obvious evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence in our solar system now doesn’t mean there wasn’t in the past, or of course they could be here now, hiding in plain sight – those pesky UFO events!

Exobiology: Life in the Solar System: Summary & Conclusions

Exobiology was the original term given to the sciences central to the question of life-in-the-Universe. It’s now been largely replaced by Astrobiology, but I’ll stick with the original. To investigate life-in-the-Universe perhaps we should start a bit closer to home and look to our own solar system. Apart from Planet Earth, we have no absolute proof positive to date that any other life, albeit relatively simple forms compared to terrestrial life forms such as ourselves and associated companion animals and plants, exists within the confines of our solar system. However, I conclude in this overall summary the odds are fairly high, almost certain in fact; those other, albeit relatively simple extraterrestrial life forms do exist in our immediate cosmic neighbourhood. 

Life is ultimately nothing more than an ongoing series of complex biochemical reactions. These sort of reactions tend to be optimal at warmer (quasi Earth-like) temperatures. Too cold and the necessary chemical reactions are too sluggish, if they proceed at all. Too hot, complex organic molecules rapidly break down. So, Titan (moon of Saturn) is probably way too chilly even though it has a thick atmosphere and lots of organic molecules on the surface, even organic liquids forming large lakes if not exactly oceans. The surface of Venus in contrast is way too hot, but it has a thick atmosphere that’s a lot more temperate at higher altitudes. Some real estate is both too hot and too cold at the same time – Mercury and Luna (our Moon) for example and lacking any real atmosphere and liquid water aren’t top of the pops for finding life, however simple.

Mars, long associated with intelligent extraterrestrial life, is still a near certainty for much housing far simpler extraterrestrial life forms, like microbes. There are many independent chains of observational evidence that support that conclusion. Proof positive however, still waits.

Europa (moon of Jupiter) has in all probability a liquid water ocean beneath a global ice cap. Water plus a geothermal/tidal energy heat source opens up a good plausibility for going ice fishing to our descendents several generations down the track. There are several other moons with ice cap surfaces covering possible liquid oceans that might rival Europa as an eventual fishing destination.

My favourite solar system locations for (probably) tough-as-nails microbial life, Mars apart, are the upper atmospheres of the Jovian (gas giant) planets (Jupiter and Saturn; maybe Uranus and Neptune). Their atmospheres are rich in organics and no doubt water vapour.  The gas giants, Uranus excepted, radiate more heat energy than they receive from the Sun. There will be regions in their upper atmospheres that have Earth-like temperatures; there will be a lot of atmospheric mixing (useful for bringing different chemicals together); and of course these planets will also have been seeded with organics and water from space via comets, meteors, cosmic dust, etc., if not in fact seeded directly with microbial life forms via the Panspermia hypothesis.

The problem in finding out for sure is going to revolve around sending appropriate instrumentation into those planetary atmospheres that will be able to detect actual life forms, as opposed to just measuring just purely physical parameters and chemical constituents. So, don’t expect definite answers anytime soon.  

Lastly, we can’t rule out comets and meteors from housing dormant extraterrestrial microbial life forms.

Exobiology: Life In The Inner Solar System

Exobiology was the original term given to the sciences central to the question of life-in-the-Universe. It’s now been largely replaced by Astrobiology, but I’ll stick with the original. To investigate life-in-the-Universe perhaps we should start a bit closer to home and our own inner solar system – Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon and Mars. Apart from Planet Earth, we have no absolute proof positive to date that any other life, albeit relatively simple forms compared to terrestrial life forms such as ourselves and associated companion animals and plants, exists within the confines of our solar system. However, the odds are fairly high, almost certain in fact; those other, extraterrestrial life forms do exist in our immediate cosmic neighbourhood. 

Humans and our associated kin on the third rock out from the Sun are lords of life forms in the solar system. But, we’re not unique lords, just lords. Other abodes in the inner solar system, most probably Mars, are possible even probable habitable abodes to simple microbial life forms; perhaps something slightly above and beyond that.

But first a pat on the back for those terrestrial microbes; all those germs, bacteria, unicellular critters and even viruses (though viruses, depending on your perception of their actually being alive as we normally define ‘alive’ might exclude them from this discussion). They are tough, I mean they boldly go, survive, and even thrive where even angels fear to tread, far less humans.

On Earth, microbes rule, OK? The biomass of all those bacteria, etc. put together easily equals the biomass of every other multicellular plant and animal added together. One could easily argue that microbes, not humans, are the jewels in God’s crown – He made so many of them, and talk about being fruitful and multiplying. The number and mass of micro-organisms are many orders of magnitude greater than the numbers and collective mass of humanity. If fact, there are millions of microbes living inside you – most beneficial. In fact, it could also be argued that you are nothing more than an elaborate colony of billions of unicellular organisms – your individual cells that make you, you..

Microbes have another decided advantage over more complex life forms, like plants. Solar energy (photosynthesis) isn’t the only kind of energy available to organisms. Even on Earth there are lots of organisms, mainly unicellular ones, that use chemosynthesis as the means by which they directly derive their energy needs, directly as in from the chemicals in their environment. Today we know a great deal about chemosynthesis and the organisms that can produce organics from inorganic substances and derive energy from the process.

When I was a high school biology student (1962-63), it was absolutely gospel (and no correspondence would be entered into contrary) that our Sun was the be all and end all of the existence of terrestrial life. No sun; no life. All life ultimately depended on photosynthetic plants which in turn couldn’t exist without sunlight. And while we don’t get our energy directly via photosynthesis, we’re still dependent on solar energy since we eat the plants or the animals that eat the plants.

A well known, if little understood example of chemosynthesis are the colonies of microbes (dubbed ‘rusticles’) that are eating the iron structure of the RMS Titanic, resting some four kilometres below the surface of the North Atlantic. Within another generation or two, the famous shipwreck will have been basically consumed by microbes, without any benefit bestowed by our sun. Also from the marine environment, the entire ecological communities’ part and parcel of hydrothermal vent systems is ultimately based on chemosynthesis.

From terrestrial environments to those of outer space and our solar system is but perhaps a small step for microbes. Even back in those high school days however I seem to recall speculation by no less a scientist than the late Carl Sagan about the possibility of a non-photosynthetic based ecology in the atmosphere of Jupiter which gladdened my heart no end - however, it wasn‘t Jupiter that broke the photosynthetic mould, but good old Mother Earth herself as it hydrothermal vent ecosystems among many others now known. So gospel ain’t gospel any longer!

Now taking each abode in turn…

Mercury: The planet Mercury, closest planet to our Sun, unfortunately lacks any atmosphere to speak of, and broils on the side facing the Sun and freezes on the side facing away – much like our Moon, and is in fact is similarly heavily cratered. There’s no liquid water on the surface, and overall, like our Moon, seems totally inhospitable. Bacteria might be able to exist in a dormant sort of way in 100% sheltered niches, but actively survive and thrive they do not.

Venus: The planet Venus had long been thought of as Earth’s twin sister. It’s the second planet out from the Sun, and has a size and density very close to terrestrial values. It also has an atmosphere. Being closer to the Sun than Earth, Venus was, pre-space age, thought to be warm and moist, a totally tropical environment of lush vegetation where maybe dinosaur-like creatures or dragons roamed and chased scantly clad maidens! Alas, once space probes crossed paths with, and landed on, Venus, such dreams of a tropical paradise was dashed. Well its tropical alright, if ‘tropical’ means a surface temperature of 900 degrees Fahrenheit.  But the atmosphere, mainly carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas - is so thick and dense that the atmospheric pressure is way massive relative to Earth’s. So, Venus turned out to be more akin to Hell than a tropical Heaven. No life here!

But wait, perhaps such a judgment is premature. What happens here on Earth as you climb up a high mountain? Well, the temperature drops and the air gets more rarefied - and so too on Venus. In the upper atmosphere, the temperature and pressure of Venus drops to more terrestrial surface conditions. There can’t be surface life-as-we-know-it on that planet, but what about simple, say microbial life existing in the upper atmosphere?

The question therefore is, if life couldn’t have arose on the surface of Venus because it is just too damn hot (and no water), where hence did the atmospheric life (microbial most likely) come from? Well, the surface of Venus, way back when, may have been far more hospitable than it is now. However, there’s also Panspermia – life forms adrift in space that eventually impact other worlds. The upper atmosphere of Venus may have been seeded with microbial life forms at some time in the past via such a mechanism, the same mechanism that may have kick-started life on the early Earth, and perhaps seeded other planetary abodes in our solar system. 

Earth (Terra): Home! Nothing further need be said.

The Moon (Luna): Like Mercury, our Moon is airless and subject to extremes in temperature depending on whether the Moon is facing towards or away from the Sun. While the first couple of crews of Apollo Moon landing astronauts were quarantined after their missions, just in case, no extraterrestrial life forms of any kind were ever discovered. But that’s not quite the end of the story. The Apollo 12 astronauts brought back with them a few bits and pieces of the unmanned Lunar Surveyor that had landed about three years previously. Terrestrial bacteria within those bits and pieces were found to still be viable after exposure to the lunar vacuum, intense radiation exposure and temperature extremes. While hardly indigenous Lunar life forms, they give credibility (as if any were needed) that microbes are composed of the right stuff to survive the rigours of outer space.