Life Beyond Earth

“If we find lots of planets like ours…we’ll know it’s likely that we aren’t alone, and that someday we might be able to join other intelligent life in the universe.”

– William Borucki, principal investigator for NASA’s Kepler mission

Sources:

 

 

According to NASA, there is no solid evidence of life outside the Earth, but a great number of their scientists think that there’s life beyond earth, so they’re looking for it with great passions. Earth hasn’t been visited by aliens. The combination of high probability of life and this lack of evidence, is called the Fermi Paradox – which is just basically asking if we’re not alone and the aliens are intelligent, where is everybody? (Sources 1 & 3)

When are the scientists going to find life beyond earth? It depends on two factors; the prevalence of life and being lucky. How are they going to find it? (source 1)

  • They are looking for Oxygen, water vapor, or some other powerful indication of possible life on other earth-sized, giant-sized, or super giant-sized planets. That means that they might find an outsized version of our planet which is a very suitable place for alive beings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKFaAS30X8#action=share (source 1)

 

  • They are going to look for the pollution caused by the “reasonably advanced technology of the aliens”. “As Isaac Newton recognized, white light shot through a prism is exposed for what it really is: a band of color spanning violet to red, characterized by “wavelength.” Chemicals and gases in the atmospheres of planets can absorb certain slices of this band, called a spectrum, and leave behind a narrow black gap”. So they’re going to analyze the light that is being shot by a star through the atmosphere of the distant planets, and the missing gaps might indicate methane, another, oxygen. Seeing those together could be a strong argument for existence of life out of earth. (source 1)

 

  • They are looking for different kind of life! They think that there could be life out of earth, but it might be so different that they could miss it and not see it. So they came up with computer-generated mixtures of six elements that associate with life on earth and they look for those combinations on other planets. (source 1)

 

  • There is a camera in making progress – called the Thermo Scientific SPECTRA CAM XDR – which is “capable of observing a faint object in the presence of an object that is one billion times brighter; like spotting a candle next to a lighthouse.” This camera is not ready yet so the scientists use other techniques, like looking at a planet’s gravitational movement. (source 2)

The search for life beyond earth is still in progress…

Rube Goldberg Machine Science 10

Rube Gold Berg’s Machine – THE UNPLUGGER

Step 1 – A person fires the rubber band to a ball that is placed on top of the play button of the laptop.

Step 2 –  The laptop is already connected to the speaker, the speaker plays a loud music and vibrates to make the dominos fall.

Step 3 – Dominos start to fall and they hit the ball which is placed at the very end.

Step 4 – The ball drops down and hits the shoe box.

Step 5 – The ball on the upper side of the slide rolls down due to the vibration created by the ball that drop.

Step 6 – As the ball rolls the slide, it hits the wooden stick wheel.

Step 7 – The wooden stick wheel spins and hits the book with the edge of the stick.

Step 8 – Books fall on each other and the last book hits the charger and unplugs it successfully.

Energy Transformation Used

  1. Elastic —> Mechanical
  2. Sound —> Mechanical
  3. Gravitational —> Mechanical

Types of Energy Used

  1. Gravitational
  2. Electrical
  3. Mechanical
  4. Elastic
  5. Sound

The Unplugger-2jzxere