The ‘Alien Contact Era' to Earth’s Water is Older than Our Sun

The Contact Era: the Fermi Paradox Revised --A new solution to the Fermi Paradox is presented: probes or visits from putative alien civilizations have a very low probability until a civilization reaches a certain age (called the Contact Era) after the onset of radio communications. If biotic planets are common, putative advanced civilizations may preferentially send probes to planets with technosignatures, such as radio broadcastings, reports a new preprint paper published to the arXiv database.

Astronomers Discover Missing Link: Water on Earth Is Even Older Than Our Sun, reports SciTechDaily. “We can now trace the origins of water in our Solar System to before the formation of the Sun,” says John J. Tobin, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), USA and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.

Black Holes Will Eventually Destroy All Quantum States, Researchers Argue--New calculations suggest that the event horizons around black holes will ‘decohere’ quantum possibilities — even those that are far away, reports Thomas Lewton for Quanta. “What we have found might be a quantum mechanical realization of [the participatory universe], but where space-time itself plays the role of the observer,” said Daine Danielson, the third author at the University of Chicago.

The big theoretical problem of dark energy--The zero-point energy of empty space is not zero. Even with all the physics we know, we have no idea how to calculate what it ought to be, reports Ethan Siegel for Big Think.

Quantum computing is the key to consciousness--”Perhaps our brains are able to ponder how things could have been because in essence they are quantum computers, accessing information from alternative worlds, argues Tim Palmer, Royal Society Research Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford."

The planet that could end life on Earth, reports EurekAlert--"A terrestrial planet hovering between Mars and Jupiter would be able to push Earth out of the solar system and wipe out life on this planet, according to a UC Riverside experiment."

Is humanity Smarter than a colony of yeast cells? Left to their own devices, yeast cells will consume all available resources and poison themselves to death. Is humanity smarter than that? explores Big Think.

Live stream: Watch first 3D-printed rocket launch into space--US aerospace start-up Relativity Space is planning to launch its 3D-printed Terran 1 rocket on 8 March, skipping planned tests and heading straight for orbit, reports Leah Crane for New Scientist.

Newborn stars sculpt their galaxies in new James Webb telescope images--JWST’s sharp infrared eyes reveal stunning new details invisible to previous observatories, reports Science News. “We were just blown away,” says Janice Lee, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She and more than 100 astronomers reported on scientists’ first look at these galaxies with JWST in a special February issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Galaxy-size shock waves found rattling the cosmic web — the largest structure in the universe, reports Ben Turner for LiveScience. "Astronomers have detected enormous shockwaves rattling the cosmic web that connects all galaxies in the universe, offering vital clues on how the largest structures in space were shaped."

Science fiction books that predicted the future with terrifying accuracy--Jules Verne wrote about gasoline-powered vehicles, weapons of mass destruction, and global warming more than a century ago, reports Big Think.