Editor's note: This column originally published Oct. 29, 2015.
Professional athletes will sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to protect their bodies and keep themselves in top physical condition. Twice-per-day exercise routines which isolate independent muscle groups, no carb/high protein diets without variety and mentally abstaining from the occasional treat at weddings and parties are all essential for those folks in top form.
I can deal with discomfort in the name of health, but one technique which I’ve always thought hit the extreme is an ice bath. Climbing into a tub of partially frozen water is not my idea of healthy muscles — even if it’s supposed to slow acid buildup and muscle breakdown.
NASA has an athlete of its own that has been on an endless sprint around the planet Saturn since 2004. The Cassini Space Probe keeps up this pace while snapping high resolution photos and spectrographs of the ringed planet and its more than 60 moons. On Oct. 28, Cassini intentionally stepped into an ice bath of Saturn’s snowball moon Enceladus — flying through plumes of water ice shooting from below the moon’s surface like geysers into space. The probe came within 30 miles the Enceladus’ surface, looking for the chemical signatures of organic compounds.
These plumes are thought to originate from s subsurface lake or ocean — theorized to be found on many of Saturn and Jupiter’s icy moons in the last decade. Cassini will attempted to identify the compounds specifically found as a byproduct of microbial life (gasp! aliens!).
The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute — yes, this is a real 501(c)3 established in 1984 with published scientists in its ranks — has been taking to social media to carefully promote the theory that a sudden drop in star KIC 8462852’s luminosity found last week is due to a large energy collecting superstructure created by an advanced civilization.
This theory immediately sends red flags to skeptics and the majority of rational people, but the theory was floated by the NASA scientists which analyzed data taken from the space agency’s Kepler Space Telescope. For readers who are not astronomy nerds like myself, Kepler was designed as an exo-planet hunter, or a telescope to detect planets around other stars by measuring the dip in light recorded when a planet moves between it’s host star and Earth’s line of sight.
Scientist have immediately began to point SETI’s radio telescope array to the star in an attempt to rule out this theory. We might know within days if ET is placing a collect call to Earth or if its just a bunch of massive space rocks in weird orbits blocking the light from KIC 8462852.
Regardless of the outcome, the cool thing is we are coming close as a society to being able to detect life in environments outside our own planet. This is exciting. Compared to other forms of life on our planet, our mastery of environment and ability to progress within an evolutionary short amount of time —although it has created some problems for our planet — has largely allowed us to survive, thrive, learn and grow. Gaining knowledge has become humans’ work out routine.
We are living in a world where our boundaries will soon no longer be our own planet, and this gives me hope.
Contact Mike Mendenhall
at mmendenhall@newtondailynews.com