(ORDO NEWS) — One scientist believes that exotic chemicals found in meteorites are actually the remnants of ancient alien technology.
Between 1957 and 1968, scientists decided to try their hand at creating new minerals that could act as very efficient conductors of electricity. They “invented” a couple: heideite and bresinaite.
A few years later, these same minerals suddenly began to be found in fragments of meteorites that fell to Earth. As it turned out, these materials did not need to be invented – although how they could form outside the laboratory remained a mystery to scientists.
Now, six decades later, a Venezuelan researcher is trying to make a connection between the minerals scientists created in the labs and the same minerals that fell to Earth from space.
It is possible that these superconducting minerals, which arrived from space, are also artificial, suggested B.P. Embide, a physicist at the Central University of Venezuela, in his study.
And if so, then the minerals could be evidence of extraterrestrial technology – “technosignatures,” as scientists like to say. ” It’s important to open-mindedly and even provocatively consider the following question: Are these meteorite minerals samples of extraterrestrial technosignatures? ” Embiid wrote.
This is a controversial proposal. The implications are extremely compelling: Scientists studying alien technosignatures want to find alien technology and get confirmation that we are not alone in the universe. But even they are not convinced by Embaid’s research.
There are many reasons to believe that these exotic minerals are not proof of the existence of an extraterrestrial civilization.
“I’m very skeptical that these minerals are technosignatures,” Edward Schwieterman, an astrobiologist at the University of California, Riverside, told The Daily Beast.
It’s possible that heideite and bresinaite occur naturally somewhere out there in space. And in In this case, we don’t need “ET” to explain the presence of these minerals in a handful of space rocks.
But Embaid’s broader view – that evidence of aliens could be right under our noses – has more basis. Scientists generally agree that we should look more broadly and open-mindedly for signs of extraterrestrial civilizations. Embaid did not respond to a request for comment.
Back in 1957, scientists first synthesized bresinaite by combining and carefully layering chromium and sulfur.
Twelve years later, astronomers studying a meteorite that crashed to earth near Tucson, Arizona in 1850 discovered bresinaite in a space rock structure. This same strange mineral was later found in other meteorites that fell to Earth.
“Scientists generally agree that we should look more broadly and open-mindedly for signs of extraterrestrial civilizations.”
Heideite is a later discovery. Scientists first created it in the laboratory in 1968 by combining chromium, iron, sulfur and titanium. Six years later, heideite was discovered in a meteorite that hit the ground in India in 1852. In 1995, scientists discovered heideift in a second meteorite that fell in Yemen in 1980.
It’s not some cosmic coincidence that we found bresinaite and heideite in the lab, and then a few years later found them in meteorites. Of course, these minerals have been circling in space for centuries – and they’re probably found in the countless meteorites that litter our planet.
We just didn’t notice them until the late 1960s, because we didn’t even know they existed until we created them for ourselves, and didn’t notice them when they were right under our noses.
Scientists have even come up with a name for our tendency to notice things around us only after we’ve decided they’re important. “Frequency Illusion”. A classic example in the scientific literature is people who see red cars everywhere after deciding to buy – you guessed it – a red car.
Bresinaite and heideite are special – not least because they are very, very conductive. Perhaps even superconductors.
That is, electricity can pass through them without resistance. Superconductors are key components in a wide range of modern technologies such as computer chips and medical instruments. No wonder scientists created bresinaite and heideite.
Therefore, it would be logical if an alien civilization also created these minerals.
Intelligent life, whether on this planet or another halfway through the galaxy, operates with the same natural elements and the same laws of physics.
This does not mean that bresinaite and heideite appear only in laboratories. Of course, they do not occur naturally on Earth – we have to produce them. But, nevertheless, they can occur naturally somewhere else in the galaxy.
In other words, the fall of bresinaite and heideite from the sky is not necessarily proof of the existence of aliens.
But Embiid thinks that bresinaite and heideite are so weird, with their unique compositions and layers, that there’s a good chance they were always made. There is a good chance that all Bresinaites and Heideites in the galaxy come from laboratories – our laboratories or laboratories of some alien civilization.
“Creating these meteorite minerals may require a controlled and complex process that is not easily found in nature ,” Embiid writes.
Maybe. Ravi Kopparapu, a technosignatures research expert at NASA‘s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told The Daily Beast we need a lot more data before we start making bold claims about breezinite and haydate.
“It can only be trusted when more experiments are done and independently confirmed that they are not natural.”
“The genesis of these meteorite minerals may require a controlled and complex process that is not easily found in nature.”
Scientists should be scouring space for evidence of some natural process that turns chromium, iron, sulfur, and titanium into, say, heideite. They must look for evidence that nature cannot by itself produce bresinaite or heideite.
“If many attempts are made and the hypothesis is never confirmed, then we can start to wonder about the possibility that these minerals were obtained from industrial processes – in other words, that they are technosignatures,” Jacob told The Daily Beast.
Hakk-Misra, an astrobiologist at the Blue Marble Space Science Institute in Seattle. If it is true that bresinaite and heideite are exclusively synthetic, then the implication is obvious.
Any meteorite found by us containing bresinaite or heideite is not a natural space rock. It’s a piece of alien technology – more specifically, “orphan technology”. Remains of long-disabled spaceships or probes.
How these alien technologies could get to Earth is easy to imagine. At least one probe or other craft arrived in the solar system potentially millions or billions of years ago, but at some point lost energy and fell under the gravity of the Sun or one of the several planets already in orbit.
This spaceship could have broken apart and shattered into many fragments throughout the system. Some of these parts fell to Earth in the form of meteorites.
If that sounds unusual, consider that just five years ago, a very strange, shiny, elongated object the size of a cruise liner burst into the solar system and left as quickly as it appeared.
‘Oumuamua, as the object has come to be called, is unlike anything we have ever seen. At least one prominent Harvard scientist thinks it could be an alien craft.
If ‘Oumuamua is an intact alien craft, then all of these bresinaite or heideite-bearing meteorites could be the remains of a much less fortunate craft that fell apart during its long journey.
As our understanding of the universe expands, more scientists are coming to the conclusion that aliens are probably out there, in one form or another.
Mathematics confirms this. There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone. And besides our own galaxy, there are potentially trillions of other galaxies.
Multiply these two numbers and you get a total number of stars somewhere in the region of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. If other galaxies are like ours, most of these stars have at least one planet the size of the Earth.
That’s a lot of planets. Many potentially wet and warm planets similar to ours, on which life could develop. With the right combination of circumstances, in the end, this life can become sentient and invent technology.
Signs of this technology can come in many different forms: environmental pollution from alien farms and factories, or giant habitable structures containing entire stars, or explosive bursts of radiation from the engines of high-tech spacecraft belonging to other intelligent species, to name but a few.
A team of scientists this summer began compiling a new, broader list of potential techno-features.
This list does not yet include superconducting pieces of an abandoned alien ship. But maybe they should be there.
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