Could humans live on alien worlds the way they have on Earth from the beginnings of the hominid lineage?

Well, within the Solar System, so far there is just one world capable of supporting our kind of life -- Earth itself. But we could plant bases and even underground colonies on the Moon and Mars, even now -- it's only a matter of going through ( Read more... )

http://unixronin.livejournal.com/764107.html

This is so good I just had to link it. You may also want to check out Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, which goes into the whys and wherefores of the low probability of two relatively technologically advanced ( Read more... )

Stephen Hawking Warns Of Aliens | The Onion - America's Finest News Source | American VoicesNow, why the hell would ET bother mining our planet for resources, anyway? All the raw materials are available in interstellar space and in the less desirable real estate in any stellar system in quantities orders of magnitude greater than anything ( Read more... )

If you're wondering why I seem to be obsessing over these two subjects, there's a method to my madness ( Read more... )

I had an exchange with someone on LiveJournal the other day having to do with humanity's flaws and bad behavior, which, by the way, are numerous and, in many cases, terrible. He had posted about the tragic death of Alan Turing, who was gay and hounded to his grave by the US government ( Read more... )

. . . Earth did not spring into being in its present state; instead, it took billions of years to develop into what it is today. Similarly, it will not sustain today’s environment forever; Our planet will break down as the human body does, in a complex series of processes that can be forecast as surely as our own deaths. [We believe habitable ( Read more... )

Certainly we have shown that the conditions for the Earth’s rich diversity did not pop into being, but instead were the result of billions of years of geologic processes, the modification of the atmosphere, and evolution. A complex system has arisen in which plants and animals provide services to one another and in which photosynthesis and animal ( Read more... )

. . . [Earthly life] may have reached a steady state of diversity some time ago! Scientists also learned that biological productivity - the total amount of living plant and animal tissue on Earth - appears to have been higher 200 million to 300 million years ago, when the planet was warmer and richer in atmospheric carbon dioxide than it is today ( Read more... )

How did one emerging multicelled plant and [sic] animal lead to another? We don’t know in any detail. The fossil record for these early soft-bodied experiments is scant, and the evolutionary sequence remains unclear; what is clear, however, is that about 530 million years ago there was a sudden proliferation of marine animals experimenting with a ( Read more... )