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While artificial intelligence and quantum computing insiders have both been guilty of hyping up their products, only the latter group appears to still be applying proper scientific rigour to their field

I don’t know if it’s considered ethical to use one’s newspaper column to reproduce excerpts of a book that you’ve written—at least if you get paid for both the book and the column, which would be double-dipping. But let’s leave that aside to consider Ross Douthat’s new book, which he’s excerpted twice in The New York Times. In the latest article, below, Douthat gives several arguments for the existence of God, including his favorite one, which turns out to be humans’ ability to comprehend the truths of the universe. That comprehension is supposedly evidence for a divinity, for Douthat doesn’t see how natural selection could give us abilities beyond those that evolved during most of the six million years since we shared a common ancestor with chimps.  Click below to see his arguments, which are also archived here.  And of course I try to refute his arguments.

First, here Douthat’s book, apparently part of an intellectual/journalist push to argue that religion (despite its disappearance) is really, really, supported by evidence. Click below to go to the Amazon site. The book came out yesterday.

I’ll also leave aside my problem that it’s hard to believe in God if you’ve already rejected that form of supernaturalism. However, Douthat is trying to pull an anti-Hitchens and convince us that, yes, there are very good arguments for believing in God, In other words, he’s trying to reconvert us nonbelievers. The problem is that he recycles the same old tired arguments that have failed to convince most nonbelievers, and so offers at best a lame argument.  It sure doesn’t convince me, though, as I said in Faith Versus Fact, I don’t think it’s a 100% absolute certainty that no God exists. That would be an unscientific point of view. But I’m pretty damn sure that we live in a godless universe.

Here are Douthat’s arguments, most of which should be familiar to you (his quotes are indented):

1.) The three big ones.  He considers the best evidence for God to be the “convergence of multipole different lines of arguments”, though the convergence of weak arguments do not, to me, lead to a very convincing argument:

Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions.

Each of these realities alone offers good reasons to take religious arguments seriously. Indeed, I think each on its own should be enough to impel someone toward at least a version of Pascal’s Wager. But it’s the fact that a religious perspective makes sense out of all of them — why the universe seems calibrated for our appearance and why consciousness has a supernatural-seeming dimension and why even nonbelievers report having religious experiences — that makes the strongest case for some form of belief.

The cosmic design argument rests on the so-called “fine tuning” of the universe, which of course has alternative explanations, including the fact that we do not know how fine-tuned the universe is since we don’t know what other combinations of constants would permit life; the anthropic principle that since we’re here to observe life, the constants must have permitted life; the view that the constants may be connected in a way that we don’t understand; the idea that there are multiple universes, only some of which permit life, and we happily happen to be in one that allows it (Douthat, not a scientist, rejects the multiverse explanation); that the universe would look very different from how it does now if it really was fine-tuned, and so on. For a good summary of these arguments, see Sean Carroll’s video and my post here, as well as Carroll’s summary at The Preposterous Universe. Douthat apparently has not considered these rebuttals seriously.

As far as human consciousness is concerned, Douthat doesn’t see how it could have evolved, and therefore sees it as a product of God. But we are beginning to understand the naturalistic underpinnings of consciousness, which means that evolution—either directly for consciousness or indirectly via evolution that’s produced  consciousness as a byproduct—is a plausible alternative. For some reason Douthat ignores the evidence that other species of animals are conscious (some appear to have a “theory of mind,” which implies consciousness, as well as the ability to pass the mirror test for self recognition; see also here). Since Douthat sees human exceptionalism for this trait as evidence for God, what about the consciousness of animals. Why did God make them conscious.  Douthat:

[God’s] infinite mind and our finite minds have some important connection, that we actually matter in the scheme of things and that in fact our own godlike powers are proof of something that was claimed by the old religions at the start: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”

Are squirrels and ravens also made in the image of God?

Finally, there Douthat’s argument based on “the plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions”.  I guess you’d have to read the book to see what “disenchanted conditions” means (presumably not when you’re in church or taking LSD), but I’m always dubious that one having an experience of God (and I have had “spiritual” experience, which I don’t consider evidence for God) proves the existence of God. After all, people have illusions and delusions and experiences all the time that do not compoart with reality. People with anorexia look in the mirror and think they are too fat even though they are skeletal. But they are not fat. I could go on, but you can think of similar delusions.

But wait! There’s more!

2.) The universe is intelligible and we can use reason to understand it.  To Douthat, this is the most convincing argument of all. 

Even then there is still a strange jackpot aspect of our position that cries out for explanation: We aren’t just in a universe that we can observe; we’re in a universe that’s deeply intelligible to us, a cosmos whose rules and systems we can penetrate, whose invisible architecture we can map and plumb, whose biological codes we can decipher and rewrite and whose fundamental physical building blocks we can isolate and, with Promethean power, break apart.

This capacity of human reason is mysterious, on one level, in the same way that consciousness itself is mysterious: As the philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it in his critique of materialism, “Mind and Cosmos,” it is “not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and discover what is objectively the case” that presents a problem for a hard materialism, since under materialist premises our thoughts are ultimately determined by physical causation, raising questions about how they could possibly achieve objectivity at all. (There is an even more intense argument that even having our thoughts align as they do with physical reality is extremely unlikely and miraculous, but I’ll just direct you down that rabbit hole rather than explore it.)

But the success of human reasoning is remarkable even if you wave away the problem of consciousness and assume that evolutionary pressure suffices to explain some modest form of successful reasoning — that the response to stimuli that enabled early Homo sapiens to recognize the patterns, say, of a predator’s behavior ended up having adaptive use beyond just panther dodging, granting our hominid ancestors some kind of basic capacity of understanding.

As we’ll see in #3 below, Douthat doubts the evolutionary hypothesis for other reasons, but in fact I cannot see our powers of understanding the universe as something that defies naturalistic evolution. We have evolved through natural selection to understand what we could over the first six million years of our lineage.  Individuals that had correct understandings (snakes might kill you, thunder means that there may be water, cat tracks are a cause of concern) are those who survived, while those who didn’t understand such stuff would not survive.  This is of course not unique to humans, for many animals show what seems to be an understanding of their world, and what various signs and signals mean. Some birds know that if another bird seems them cache an acorn, they have to go rehide the acorn. The sure looks like reasoning, but it may be the product of natural selection—or even learning.  And, of course, the ability to learn evolved by natural selection as well.

Douthat, though, says that we understand far more than we could have evolved to understand: our powers or reasoning far exceed what was “needed” by natural selection. Ergo Jesus and the last point:

3.) We understand far more about the universes than would be expected if our powers of reasoning evolved by natural selection. We can play chess, we can make music, we can send people to the Moon. How on earth did we evolve the capabilities to do those things? Douthat:

Even then, it seems likely that in many, many potential universes those capacities would have hit a ceiling in terms of what they could accomplish, that there would have been either inherent limits on our ape-minds or complicating aspects of the hidden architecture preventing superficial understanding from ever going really deep. It seems dazzlingly unlikely that an accidental observer would just keep on cracking codes at each new level of exploration, as the practical gave way to the theoretical, the simple to the complex, the intuitive to the far more mysterious, without any obvious evolutionary pressure forcing each new leap.

“Is it credible,” Nagel asks, “that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time?” Evolution’s pressures on our capacities are for prehistoric survival, not discovering calculus or E=mc². So why should capacities that evolved because we needed to hunt gazelles and light fires also turn out, mirabile dictu, to be capacities that enable us to understand the deepest laws of physics and of chemistry, to achieve manned spaceflight, to condense all of human knowledge onto a tiny piece of silicon?

This to me seems a really misguided argument, for it neglects two things that have developed through culture, which, of course, though not unique in humans, are most highly developed in our species (advanced reasoning and complex culture). I could add writing, which allows us to pass on knowledge to a distant futurity. Once we have a big brain and an ability to reason, and on top of that culture and communication through writing or syntactical language, the sky is the limit. Playing chess or going to the moon is not a result of evolution, but a byproduct of an evolutionary process that eventually led to the development of culture and communication (both of which, by the way, would also be favored by natural selection, since we are social animals).  Further, it’s not just us who have abilities that could not have evolved. Lyrebirds can imitate car doors closing or chainsaws; parrots can imitate human speech and song. While some imitation may have been favored by natural selection, surely the imitation of human speech has piggybacked on other abilities.  Dogs and horses can be trained to do things that are completely unnatural to them, and would never have appeared in nature, but they get a reward for successful training. It’s not hard to see that these abilities are simply byproducts of these animals’ evolution.  Now horses and parrots have neither the culture, language, or manual abilities to build spaceships, and so they haven’t done so, but one can see in many species potential abilities that could not have been the direct product of evolution.

And if we can see in other species these “piggyback” abilities, then it’s not so hard to see them in our own species. That, after all, is the line of argument that Darwin made in his books, showing that humans could have evolved because there’s a continuum between the features and behavior of other species and of our own species.

And with that I will conclude my argument on this Darwin Day. Douthat, I fear, is simply appropriating old arguments and cobbling them together to argue for God.  But of course the best argument for God, which can’t be made because it hasn’t worked, is direct signs of God’s existence, like him spelling out “I am that I am” in the stars (that one is due to Carl Sagan). In Faith Versus Fact I list other arguments that would tentatively convince me, an atheist, of the existence of not just God, but of a Christian God.  But no such evidence has appeared, so Douthat relies on The Argument from Lived Spiritual and Religious Experience. The words of the late Victor Stenger come to mind: he said something like, “The absence of evidence is indeed  evidence of absence—if that evidence should be there.” It isn’t.

Finally, there are arguments against God, especially Douthat’s Christian variety. One was made by Stephen Fry: Why does God let innocent children die of cancer, or kill millions through earthquakes and tsunamis? Presumably an omnipotent and loving God would have the ability to prevent needless suffering. I’m sure Douthat deals with that in his book, but I’ve heard all the justifications for that (“God gave us free will,” “God gave us a planet with tectonic plates,” “We don’t understand God’s ways,” and so on), and find none convincing.

Douthat is merely buttressing a faith that he probably learned as a child (he’s not a Hindu or Muslim, after all), and I’m betting that his book will be an extended exercise in confirmation bias. We shall see.

****************

Douthat has also touted his book on a podcast with Catholic believer Andrew Sullivan. I’ve listened to about half of their 1½-hour conversation (link below), but you can listen to it by clicking on the screenshot below, and you can see Sullivan’s notes here. An excerpt:

Ross is a writer and a dear old colleague, back when we were both bloggers at The Atlantic. Since then he’s been a columnist at the New York Times — and, in my mind, he’s the best columnist in the country. The author of many books, including Grand New Party and The Decadent Society, his new one is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (which you can pre-order now). So in this podcast, I play — literally — Devil’s advocate. Forgive me for getting stuck on the meaning of the universe in the first 20 minutes or so. It picks up after that.

For two clips of our convo — on the difference between proselytizing and evangelizing, and the “hallucinations of the sane” — see our YouTube page.

Other topics: Creation; the improbable parameters of the Big Bang; the “fine-tuning” argument I cannot understand; extraterrestrial life; Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; Hitch; the atheist/materialist view; the multiverse; quantum physics; consciousness; John von Neumann; Isaac Newton; human evolution; tribal survival; the exponential unity of global knowledge; Stephen Barr’s Modern Physics and Ancient Faith; the substack Bentham’s Bulldog; why humans wonder; miracles; Sebastian Junger and near-death experiences; the scientific method; William James; religious individualists; cults; Vatican II; Pope Francis; the sex-abuse crisis in the Church; suffering and theodicy; Lyme Disease; the AIDS crisis; Jesus and the Resurrection; Peter J Williams’ Can We Trust the Gospels?; and the natural selection of religions.

There are also shorter YouTube clips of the discussion here and here.  The longer discussion is pretty much a precis of the article above, at least the bit I listened to. Sullivan says he pushes back just to be the devil’s advocate, but I haven’t yet gotten to that part.

h/t: Paulo

Forensic scientists investigating cases of sexual assault may be able to use the genital microbiome to identify the perpetrator, as researchers have found that this "sexome" is exchanged between partners during intercourse

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The smooth wings of fruit-sucking moths appear to be ridged like a leaf – but the resemblance is created by nanostructures that reflect light in an unusual way

A neutrino with more energy than we've ever seen before was picked up by a detector on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea, and it seems to have a distant cosmic origin

Our estimates of the size of a neutrino span from smaller than an atomic nucleus to as large as a few metres, but now we are starting to narrow down its true value

Archaeopteryx, long considered the earliest fossil bird, could be knocked off its perch by Baminornis zhenghensis, which lived around 150 million years ago and had a short tail like those of modern birds

The surprising discovery of entities smaller than viruses raises profound questions about what life is and how it got started

Humanity will eventually need somewhere to live on the Moon. While aesthetics might not be the primary consideration when deciding what kind of habitat to build, it sure doesn’t hurt. The more pleasing the look of the habitat, the better, but ultimately, the functionality will determine whether or not it will be built. Dr. Martin Bermudez thinks he found a sweet synergy that was both functional and aesthetically pleasing with his design for a spherical lunar habitat made out of blown glass. NASA apparently agrees there’s potential there, as he recently received a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I grant to flesh out the concept further.

Bermudez’s vision’s artistic design looks like something out of an Arthur C. Clarke novel: a glass sphere rising off the lunar surface that could potentially contain living and work areas for dozens of people. His firm, Skyeports, is founded on creating these blown glass structures in space.

The design has some challenges, as Dr. Bermudez discusses in an interview with Fraser. First is how to build this thing. It’s far too large to ship in any conventional lunar lander. However, there’s also no air on the Moon to use as the blown gas to create the spherical shape. Dr. Bermudez plans to utilize argon, which would initially be shipped up from Earth to fill the sphere. Argon has several advantages in that it’s a noble gas and not very reactive, so it’s unlikely to explode in the furnace while the glass is blown.

Video animation showing the blown glass concept.
Credit – Skyeports YouTube Channel

Surprisingly, the lack of outside air pressure actually makes it easier to form a sphere than it would be on Earth since less pressure would be necessary to expand the sphere outwards. There are some nuances in the glass as well, with it being more like a glass lattice with embedded titanium or aluminum to make it stronger. Specific kinds of glass, such as borosilicate glass, could potentially add to the strength of the glass itself.

Most of the materials required to create such a structure could already be found on the lunar surface. Lunar regolith is full of the raw building materials required to make the structure work. Some of it has already been blasted into glass-like structures called agglutinates when micrometeoroids hit the lunar surface.

Those micrometeoroid impacts pose another risk to the glass sphere. Dr. Bermudez suggests having multiple layers of glass protecting the habitat, each with a layer of argon between them, like modern-day double-glazed windows. He suggests that spinning the outer layer might also provide some advantage, as will the spherical shape itself, as the impact force will dissipate better into the structure than it would on a flat surface.

3D printing is one of the fabrication technologies the blown glass sphere will have to compete with, as Fraser discusses.

Dr. Bermudez’s dreams don’t stop at the Moon, though. He suggests such a glass-blown structure could be useful on Mars or asteroids, where the microgravity would make it even easier to create these structures. On Mars, such a habitat might be limited to the top of Olympus Mons, where the atmosphere is thinner, and there isn’t as much wind and dust that could erode away the outer layers.

Many use cases exist for a structure like this, though many technical challenges remain. NIAC is the place for novel ideas that could potentially impact space exploration, and this one certainly fits that bill. As Dr. Bermudez works through de-risking his design, we get closer than ever to a future of aesthetically pleasing habitats on the Moon and everywhere else in the solar system.

Learn More:
NASA / Martin Bermudez – Lunar Glass Structure (LUNGS): Enabling Construction of Monolithic Habitats in Low-Gravity
UT – Glass Fibers in Lunar Regolith Could Help Build Structures on the Moon
UT – Recreating the Extreme Forces of an Asteroid Impact in the Lab
UT – Conceptual Design for a Lunar Habitat

Lead Image:
Artist’s concept of a lunar sphere on the lunar surface.
Credit – NASA / Martin Bermudez

The post A Blown-Glass Structure Could House Astronauts on the Moon appeared first on Universe Today.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “crimes,” came with a link: “Disestablish the Church of England“. And this time it’s Jesus rather than Mo who shows the characteristic hypocrisy or doublethink of the Divine Duo.  Also, note the decline in respect for religion!

In lieu of readers’ wildlife today, I’ll show some drawings and photos in honor of Darwin’s Birthday.  (Note to those malcontents who think that evolution is a religion that worships Darwin as a God: no, we do not think Darwin is infallible. He made a lot of errors, and his neglect of genetics and of how species really arise are big lacunae. Nevertheless, he’ll gone down in history as perhaps the most influential biologist ever.)

This comes from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior.

Here is my own Jewish Darwin Fish, just photographed:

More from Athayde. A mockery of the Christian Fish (there are many):

A big Darwin Award for this:

Darwin was born in Shrewsbury on this day in 1809 and attended Shrewsbury School as a boarder beginning at age 8. He went to the University of Edinburgh Medical School in 1825, but couldn’t stand the sight of blood and preferred collecting beetles. He dropped out and attended Cambridge University until 1831, when he started on the epic five-year voyage of the Beagle.  Here is his statue is in front of Shrewsbury School:

Bs0u10e01, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Darwin was pretty well off, and became more so when he married Emma Wedgwood, heiress of the Wedgwood pottery company. He married Emma in 1839 and in 1842 they moved to Down House in Kent (visit it; it’s not far from London!).  The couple had ten children, seven of whom survived. Darwin lived at Down House the rest of his life (he died in 1882), and it was there that he wrote On the Origin of Species and all his subsequent books. Here’s his study in Down House, which is pretty much as it was when he worked there.  I understand that he wrote in the chair, using a board placed over the arms. There’s also a basin behind a screen where Darwin would go to vomit, for he was often ill with a disease that we still don’t understand.

It’s me at Down House: August 19, 2008. You can see that Darwin had a nice mansion:

My friend Andrew Berry, who went to Shrewsbury School, and Janet Browne, who wrote the definitive biography of Darwin (two volumes). It is magnificent and written beautifully: a must-read. Janet showed us around Down House, which was a rare opportunity! I understand she’s revising it into one volume, perhaps because people lack attention spans these days, but I’d read the two-volume bio.

A cat I photographed at Down House. Darwin didn’t have much truck with cats and preferred d*gs. However, there are cats there now:

Here’s a tweet that points to many caricatures of Darwin and Darwinism, carefully collected and curated by John van Wyhe on his fantastic Darwin Online website. There are caricatures of Darwin, caricatures of evolution, and drawings from the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial”. I’ll give a few of each, with permission from van Wyhe.

For #DarwinDay, John van Wyhe shares this new collection of Darwin/evolution caricatures on the Darwin Online website: darwin-online.org.uk/Caricatures….Image: "This way to daylight my sons," Darwin says to Huxley and Tyndall (holding the banner of Science) in an 1873 caricature#histsci #HPS

— Michael D. Barton (@darwinsbulldog.bsky.social) 2025-02-12T03:25:05.199Z

Caricatures of Darwin. All captions are from the website:

c.1828 Two humorous ink sketches of Darwin riding giant beetles by fellow Cambridge undergraduate Albert Way, with captions “Darwin & his hobby.” and “Go it Charlie!”. The joke in this instance being Darwin’s obsession with collecting beetles as an undergraduate at Christ’s College, Cambridge. See Diana Donald’s entry on this here. See some of Darwin’s beetle captures here. (Yale University Library & Falvey Library, Villanova University) 1871 “MR. BERGH TO THE RESCUE.” At the door of the “SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. PRES. BERGH”. Harper’s Weekly (19 August): 776.

A postmortem portrait:

1882 “THE LATE CHARLES DARWIN.” The Wasp (San Francisco) 8, no. 300 (28 April): front cover.

Caricatures of Darwinism:

1872 “London: a Pilgrimage” by Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré. The gaping human visitors seen from inside the Monkey House, in the Zoological Gardens, London, appear rather monkey-like themselves. This was only a year after Darwin’s Descent of man was published.

1909 “How true! How True! | DARWIN [on cover of a magazine] | IN THE GOLDEN CHAIN OF FRIENDSHIP | REGARD ME AS A ‘MISSING’LINK!” By H. H. Tammen. “994”. USA postcard, stamped 1912.And two from the Scopes Trial:

1925 “Tennessee’s St. Patrick”. Los Angeles Times (27 March). Bryan wields a club “Evolution must not be taught in the schools of Tennessee” against scurrying apes and monkeys.

And from Chicago (a Darwinian town) showing how banning the teaching of evolution just creates interest in it:

1925 “HOW THEY ARE TEACHING EVOLUTION IN TENNESSEE”. Chicago Tribune (27 May).

It’s always good (and frustratingly rare) to see the mainstream media get it right when it comes to pseudoscience in medicine. Too often the narrative is – scientists are baffled at this alternative “one easy trick” to improve your health. Most mainstream articles on pseudoscience in medicine frame their reporting around a positive anecdote, and at best throw in some token skepticism […]

The post BBC Takes On Appeal to Nature Fallacy first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A waste-water surveillance network of strategic international airports could quickly detect outbreaks of new diseases – and provide early warnings of future pandemics

A groundbreaking study has uncovered how specific genetic mutations influence cancer treatment outcomes -- insights that could help doctors tailor treatments more effectively. The largest study of its kind, the research analyzed data for more than 78,000 cancer patients across 20 cancer types. Patients received immunotherapies, chemotherapies and targeted therapies.

How can a geologic map of a lunar impact crater created billions of years ago help future human and robotic missions to the lunar surface? This is what a recent study published in The Planetary Science Journal hopes to address as an international team of researchers produced arguably the most in-depth, comprehensive, and highest resolution geologic maps of Orientale basin, which is one of the largest and oldest geologic structures on the Moon. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and mission planners develop sample return missions that could place absolute ages on the Moon’s geology, resulting in better understanding the formation and evolution of our Moon and the Earth.

For the study, the researchers created a 1:200,000-scale geologic map of the Moon’s Orientale basin while focusing on identifying what are known as impact melt deposits, which are molten rocks created from a high-speed impact and intense heat that cooled and is now frozen in time, thus preserving its geologic record of when it was formed billions of years ago. The 1:200,000-scale means the map is 200,000 times smaller than in real life. Additionally, one pixel on the geologic map is equal to 100 meters, or approximately the size of an American gridiron football field, which improves upon previous Orientale basin geologic maps that were created at 1:5,000,000-scale.

“We chose to map Oriental basin because it’s simultaneously old and young,” said Dr. Kirby Runyon, who is a Research Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute and lead author of the study. “We think it’s about 3.8 billion years old, which is young enough to still have its impact melt freshly exposed at the surface, yet old enough to have accumulated large impact craters on top of it as well, complicating the picture. We chose to map Orientale to test melt-identification strategies for older, more degraded impact basins whose ages we’d like to know.”

The goal of the study is to not only create an improved geologic map of Orientale basin, but to provide a foundation for future missions to potentially obtain surface samples of the impact melt and return them to Earth for analysis. Such analyses would reveal absolute ages of the impact melt through radiometric dating since these samples have been frozen in time for potentially billions of years. These results could help scientists unravel the Earth’s impact history, as both the Earth and Moon were potentially formed around the same period.

Along with the targeted impact melt, the team successfully identified and mapped a myriad of geologic features within Orientale basin as part of the new geologic map, including smaller craters within Orientale, fractures, fault lines, calderas, crater ejecta, and mare (volcanic basalt deposits), while also constructing a top-to-bottom map of Orientale basin, also called a stratigraphic map, that shows the most recent layers on top with the oldest layers on the bottom.

Image of the most recent Orientale basin geologic map at 1:200,000-scale, which improves upon past geologic maps of the region that were 1:5,000,000-scale. The project focused on impact melt (depicted in red), which was created from the extreme heat of the high-speed impact and has been preserved for potentially billions of years. The stars represent potential landing sites for future sample return missions that scientists can analyze back on Earth to determine the absolute age of Oriental basin. (Credit: Runyon et al.)

Unlike Earth, whose surface processes like plate tectonics and multitude of weather processes have erased impacts from billions of years ago, the preserved lunar geologic record could provide incredible insight into not only Earth’s impact history, but both how and when life first emerged on our planet. This is due to Orientale basin’s crater size and age, as such a large impact on Earth billions of years ago could have postponed or reset how and when life first emerged on the Earth.

“Giant impacts – like the one that formed Orientale – can vaporize an ocean and kill any life that had already started,” said Dr. Runyon. “Some recent modeling has shown that we probably never totally sterilized Earth during these big impacts, but we don’t know for sure. At some point our oceans could have been vaporized from impacts, then recondensed and rained out repeatedly. If that happened a number of times, it’s only after the last time that life could have gotten a foothold.”

While Orientale basin is one of the most striking features on the lunar surface, more than approximately 75 percent of it is not visible from Earth due to its location at the lunar nearside and farside boundary on the western limb of the Moon as observed from the Earth. Therefore, studying the Orientale basin is only possible with spacecraft. Despite this, Orientale basin was first suggested to be an impact crater during the 1960s when scientists at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory used groundbreaking techniques to “image” the sides of the Moon not visible to Earth using telescopic images taken from the Earth.

While NASA is focused on returning astronauts to the lunar surface with its Artemis program with the goal of establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon, returning scientific samples from Orientale basin could provide enormous scientific benefits for helping us better understand both the age of the Moon but also how and when life emerged on Earth billions of years ago.

How will the Orientale basin geologic map help us better understand the Moon’s and Earth’s history in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

The post A Lunar Map for the Best Places to Get Samples appeared first on Universe Today.

Biomedical engineers have demonstrated a new synthetic approach that turbocharges bacteria into producing more of a specific protein, even proteins that would normally destroy them, such as antibiotics. The technique could be a boon to industries that use bacteria to produce a wide range of products such as pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals and biofuels.

Scientists have developed new light-sensitive chemicals that can radically improve the treatment of aggressive cancers with minimal side effects. In mouse tests, the new therapy completely eradicated metastatic breast cancer tumors.

Scientists have developed new light-sensitive chemicals that can radically improve the treatment of aggressive cancers with minimal side effects. In mouse tests, the new therapy completely eradicated metastatic breast cancer tumors.