Category: Uncategorized

IT STARTED WITH INTERSTELLAR DUST. The speculations of Fred Hoyle & Chandra Wickramasinghe started with the unlikely subject of interstellar dust. Who would devote a chunk of their life to the study of such a subject? As unlikely a start to astrobiology, this was the beginning, most famously in the then outrageous idea that much of this dust was composed of desiccated bacteria and viruses. View in LinkedIn

IT STARTED WITH DARWIN. Here is a stunning factoid. Before Darwin’s 1859 book, On the Origin of the Species, which suggested life arose in a warm pond, nobody in Western society questioned the origin of life, which was deemed to be God-given. The answer to this question was simply taken as a given. Ancient peoples the world over had creation myths, but these became suffused under the blanket of orthodox christian thinking in the West for about two thousand years. Genesis became our dominant myth. View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE focuses on a very unusual white paper by Professor Jason T. Wright about the state of affairs in exobiology, the search for extraterrestrial life, astonishingly endorsed by 126 prominent people from academia, NASA, SETI, observatories, and industry. This section starts by five of quotes from the late Professor Fred Hoyle & Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, while at Cambridge University, the two truly remarkable scholars who set in motion the modern resurgence of Panspermia back in the 1970s; this topic is the sad mirror of humanity’s self-fixation that has (nearly) obliterated our curiosity. http://www.lifefromspace.com/Another-Beginning/Life-Cloud/ View in LinkedIn

THE TRUE BACKWATER. “Indeed, many in the public would be surprised to learn that the field is not part of the publicly-funded science portfolio, and how few scientists are actually involved in the search. The reasons for this are varied, but are ultimately social, not scientific.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE focuses on a very unusual white paper by Professor Jason T. Wright about the state of affairs in exobiology, the search for extraterrestrial life, astonishingly endorsed by 126 prominent people from academia, NASA, SETI, observatories, and industry. This section starts by five of quotes from the late Professor Fred Hoyle & Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, while at Cambridge University, the two truly remarkable scholars who set in motion the modern resurgence of Panspermia back in the 1970s; this topic is the sad mirror of humanity’s self-fixation that has (nearly) obliterated our curiosity. https://lnkd.in/dTcBWgy View in LinkedIn

NEW AWAKENINGS. “The past 10 years have seen a resurgence in searches for extraterrestrial intelligence. Some of the drivers for this include: The Big Data revolution; The privately-financed Breakthrough Listen Initiative.” But no systematic search for extraterrestrial biology. https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

0 View in LinkedIn

0 View in LinkedIn

POLITICALLY SIDELINED. “Because of this lack of support, searches for technosignatures, precisely the part of the search of greatest public interest, suffers from a very small pool of trained practitioners. A major source of this issue is institutional inertia at NASA, which avoids the topic as a result of decades-past political grandstanding, conflation of the effort with non-scientific topics such as UFOs, and confusion regarding the scope of the term “SETI”.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

THE BACKWATER OF CURIOSITY. “The search for life in the universe is a major theme of astronomy and astrophysics for the next decade. This approach has been endorsed in prior Decadal Reviews and National Academies reports, and yet the field still receives almost no federal support in the US.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn