LYCOS RETRIEVER
Extraterrestrial Life: Earth
built 633 days ago
Remote sensing helps in searching for extraterrestrial life. Robotic sampling missions may ... be attempted. After the landing zone is selected, rovers could be used to deliver samplers closer to the best locations. Spacecrafts used to search for extraterrestrial lives are sterilized as they could contaminate extraterrestrial locales with earth organisms. But, note that the degree of sterilization varies and are mission-specific. Research by several groups suggests that meteorites from other planets contain amino acid analogs that are common among the earth's living things.
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No one knows if extraterrestrial life, or life that originated beyond Earth, exists or ever existed. The branch of biology concerned with extraterrestrial life, from microscopic organisms to intelligent beings, is called exobiology or astrobiology. Scientists in this field consider the conditions necessary for life, how it evolves, how to detect alien life-forms,
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Excerpt: With the discovery of the potentially habitable planet Gliese 581 c, astrobiologists are setting their sights on the search for extraterrestrial life. Where are the best places to look? What are the best instruments to perform those searches? How will they do it? More information about this Earth-like exoplanet [Gliese 581 c] is found at the ITwire article “Earth-like planet found around star Gliese 581, 20.5 LYs away” at http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/11577/1066/. [See ... ESO press release, and Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy site.]
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Perhaps Americans expect to take a government announcement about extraterrestrial life in stride because many Americans already believe in the extraterrestrial. Two-thirds of Americans say they think there are other forms of intelligent life in the universe and nearly half say they believe that UFOs have visited the earth in some form over the years (48 percent) or that aliens have monitored life on earth (45 percent). In fact, more than one in three Americans (37 percent) believe that humans have already interacted with extraterrestrial lifeforms. These beliefs tend to be more prevalent among males and among adults under the age of 65.
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Authors of Jewish sources ... considered extraterrestrial life. The Talmud states that there are at least 18,000 other worlds, but provides little elaboration on the nature of the worlds and on whether they are physical or spiritual. Based on this, however, the 18th century exposition "Sefer HaB'rit" posits that extraterrestrial creatures exist but that they have no free will (and are thus equivalent to animal life). It adds that human beings should not expect creatures from another world to resemble earthly life, any more than sea creatures resemble land animals.[7][8]
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Most scientists agree that if Aliens, or extraterrestrial life, does in fact exist, its evolution would have occurred independently at different times and in different places throughout the universe. Others hypothesize that all life in the universe could have culminated in one original location, then spread from planet to planet. While no proof for extraterrestrial life has ever been found, mysterious events such as the Roswell, New Mexico incident in July of 1947 have continued to fuel speculation and countless stories and ideas as to whether or not alien life forms beyond the planet Earth really exist.
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