Man who disappeared in 1991 reappeared 30 years later with no memory
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By SpaceObserver
This is the kind of video that works best when people separate the interesting claims from the parts that still need evidence.
Steven Benner.' It really got me thinking about the implications of past missions, especially the Viking landers, and how our understanding of Mars has evolved over the decades. Dr. Benner discusses some intriguing evidence that might suggest life was present on the Red Planet back in the 1970s, which raises so many questions about what we’ve been missing in our searches for life beyond Earth.
One of the key points Dr. Benner makes revolves around the biological experiments conducted by the Viking landers, which returned mixed results. He touches on how the interpretation of those results has shifted over time, particularly with our advancements in astrobiology and knowledge about extremophiles. It’s fascinating to consider how our definitions of life can expand as we uncover more about different environments. Could it be that the life we were looking for wasn’t in the form we expected? The video hints at the potential for more data to be re-evaluated with modern techniques, and it leaves me wondering what else we might discover through this lens.
Additionally, Dr. Benner mentions how current missions, like the Perseverance rover, are building on this legacy. Are we finally on the brink of answering questions that have lingered for fifty years? The emphasis on returning samples to Earth for detailed analysis also makes me think about the role of the Mars Sample Return mission planned for the late 2020s. How will those samples reshape our understanding of the Martian environment and its capacity for life?
Something else that caught my attention is the contrast between the findings of the Viking missions and the new data coming from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). With JWST's ability to analyze exoplanet atmospheres and search for biosignatures, it seems like we are at a pivotal point in our journey to understand life in the universe. Could insights from Mars help guide our search for life on these distant worlds? I’m curious to see whether astrobiology will evolve in tandem with our findings from both Mars and exoplanets.
As we delve deeper into the questions raised by Dr. Benner, I can’t help but wonder: What do you all think about the potential for past life on Mars? Are we too quick to dismiss the Viking landers’ findings, or is there a genuine chance that we might uncover evidence that changes our view of life beyond Earth? Let's discuss!
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By Avi Loeb Medium
(Image credit: Greg Wyatt)Since the instant that Galileo Galilei looked through his telescope at the sky, Astronomy was based on detecting light from the cosmos. The hot cosmic gas glowed early on, and we detected the radiation it emitted in the form of the cosmic microwave background.
Afterwards, the cosmic gas condensed into galaxies — inside of which it fragmented into dense clouds that gave birth to luminous stars. When a star is born, the temperature at its core exceeds millions of degrees and so the fuel of hydrogen and helium starts to burn. Clusters of these nuclear fusion reactors are observed in the form of galaxies all the way to time when the Universe was just hundreds of millions of years old. This offers scientific details to the biblical story of genesis: “Let there be light!”, which I summarized in two textbooks here and here.
(Image credit: Greg Wyatt)The debris disk of material left over from the formation process of the Sun included heavy elements that condensed in the disk midplane to make dust particles that stuck together to make rocks that coagulated to make rocky planets like Earth. There were many more Earth-size planets in the early Solar System and most of them were ejected through gravitational slingshot by Jupiter or other planets. The surviving planets are on stable orbits, but we know that shortly after the Earth formed — it likely collided with a Mars-size planet and shed some mass that gave birth to the Moon. The duration of a day on Earth was lengthened from about 4 hours early on to 24 hours today, as the Moon receded and stole the Earth’s rotation into its orbital angular momentum. Within 7.6 billion years, the Sun’s envelope might engulf the Earth-Moon system and cause the Moon to crash back on Earth as a result of its drag on the envelope’s material.
(Image credit: Greg Wyatt)Everything around us keeps changing and as a young technological civilization, we need to learn how to survive in our turbulent cosmic neighborhood. Attending to lessons learned by advanced civilizations that survived for a longer period of time could guide us about the best strategy for our own survival.
Observing the large scales of the cosmos endows us with a sense of cosmic modesty, but it also offers us a global perspective on the death of everything we get emotionally attached to. Over the cosmic timescale of billions of years, the best we can hope for is to rise to the level of an interstellar or perhaps an intergalactic civilization that started its life on a small rock near a common star but chose to be cosmologically ambitious despite all odds against its longevity.
(Image credit: Greg Wyatt)It is unclear whether this is truly our destiny or just my wishful thinking. At any event, my hope is that by finding siblings from our family of intelligent civilizations who survived, we will be inspired to imitate them. Finding them will also provide us with an emotional connection to the Universe, far more powerful than the deterministic dynamics of matter and radiation described currently by our incomplete cosmological equations.
Here’s hoping that the human spirit will ultimately prevail over all challenges imposed on it by our cosmic circumstances.
***
In this essay, I featured four amazing watercolors from a series created by the celebrated artist, Greg Wyatt. These watercolors incorporate inspiring statements by Giordano Bruno, Cicero and Johannes Kepler. This is the sixth in a sequence of essays, where Greg and I collaborate on the interface between art and science. The first essay in this series, titled “Music of the Cosmic Spheres,” appeared here; the second essay, titled: “Cosmic Waterfalls in Spacetime Cliffs,” appeared here; the third titled “Missing Elements in the Cosmic Jigsaw Puzzle,” appeared here; the fourth essay, titled: “Why Do We Exist?”, appeared here; the fifth titled “Inspiration from the Stars”, appeared here; and the sixth titled “We Might Understand How the Cosmos Works Before We Understand How Life Works”, appeared here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
Professional website:
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/
Social media:
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb
https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb
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By Avi Loeb Medium
Space Companies Did Not Pollute Our Night Sky for Billions of Years and Should Not Do So in the Future
Satellite streaks are evident in this long-exposure image of the sky over the NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory in Chile. (Image credit: Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA/W.O’Mullane)If a future catastrophe will wipe out our technological civilization from the surface of Earth, will there be a technological relic that will survive intact for billions of years?
One form of such relics are satellites above the altitude of geostationary orbits at 35,786 kilometers. These relics will continue to orbit the Earth long after they stop operating, since they do not have significant drag on the Earth’s atmosphere. Given that we had not discovered any prehistoric satellites at these high altitudes, we can safely conclude that there was no SpaceX-like company on Earth for billions of years before Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002.
If the dinosaurs had launched a geostationary satellite, it could have still been up there today. If the Roman Empire had been able to launch a satellite with an orbital altitude as low as 1,200 kilometers, then this Roman satellite might have been falling back to Earth and burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere just now. Space archeology informs us that no space launch capabilities were available to the dinosaurs or the ancient Romans.
(Image credit: UN/ESA)But with advanced technology comes responsibility! This does not only apply to artificial intelligence systems, a hot topic for today’s policy makers in Washington DC, but also to satellites around Earth. Let me explain.
The lack of a large population of high-altitude pre-historic satellites allowed humans to study the Universe with ground-based telescopes and understand how we came to exist from the initial conditions set by the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. This intellectual accomplishment started with Galileo Galilei who spotted the moons of Jupiter through his telescope and realized that the Earth is not at the center of the Universe. Following his pioneering work, humanity’s best telescopes were placed on top of remote mountains — where they can effectively avoid the contamination of the night sky by light pollution from human made activities. Largely because of SpaceX and other companies, this is not possible any more. Our space economy is now gearing up to fill the dark night sky with lights.
Communication satellites are already leaving unavoidable marks on the images obtained by ground-based telescopes, as they reflect sunlight outside the Earth’s shadow. Their motions around the Earth imprint prominent streaks in the (15+15) second exposures taken by the state-of-the-art NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory in Chile (as discussed recently here).
But the worst is yet to come. A new space-mirror company is requesting authorization to pollute the night sky intentionally!
Reflect Orbital is a start-up company proposing a constellation of up to 50,000 satellites by 2035, to provide a sunlight-on-demand service to consumers. This would involve reflecting beams of sunlight with a diameter of about 5 kilometers onto Earth’s surface to provide lighting or solar energy to the customers.
(Image credit: Gaspar Bakos, Princeton University)This potentially new source of light pollution could affect astronomical observations irrespective of their elevation or distance from city lights on the surface of Earth. Rayleigh scattering in the Earth’s atmosphere, both from the incoming beam and from reflected light, is ignored by the company and could result in an enormous skyglow from a brightly illuminated area, the size of 650 football stadiums. This technology will introduce sustained artificial dusk and dawn conditions across landscapes, in addition to hours-long bursts of daytime brightness.
Reflect Orbital has submitted an application to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch a testing satellite, EARENDIL-1. Their demonstration satellite would produce a beam about as bright as the full Moon, while the full constellation could produce illumination comparable to that of the Sun at high noon. The FCC has opened a public comment period until March 9th, 2026, giving the public an opportunity to voice their thoughts and concerns about federally approved projects.
If you care about the above-mentioned risk to the dark night sky, please sign and share the open letter opposing this initiative, written by DarkSky International, and consider submitting a public comment to the FCC by March 9th, 2026. More details, compiled by Sarah Thiele & Gaspar Bakos from Princeton University, are available here.
Past terrestrial civilizations did not pollute the night sky for billions of years and space companies like Reflect Orbital should not be allowed to do so in the future.
The species of non-avian dinosaurs was extinguished as a result of a giant asteroid impact 66 million years ago. If consulted, these dinosaurs would have agreed with this sentiment. They dominated the Earth without looking up through telescopes. The lesson is simple: if our species will not be able to survey the dark sky in search for near Earth asteroids because of light pollution, it might not survive for long in cosmological terms.
We tend to arrogantly assume that we are more intelligent than any life form that ever existed on Earth, while at the same time we promote technologies that could lead to our demise. This suggests a new solution to Enrico Fermi’s paradox concerning extraterrestrials: “Where is everybody?” Extraterrestrial technological civilizations might have blinded their outward-looking Rubin-like telescopes with light pollution and went extinct in the same way that the dinosaurs did.
Extending the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” to the cosmos, suggests that only civilizations which were intelligent enough to block companies like Reflect Orbital survived. The FCC could decide whether our civilization has a chance of fulfilling the Vulcan salute from Star Trek: “live long and prosper”.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
Professional website:
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/
Social media:
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb
https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb
View the full article
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By Avi Loeb Medium
The galaxy MoM-z14 is currently the farthest galaxy ever detected, spotted by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and confirmed spectroscopically with its NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument. The galaxy’s redshift is 14.4, corresponding to 280 million years after the Big Bang, when the age of the infant Universe was only 2% of its current value, 13.8 billion years. (Image credit: JWST/NASA)On January 15, 2013, I published a comprehensive textbook with my former PhD student, Steve Furlanetto (currently a tenured professor at UCLA), titled: “The First Galaxies in the Universe” (available here at Princeton University Press). The purpose of the textbook (and its shorter predecessor “How Did the First Stars and Galaxies Form?”, published three years earlier here), was to summarize the theoretical framework that I developed with my students and postdocs regarding the properties of the first stars and galaxies. These sources of ultraviolet light broke the primordial hydrogen atoms throughout the Universe into their constituent electrons and protons, ushering in the so-called Epoch of Reionization. The first light emitted by the earliest stars provide quantitative details to the scientific version of the biblical phrase in genesis: “Let there be light.” Understanding the formation of the first galaxies, which led to the production of the oxygen and carbon that biology relies on, is an important part of figuring out our cosmic roots. My textbook was written in anticipation of the James Webb Space Telescope, which I helped design as a member of its first working group two decades earlier.
After a major unexpected delay, the Webb telescope was finally launched in 2021 and operated magnificently as a discovery machine of the first galaxies since then.
In 1992, my colleague Piero Madau told me that his paper on high-redshift galaxies was rejected from publication by a referee who argued that the paper is too speculative because we do not know whether there are any galaxies whatsoever beyond redshift 2. The cosmic reality is very different than this referee conceived it to be. In fact, the Webb telescope has revealed a growing population of bright galaxies at redshifts larger than 10.
Yesterday, 13 years after my textbook was published, NASA announced here the confirmed detection of the record breaking farthest known galaxy, MoM-z14, in the COSMOS Legacy Field. This field covers a mosaic of the sky measuring 2 square degrees, ten times the angular area of the Moon. The galaxy’s redshift is 14.44 (+/- 0.02), corresponding to about 280 million years after the Big-Bang, when the age of the infant Universe was only 2% of its current value, 13.8 billion years. The Universe expanded by a factor of 15.44 since this galaxy emitted its light and so the observed wavelengths of its radiation are stretched by this factor relative to their values at emission. The discovery, led by Rohan Naidu from MIT (who received his PhD from the Harvard Astronomy department in 2022) was announced 8 months ago in a preprint available here.
Webb telescope imaging and spectroscopy of MoM-z14. Top panel: NIRCam images showing a compact source detected at observed wavelength longer than 2 micrometers. Inset: NIRCam color image with NIRSpec slitlets overlaid. Bottom panel: The prism spectrum reveals that the disappearance of the source below an observed wavelength of 2 micrometers in the imaging is due to an abrupt break whose sharpness implies that it is produced by the Lyman-α transition of hydrogen. Furthermore, an array of ultraviolet emission lines (dashed lines) supports the inferred redshift. (Image credit: R. Naidu et al. 2025)The redshift of MoM-z14 is confirmed spectroscopically with the NIRSpec/prism (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) through the detection of a sharp absorption break (owing to Lyman-alpha transition from the ground level to the first excited level of hydrogen atoms) as well as five ultraviolet emission lines including a nitrogen feature. These prominent ultraviolet lines signal a rising star-formation history, with a factor of 10 increase in the last 5 million years. As expected in my textbook for galaxies at that redshift, the source is extremely compact, about 240 light years in radius — a hundred times smaller than the separation between the Sun and the center of the Milky-Way galaxy.
The nitrogen spectral features observed in the early galaxy MoM-z14 cannot be produced by normal stars within 280 million years after the Big Bang. In a new research project that I am conducting with my postdoc, Devesh Nandel, we are relating the nitrogen production to supermassive stars which could have naturally formed out of the pristine cosmic gas before it was enriched with heavy elements by later generations of stars. As discussed in my textbook, the primordial hydrogen and helium gas could not cool efficiently and likely fragmented into massive stars.
The absence of a strong damping wing of the hydrogen absorption feature suggests that the hydrogen atoms in the immediate intergalactic environment of MoM-z14 were already broken, as expected in reionization models for that redshift. The galaxy MoM-z14 cleared out the thick, primordial hydrogen fog of the early Universe in the space surrounding it. Thus, MoM-z14 provides another clue for mapping out the timeline of reionization, work that was not possible until the Webb telescope lifted the veil on this cosmic era. Future radio observatories will aim to measure the faint emission by hydrogen from that era at a wavelength of 21-centimeter, as anticipated in my textbook.
Observing the earliest stars is akin to archaeology, since digging deep into space takes us back in time as a result of the finite speed of light. The Webb telescope is akin to an archeological shovel that reveals ancient layers of cosmic history.
Like other galaxies that the Webb telescope has discovered in the early universe, MoM-z14 is brighter and more chemically enriched than my textbook expected to find in this early era.
MoM-z14 is one of a growing group of surprisingly bright galaxies in the early Universe, about a hundred times more abundant than theoretical studies predicted in my textbook before the launch of the Webb telescope. When asked by reporters about my textbook 13 years ago, I expressed the hope that some of my predictions will be proven wrong by the Webb telescope. After all, science is a learning experience and observations are crucial in refining out ideas about our cosmic roots.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb
View the full article
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By USH
Strange cases are surfacing worldwide, reports of black-eyed children, mysterious phone calls from the dead, and transplant patients inheriting memories. Skeptics dismiss them as urban legends or coincidences, yet the stories refuse to disappear.
So what’s really going on?
Case 1 - Two children tap on a car window at night, asking for a ride home. Their eyes are solid black, no whites, no color. Witnesses say they cannot enter unless invited. Those who let them in rarely talk about what happened afterward.
But those who encounter the Black-Eyed Children (BEK) describe pale, emotionless kids between 6 and 16 and report sudden terror, panic, and an overwhelming sense that something supernatural is at play.
So what are they? Paranormal entities? Interdimensional beings? Or simply a myth.
Meanwhile, researchers point to similar unexplained events that blur the line between science and the paranormal.
For example: Other strange cases that make no logical sense.
Case 2 — Phantom Phone Calls: A dead man’s mobile phone reportedly dialed rescuers 35 times over 12 hours, guiding them to his body. The battery should have been dead. The phone was never recovered.
Case 3 — Transplant Memory Transfer: A heart transplant patient developed the donor’s cravings, handwriting, and even married the donor’s widow. Thirteen years later, he died the same way, in the same place, as the donor before him.
Three cases and No scientific explanation that survives scrutiny. From the Black-Eyed Children phenomenon to phantom calls and organ memory, these cases raise a larger question: Are we looking at mere coincidence and internet fueled folklore, or at consciousness based models not yet recognized by science or could this be evidence of a genuine paranormal phenomenon involving unknown intelligences?
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