Keppler 22b and Anomalocaris

 Keppler system. NASA 

APOD

Recently discovered planet Keppler 22b is orbiting its sun within the habitable zone as defined by astrobiologists. The surface temperature is comfortable 20° Celsius and there may thus be liquid water. Keppler system is some 600 light years from our Sun and is one of the more promising locations to look for signs of extraterrestrial life. In fact, a SETI project is already being developed to start listening for intelligent signals from that direction towards the constellation of Cygnus.


Communication problems
If there is life in the oceans of Keppler 22b how might those creatures look like?

There is no realistic hope that we would have space craft and robots visiting Keppler 22b in the near future. Space travel is a bit expensive.

Of course, we will be very happy if the intelligent folks over there start to send us images of their modern and ancient flora and fauna over some shared frequencies. But alas, the universal speed limit set by speed of light...

Even if a SETI project successfully establishes detects a cosmic radio station built by the inhabitants of Keppler 22b the good fellows will get and decode our earthly signals only in about 600 years from now that is in 2612. Of course, they will right away realize that the intelligent message came from that tiny planet X near that middle sized star and respond promptly in return mail. But even in that happy case we can expect their answers only in another 1200 years or about 3212 AD. Talking about long-term projects...


Options for extraterrestrial life forms

Anomalocaris. An artist's view

Credit Katrina Kenny/University of Adelaide, Australia

In order to find out some options let us take a 500 million years trip to another planet instead of distant Keppler 22b. That planet is also orbiting its sun in the habitable zone and has a surface temperature that makes presence of liquid water and thus life as we know it possible. The planet is located in the Milky Way Galaxy and scientists call it Tellus. A more common name is planet Earth.

We can get over 500 million year old signals of life from Tellus without using telescopes or turning the Hubble mirrors. Instead of detecting light signals that allow astronomers to analyse stellar spectra and through it the chemistry of the object we have actual specimens of other life forms available in what is commonly called fossil evidence.

Tellus has even today a most wonderful - although sadly dwindling - biodiversity. But when we examine the full known range of three billion years of history of life here we start to realize what a true paradise and what a rare planet our Earth really is in the local group of galaxies.


Cambrian explosion of life
When we travel those 500 million years back in time to young Earth - the explosion of life in Cambrian period we meet an extraordinary interesting and even fantastic world of God's creatures. One of the most fascinating pockets of survival of that era and protected for us by our good Lord is Burgess Shale in British Columbia, Canada.

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989) is a book on the evolution of Cambrian fauna by Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The volume was the 1991 winner of The Aventis Prizes for Science Books, and a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize..
(wikipedia)

Another pocket has survived in Kangaroo Island off the coast of Australia from where the fossilised exceptionally well preserved eyes of our example were recently discovered. The discovery is a truly staggering victory to the slow and patient work of Palaeontology. The remains show that the delicate composite eyes of the largest predator of the time Anomalocaris had over 16000 lenses letting it see underwater very sharply and almost in 360° degrees.

Not an alien
Anomalocaris is an anomality, as its name says, yes.  But no - this particular fellow is not an alien or extinct form of life on Tellus.  Even the not-so-highly educated but highly sympathetic friend of Forrest Gump, Bubba Blue, would immediately have recognized its shrimp like features.

Near and far relatives, cousins, nephews and grand-grand-....-children of the scary looking huge shrimp like anomalocaris share the planet today with us in the billions - biologists slump them all into a group called arthropods as they tend to have joint feet.

Dragonfly eyes. 

wikimedia

For example, the amazing dragonflies composite eyes with many thousands of lenses are technically not so unlike from the eyes of anomalocaris.

Subject for another blog
Because the subject of early life on planet Earth is so fascinating and complicated I will open another blog for discussions on Cambrian life.

Prolegomena for Extraterrestial life - ET

Encounter of the Third Kind

Astrobiology studies life in our solar system and in outer space and is becoming an increasingly significant field of research about the origins of life on our planet. The Titan expedition was trying to find out conditions that could resemble earth some three billion years ago when the crust of our planet began to be cool enough.

This blog is not about Astrobiology but Astrotheology, Space Theology, yet I do propose some indications about what biological extraterrestial life might be. You are welcome to join in the discussion and propose additional prolegomena to my list!


1. All life originates ultimately from a single source
Creator of the entire Universe, God of Israel, is the only one who gives life. His universe is full of life.

Life cannot be generated artificially; only life begets life. Therefore modern biologists consider that the various life forms upon Earth have single point of origins.

Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) gave prominence to the Panspermia theory according to which particles of life are flying in the interstellar space in asteroids and meteroids. Such rock has hit our planet over 2 billion years ago starting life for the first time here when the environmental conditions were ripe. Additional "impregnations" may have happened since the beginning causing perhaps multiple beginnings of life or, for example, bacterial epidemics, macro evolutionary changes or have in other ways affected life on our Tellus.

Panspermia theory does not explain the origins of life - it only moves the riddle further to the deep space. Logically reversing the Big Bang of Life we can propose that all living beings in the entire Universe do originate from a single source of life.

We humans have about as good chances to explain more closely the Origin of Life as we have in explaining the state of the Universe just before the Big Bang.



2. Extraterrestial soul and intelligence is recognizable to us
According to the self-revelation of the Creator of the world in the Hebrew Bible, man and woman are together an image of the hidden and invisible God. Since all extraterrestial life having sufficient level of consciousness to communicate with the Creator is also image of God, the extraterrestial soul and intelligence is recognizable to us. So is the presence of male and female ETs!

Science-fiction tends to fill the space with human devouring alien monsters. Well - these products of human imagination are rather in the image of the adversor of God upon planet Earth, who loves to make us to murder each other in different ways.

The Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence (SETI) of the University of Berkeley is not a bad idea. It is just a very difficult attempt of finding intelligence in outer space because of the level of noise in space and the immense distances between stars and galaxies.

The Kepler space telescope has reportedly already collected data about 1200 stars that seem to have planetary system similar to our Sun. It is probable that many millions of stars even in our own Milky Way, not to speak of Andromeda, have intelligent life. And these life forms are recognizable to us and can communicate with us - maybe with Spielberg type music of close encounters - because the same God has created them who created us.


3. Biodiversity in the cosmos is beyond our imagination
Our rapidly evolved brains separates us from the rest of life upon Earth. We humbly call ourselves homo sapiens sapiens exactly for this reason - without being there we can even calculate in our brains what probably happened during the first milliseconds of Creation in the Big Bang (if there was one...). We are able to understand the strange mathematics of atomic particles and the electronic orbits and antimatter. Maybe someday we will figure out what is dark matter and energy.

Yet our imagination is limited to painting images on what we have, images that our brain is capable of producing from the input of memes and memories and observation and imagination.

God has demonstrated such immense richness of imagination when creating the biodiversity upon this planet (which we are quickly destroying in our greed for rapid and constant economic growth) that there must be myriads of life forms in the Universe that are totally beyond our imagination. Once we see one of them, we can imagine others like it.

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Update June 3 2012. Highly focused technique for search of intelligent life BBC article

UFOs, ET, SETI and Neo-paganism

Searching for extraterrestrial life
Arecibo Radio Telescope - Puerto Rico

UFOs are commonplace these days of intensive aviation and space exploration: so many things are flying around in the atmosphere and orbiting earth that there are plenty of unknown flying objects.

A bright light in the east at night, a dark fast flying thing in the west, a strangely hovering thing the captain sees from the cockpit, and those bright fast moving lights that defy explanation.

They are all unknown, they are flying in odd ways and most of them are some sort of objects.


The Big question: are there intelligent extraterrestrials?
In other words are there genuine UFOs that are not made by people living on this planet for military or civilian purpose and that are not just some unusual natural phenomena such as meteorites or optical phenomena in the atmosphere.

A very convincing photo!

Something like from the popular books written by Erik von Däniken with mysterious visitors from outer space examining life on earth and leaving odd signs in the archaeological and historical records of humanity?

Something like Steven Spielberg's wonderful imagination of Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the even more wonderful classic ET?

Close encounter of the lovely kind: ET and Steven Spielberg

Something like those persistent rumors of US army being in the know but wisely hiding from the general public not to create panic?

Or the human body freezing aliens in X-files style? Or hostile creatures like those described in detail in Independence Day? Or the aggressive but not music loving creatures in the comedy Martian attacks? Or the a little strange American family in the comedy Third Rock from the Sun? or the scary teethed Coneheads? or the outright scary Aliens?

There obviously is an interest in the subject that movie makers, SciFi writers and TV series producers can rejoice and also cash on!

Guest landing to Chicago O'Hara Airport?

Plus a lot of urban legends.



Yes

My personal answer as a Christian to the Big question "is there extraterrestrial intelligent life" is a resounding Yes.

I believe that God of Israel does not create emptiness. He is Life and surely the entire universe He has created is bursting with most diverse life forms from corner to corner.

There is plenty of extraterrestrial life out there that goes beyond our wildest imaginations. I am sure that the nearby Andromeda Galaxy is utterly filled with life as we know it and with life as we do not know it.


But it does not really matter

Why?

The Bible is divine revelation and it talks about the God of Israel and the Savior of children of Adam and Eve and the Holy Ghost that is present in this planet in the congregation and about the end of this world of ours and new earth and heavens that God will create. The focus is here not because outer space was unknown to Biblical writers but because extraterrestrial life does not matter.

There are billions of other worlds. But they are so far from us that it does not really matter.


We were alone in this universe even we are not alone!

We are alone despite the possibility that the entire cosmos is bursting life out there. We are alone because of the enormous distances even there surely are many other intelligent beings out there.

Today we do not have realistic possibilities to visit even our nearest neighbor alfa Centaur. Four and half light years is such a distance that it is way beyond our best technologies for space travel. Perhaps ionized wind could speed our spacecraft to such speeds that after two or three human generations time it would reach the vicinity of alfa Centaur - but it will be a one way ticket for the grand children of the astronauts who began the trip.


Still, let us look for intelligent life in space!
Personally I do not want to discourage anyone from imagining other worlds, writing books or making movies about them, from broadcasting logical signals towards deep space, from building space capsules that contain gold disc with the music of J.S. Bach or spending a fortune to extensive listening of space noise in order to locate some interesting area of space where some source of meaningful signals exists.


SETI project
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence SETI program combining broadcasting and listening stations and exhaustive analysis of recorded noise from the space for any kind of logical or mathematical pattern created by some alien intelligent mind.

Anyone can donate processor time from his or her computer to the innovative Berkeley SETI project in order to help analyze the immense amount of radio signal fluctuations their Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico is recording. You will not be the only one - some five million people have downloaded the software to support this search for alien intelligence. Read more about this innovative University of California project and how to participate in it from here.



Neopaganism
Reaching for the ultimate unknown of the universe is a very productive and good challenge for the human race forcing us to try something together.

So let us do all we can to colonize the space starting with the moon and mars and let us build mighty international space stations and vehicles that can reach beyond our solar system.

Let us invest on space research and become tourists to high orbits to admire God's wonderful creation.

But let us not worship UFO things!!

Seeking for close encounters of the wrong kind

There is always something in the mysterious, secret and majestic universe that entices us to put our trust on space beings as our helpers and saviors or make us fear them as our enemies. The UFO neo-paganism is an awful return to the ancient paganism where heavenly bodies were considered divide and influential in our lives. Now people worship things flying between those suns and stars with consequences in their lives, distortion of religious behavior and outright blasphemy against the one true God who has created earth and heavens, both visible and invisible.


Let us worship the only God and nobody beyond Him

The One who has made it all - and us too - and who has promised to take care of the humanity He has created. In a just and righteous manner.

As it is written in the holy Scriptures of Old and New Testament.

Beware of UFO paganism, it is a creeping thing coming from the direction of space but in reality being a mixture of human imagination and fantasies and the works of evil spirits that mess things up around here on planet earth.