Random Thoughts, Random Places

Lord Rees, the president of the Royal Society and Astronomer Royal,said the chance of discovering alien life is greater than ever.  He believes the newer space telescopes will make it easier to dicover earth like planets orbiting distant stars.  He said, “Technology has advanced so that for the very first time we can actually have the realistic hope of detecting planets no bigger than the earth orbiting other stars.” Rees made his comments at a gathering of scientists in London for a conference on the possibilities of discovering extra-terrestrial life.

Also attending is physicist Professor Paul Davies of Arizona State University.  He thinks that instead of scanning the heavens we should search inhospitable areas of earth such as deserts for “weird” microbes that might belong to a “shadow biosphere”. He told the London Dail Mail, ‘We need to give up the notion that ET is sending us some sort of customised message and take a new approach.”

But the majority of the scientific community believe the search in outer space remains our best bet for finding aliens. Professor Colin Pillinger  remains sceptical of focusing our search on Earth.  He said, “I prefer to deal in scientific fact – this is wildly science fiction. You’d be off your trolley to go searching for arsenic-based life.”

Weird microbes in the desert?  Maybe this explains some of the characters I’ve seen wandering around Area 51.

In a report to  215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society last week, astronomer Peter Garnavich of the University of Notre Dame and his collaborators revealed their discovery of a star that exploded when its center became so hot that matter and anti-matter were created. The explosion of the star, dubbed Y-155, was visible almost half way across the universe.

The group discovered the exploding star during ESSENCE supernova search. Garnavich said, “ESSENCE found many explosions in our 6 years of searching, but Y-155 stood out as the most powerful and unusual of all our discoveries.” Although because if its distance the star appears a million times fainter than the human eye can see, Garnavich added, “If Y-155 had exploded in the Milky Way it would have knocked our socks off.” And probably would have contributed heavily to “Global Warming”.

You can read more about it at Space Daily.

Was it a UFO? Was it a meteor? Was it an early visit from Santa Claus? Or maybe is was a star, honoring the recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Or was it a Russian rocket test? (The Russians say, “nyet”.) But they did admit to a ballistic missile launch from the submarine “Dmitry Donskoi”, although they didn’t disclose it’s location.

No one knows for sure, but the speculations on the internet have gone wild.  You can see a video here on YouTube, and a complete story at CNN.

We report. You decide.

Tales of secret underground laboratories abound in the lore of UFOs. But now there’s a real deep underground lab, and it’s no secret.  The Deep Underground Science and Engineering Lab(DUSEL) is being built in the old Homestake gold mine at Lead, South Dakota. There have been other labs built in the old mine in the past, particularly a neutrino detector, but until recently the mine was sealed and filling with water. The first efforts are to get the water out; other work will follow. The DUSEL will be at the 4850 level to start, with other labs planned as deep as 8000 feet.

Did a UFO save the world from a collision with an 1 billion ton meteorite?  That’s the supposition put forth by Russian scientist Yuriy Lavbin. In an article from the Macedonian International News Agency (MINA), Lavbin says that Siberian scientists, searching river banks near the site of the 1908 Tunguska meteorite crash, found unusual quartz boards; solid stones that do not exist on Earth. And there were strange drawings on the stones. Scientist could not duplicate them, even with the most powerful lasers available. They theorize a UFO carrying the stones put itself between the meteor and the earth, breaking it up and deflecting most of it away from earth.  Of course it didn’t do much good to the UFO.

I don’t know what those altruistic aliens would do with those solid stones on a UFO. The weight might cause problems with flight.  Of course that may explain all those crashes in New Mexico. But if you read it  on Macedonian International News Agency website, who can argue with that.  The story was even picked up by Fox News.

‘Nuf said.