Sugar in Space
Unlike the first three posts under Blog Post #2, I haven’t seen anything extraordinarily great or terrible this week. I tend not to spend my time browsing through random things on the internet. However, I did come across something interesting. Astronomers had recently discovered simple sugar molecules (Glycoaldehyde) in the gases floating around a star 400 light-years away. This was not the first discovery of sugar in space, but it is the first time a star with sugar molecules is so close to a “sunlike star.” Scientists believe that the simple sugar molecule composed of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen is a fundamental component of an organism’s RNA (which is part of the DNA). It is evidence that life can exist elsewhere in the universe, even if the fact has not been confirmed.
I was fascinated by this, mainly because I had recently watched a series (fiction) that questioned our firmly held belief that the things we have no evidence of or that we cannot see cannot exist simply because there is nothing to back them up. For example, if a person yells out “Aliens exist!” in the middle of the street, everyone would think that he is either brain damaged or just another lunatic roaming the streets. Why do we restrain ourselves from believing in extraterrestrial beings? Because we have no solid evidence that they exist. But for those who simply speak the truth, those who are Aliens themselves, there is no need to fervently seek proof to accept that extraterrestrial beings exist.
If we ever have the proofs that alien existence, I imagine many people would be confused and frightened because the natural order of their world would be shattered – a world build upon the foundations of previous generations where we are the only living creatures in this galaxy. I can’t wait for that to happen. What better way is there to remove ourselves from this ridiculous global economic struggle, where every country is in debt to every other country, than to focus that attention in outer space programs?
Here’s the link to the article:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/08/120829-sugar-space-planets-science-life/
3 responses so far
Extraterrestrial life is something we are so fascinated with as a species, we have even made multiple TV shows about them (“Ancient Aliens, “X-Files”). One thing the Internet really gives us access to that we did not always have is scientific discoveries. The major, major ones are still often dwarfed by celebrity happenings in the daily news, but websites are readily available for us to use to monitor what new scientific discoveries have been occurring. This in particular is an interesting piece. Aliens have always been one of humanity’s true fascinations. I wonder, though, how we might ever contact them face-to-face, if they’re light-years away?
That question is one that I cannot answer… as well as for many scientists. With our current technology, it certainly is impossible to contact them. As I remembered reading somewhere, using radio waves to send signals into space in hopes of a feedback is never going to work – radio waves are too slow. Personally I think, if we cannot create something that can travel nearly as fast as the speed of light (since nothing can travel faster than the speed of light) or some sort of black hole technology that allows space and time to bend and thereby connecting one distant coordinate to the next, there is little chance that we will ever have contact with other extraterrestrial beings.
It’s true that we often need evidence for anyone to believe anything, and maybe there are other living beings somewhere out there, but we probably won’t ever meet. It’d definitely be all over the media if it happened. In religion, you need faith, as there is no real evidence, so if you treat God as an extraterrestrial being, there are people who believe. People who believe in aliens may be considered crazy, but maybe it’s possible beyond our scope of knowledge. It’s nice to think about sometimes.