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By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
What Would It Take to Say We Found Life?
We call this the podium test. What would it take for you personally to confidently stand up in front of an international audience and make that claim? When you put it in that way, I think for a lot of scientists, the bar is really high.
So of course, there would be obvious things, you know, a very clear signature of technology or a skeleton or something like that. But we think that a lot of the evidence that we might encounter first will be much more subtle. For example, chemical signs of life that have to be detected above a background of abiotic chemistry. And really, what we see might depend a lot on where we look.
On Mars, for example, the long history of exploration there gives us a lot of context for what we might find. But we’re potentially talking about samples that are billions of years old in those cases, and on Earth, those kinds of samples, the evidence of life is often degraded and difficult to detect.
On the ocean worlds of our outer solar system, so places like Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, there’s the tantalizing possibility of extant life, meaning life that’s still alive. But potentially we’re talking about exceedingly small amounts of samples that would have to be analyzed with a relatively limited amount of instrumentation that can be carried from Earth billions of miles away.
And then for exoplanets, these are planets beyond our own solar system. Really, what we’re looking for there are very large magnitude signs of life that can be detectable through a telescope from many light-years away. So changes like the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere or changes in surface color.
So any one of those things, if they rose to the suspicion of being evidence of life, would be really heavily scrutinized in a very sort of specific and custom way to that particular observation. But I think there are also some general principles that we can follow. And the first is just: Are we sure we’re seeing what we think we’re seeing? Many of these environments are not very well known to us, and so we need to convince ourselves that we’re actually seeing a clear signal that represents what we think it represents.
Carl Sagan once said, “Life is the hypothesis of last resort,” meaning that we ought to work hard for such a claim to rule out alternative possibilities. So what are those possibilities? One is contamination. The spacecraft and the instruments that we use to look for evidence of life are built in an environment, Earth, that is full of life. And so we need to convince ourselves that what we’re seeing is not evidence of our own life, but evidence of indigenous life.
If that’s the case, we should ask, should life of the type we’re seeing live there? And finally, we need to ask, is there any other way than life to make that thing, any of the possible abiotic processes that we know and even the ones that we don’t know? And as you can imagine, that will be quite a challenge.
Once we have a piece of evidence in hand that we really do think represents evidence of life, now we can begin to develop hypotheses. For example, do we have separate independent lines of evidence that corroborate what we’ve seen and increase our confidence of life?
Ultimately, all of this has to be looked at hard by the entire scientific community, and in that sense, I think the really operative word in our question is we. What does it take to say we found evidence of life? Because really, the answer, I think, depends on the full scientific community scrutinizing and skepticizing this observation to finally say that we scientists, we as a community and we as humanity found life.
[END VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]
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By European Space Agency
According to the newly released 35th State of the Climate report, 2024 saw record highs in greenhouse gas concentrations, global land and ocean temperatures, sea levels, and ocean heat content. Glaciers also suffered their largest annual ice loss on record. Data records from ESA’s Climate Change Initiative helped underpin these findings.
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By USH
The weight of the gods was crushing, their toil beyond endurance. Let the burden pass to humankind! So speak the oldest verses carved into clay, a fragment from the Atrahasis tale of Mesopotamia. Yet what if these divine figures were not simply legends? What if the stories hint at something far older and stranger than we have allowed ourselves to believe? The name Anunnaki comes from the etched symbols of Sumerian records, their lines recounting the deeds of deities who shaped the world and watched over the Earth.
From the cradle of ancient Mesopotamia comes a story older than any empire, etched into clay tablets and whispered through time: the tale of the Anunnaki. Were they gods, symbols, or something far stranger visitors from beyond the stars who shaped human civilization? The myths of Sumer speak of creation, rebellion, giants, and a great flood. But when paired with the ancient astronaut theory, these legends take on a new dimension, one that could rewrite human history.
Who were the Anunnaki? In the ancient Sumerian texts of Mesopotamia, they are described as the offspring of An, the sky god, and Ki, the earth goddess. Their names appear across the Atrahasis epic, the Enuma Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Sumerian King List, etched into clay tablets more than 4,000 years ago.
To mainstream historians, the Anunnaki are mythological gods. Yet in the ancient astronaut theory, they were real beings, extraterrestrial visitors who shaped early civilization.
Author Zecharia Sitchin popularized the idea that the Anunnaki came from Nibiru, a hidden “twelfth planet” on a long, elliptical orbit. According to his interpretation of Sumerian records, the Anunnaki faced an environmental crisis. Their planet’s atmosphere was failing, and the solution they sought was gold, which could be ground into particles and suspended as a shield.
This quest for survival brought them to Earth more than 400,000 years ago. They mined resources, altered life, and may even have engineered humanity itself.
The tablets describe how the lesser gods, the Igigi, were forced into back-breaking labor until they rebelled. To replace them, the Anunnaki created humans.
In myth, mankind was formed from clay mixed with divine blood. In Sitchin’s interpretation, this was genetic engineering: the fusion of Anunnaki DNA with Homo erectus. The first prototype was Adamu, a name that echoes the biblical Adam.
The Sumerian “Edin,” later mirrored in the Hebrew Eden, may not have been a paradise garden but an Anunnaki laboratory outpost.
Two Anunnaki brothers shaped humanity’s destiny: Enki – the god of wisdom and waters, often seen as humanity’s ally, granting knowledge. Enlil – stern and authoritarian, seeking control and fearing that humans might grow too powerful. Their rivalry runs through Mesopotamian myth, influencing stories of divine punishment, survival, and human struggle.
Over time, some Anunnaki defied the rules and took human women as partners. Their offspring were the Nephilim, giants and “mighty men of renown.” The Book of Enoch calls their fathers the Watchers, led by Shemyaza.
According to the stories, these hybrids grew violent, corrupted the world, and became uncontrollable. The solution was drastic: a great flood to wipe the Earth clean.
The Atrahasis epic, the story of Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the biblical Noah all describe the same event: a chosen man warned by a god, a vessel built to preserve life, animals carried aboard, and birds released to find land. Humanity survived, but weaker, with shorter lifespans, and forever changed.
Supporters of the ancient astronaut theory believe the Anunnaki left traces in stone:
Mesopotamian ziggurats – described as “bonds between heaven and earth,” possibly landing platforms.
The Great Pyramid of Giza – aligned to true north, massive in scale, theorized as a power plant or beacon rather than a tomb.
Megalithic monuments worldwide – stone circles, cyclopean walls, and sacred sites possibly linked to Anunnaki influence.
The Sumerian King List also suggests a divine legacy, describing rulers with lifespans of thousands of years, perhaps evidence of semi-divine hybrids.
Mainstream archaeology sees the Anunnaki as symbolic deities, metaphors for cosmic order and human struggle. But in alternative history, they were real beings, extraterrestrial visitors from Nibiru, who shaped civilization, taught astronomy, metallurgy, agriculture, and law, and left their mark in myths and monuments that endure to this day.
Explore the mystery of the Anunnaki—Sumerian gods, Nibiru, genetic engineering, Nephilim, the Great Flood, and the ancient astronaut theory in the video below.
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By European Space Agency
At ESA’s Living Planet Symposium, scientist have unveiled how the combination of different long-term, high-resolution satellite datasets from ESA’s Climate Change Initiative is shedding new light on the South American Gran Chaco – one of the world’s most endangered dry forest ecosystems. These data reveal, in remarkable clarity, that fire is the primary driver of widespread, accelerating deforestation across the region.
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By European Space Agency
While satellites have revolutionised our ability to measure sea level with remarkable precision, their data becomes less reliable near coasts – where accurate information is most urgently needed. To address this critical gap, ESA’s Climate Change Initiative Sea Level Project research team has reprocessed almost two decades of satellite data to establish a pioneering network of ‘virtual’ coastal stations. These stations now provide, for the first time, reliable and consistent sea-level measurements along coastlines.
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