Biology Blog and Biological Sciences News and Articles

Our recent post on the shadow biosphere attracted a lot of attention, including from Dr. Paul Davies himself.  We’ve been talking to Dr. Davies now and were happy to learn that he has just published a new book on the implications of shadow life for the search for extra-terrestrial beings. Here’s what Dr. Davies had to say about his new book:

Fifty years ago, a young astronomer named Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope at nearby stars in the hope of picking up a signal from an alien civilization. Thus began one of the boldest scientific projects in history — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). But after a half-century of scanning the skies, astronomers have little to report but an eerie silence — eerie, because many scientists are convinced that the universe is teeming with life. The problem could be that we’ve been looking in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and in the wrong way. In this book I offer a new and exciting roadmap for SETI’s future, arguing that we need to be far more expansive in our efforts, by questioning existing ideas of what form an alien intelligence might take, how it might try to communicate with us, and how we should respond if we ever do make contact. It will appeal to fans of science and science fiction alike.

If this book is half as interesting as his previous books, “The Fifth Miracle” and “The Goldilocks Enigma” then it should be a mind expanding read.

One more interesting follow up point. We are proud to have coined a new word in the shadow biosphere post. Did you catch it? Bio-hadronistry and by default hadronistry. The concept was described by Robert Forward in his book, “Dragon’s Egg“.  On the surface of a neutron star, the gravitational force would be so great that most complex molecules (DNA for example)  are dissociated into their constituent nuclei. However, precisely because of this gravitational force, the nuclei themselves could interact and even take on complex shapes. Indeed, scientists are already observing non-spherical nucleons at normal gravity with high mass elements. Forward suggested that these complex nucleon mixtures could combine in their own analogous way to molecules. These “molecules” could potentially form structures that would allow life to form. One major difference would be their reaction times which would be many, many orders of magnitude faster than normal chemistry. A hadron is a particle made of quarks held together by the strong force (similarly to how molecules are held together by the electromagnetic force), thus protons and neutrons are hadrons. So looking for a word to describe Forward’s concept succinctly, we proposed hadronsitry and now (for completeness) hadronecule. We hope it sticks!