Category Archives: Exobiology

alien critters

And now: Cover art/synopsis reveal for Under Nameless Stars – Zenn’s new adventure kicks your sci-fi thrill-o-meter into the red zone. Coming April, 2014.

Zenn Scarlett’s novice year of exoveterinarian training on Mars isn’t quite going to plan… After barely surviving a plot to destroy her school and its menagerie of alien patients, could things at the Ciscan cloister get any worse? Yes, they … Continue reading

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17 billion earth-size planets in the Milky Way galaxy. Cheers, 2013!

Some juicy numbers to start the new year with, courtesy of the Kepler planet-sniffing satellite, which is doing a great job, exceeding expectations and deserves a raise. Recent data sez Kep has found reasonable evidence for no less than 461 … Continue reading

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ALIEN LIFE PERCOLATING UNDER SUPER-EARTHLY LIQUID-METAL UMBRELLAS?

  Now then, the premise of the article that prompted this post is a bit of a stretch. A bit of a gi-normous not-bloody-likely stretch, actually, even for an exo-life-presumer like me. But I had to post it primarily because … Continue reading

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Alien contact: “Howdy, let’s be friends!” or “Oh my, these human things are naaaasty.”

A number of soft, easily-captured-immobilized-broasted-and-eaten humans with a vested interest have been thinking, furiously it seems, about the down-in-the-weeds details of how our first contact with an alien intelligence might go. And some of our sage-est of sage elders (as … Continue reading

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Launch your brain into “The Living Cosmos”

The Living Cosmos by Chris Impey Cambridge University Press 393 Pages, Paperback Edition Updated 2010 I write fiction that speculates about life on other planets, and while my attention to scientific nuts and bolts is far from exhaustive, I take … Continue reading

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Saturn’s moon Enceladus: just one big ol’ salt-water aquarium?

    NASA’s Cassini probe to Saturn has turned up the best evidence yet that there’s a seriously vast ocean of salt water sloshing around beneath the icy shell girdling the little Saturnian moon Enceladus. The water comes from fissure’s … Continue reading

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Excuse me, it’s for you. Long distance….

How will Earth respond when we receive our first message from an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization? We really don’t want to mess it up. Could be important. Fortunately, a guy with probably the coolest job description on the planet gets to … Continue reading

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you say exo, I say astro, let’s call the whole thing xeno…

Here’s some word-parsing (and worse…) re: the astro- exo- conundrum from a few different sites. Lots of overlap, I gotta say. But in the end, Cornell sorts it out for us. From the Astrobiology Web site: http://www.astrobiology.com/how.to.html Astrobiology seeks to … Continue reading

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Ice of the beholder

re: Vostok – here’s some hard science being done by NASA. The arty is on the astrobiology mag. site. (And then there’s the on-going scrum of: the use of terms exo-    vs. astrobiology in- and outside the SF realm. More … Continue reading

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cold, dark, wet… alive?

I’ve been following the Lake Vostok story off and on – last I heard the Russian crew had penetrated thru the last few meters, broke thru, pulled the rig up & let the trapped lake water pressure-rise up into the … Continue reading

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