6 paradigm-shifting Discoveries About humanity and extraterrestrial life. Recent scientific discoveries have shattered our ideas about where we came from and where we are headed. They have mind blowing implications regarding what we thought we knew about our past, and more importantly, they tell us something about where we are headed.
6) Forget everything you think you know about Neanderthals. They were not ape-like, dumb brutes. They were in fact, just like us. And in a sense, they did not disappear 40,000 year ago. They evolved – into us. They interbred with us. That’s right, we had sex with them… and consequently 2% of all current human genes are Neanderthal genes. They gave us immunity from many diseases, and lighter skin colors. Yes, they were lighter skinned than us, not darker.
5) The original population of native Americans immigrated from Asia and went almost straight to South America hugging the West Coast of Canada and the United States, before a secondary migration into North America. You would have thought that if the first populations of Native Americans came from the far north, what is now the Bering strait, they should have expanded into North America first, before spreading to South America. But anthropological finds indicate that they went straight to South America first. This could have been because they followed warm weather or game migrations. Scientist think much of North America may still have been in recovery from the ice age 25,000 years ago when they first migrated there.
4) There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. And Every Star has at least one planet orbiting it. The Keppler telescope has confirmed this. This makes it mathematically impossible that there is not at least another world where life exists. There has to be other life in the universe. The math indicates that the earth being the only planet with life is 1 in 6 sextillion. 6 followed by 21 zeros. Based on Keppler data, Scientists estimate that there are at least 40 billion other planets the size of earth, and in the habitable zone of their stars in the Universe. If that is the case, then we may find life elsewhere very similar to our own here. We are not alone in the Universe folks. There is definitely life elsewhere, but whether any life is intelligent remains the big unknown.
3) Shortly before it lost contact, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft discovered lights on the dwarf planet Ceres. This planet is only 300 miles wide, about the size of Texas, and lies in the meteor belt between Jupiter and Mars. Among the theories to explain it: It could be ice volcanoes reflecting light. It could be huge patches of salt. But scientists have also speculated that it could be extraterrestrial lights, since they can be seen from 29,000 miles away by NASA’s Dawn.
2) There is flowing liquid water on Mars. Liquid water has been detected flowing on the side of mountains during periods of warm weather. This water freezes as soon as it gets cold though. This type of water can support algae, fungus and other microbes. So, it increases the chance of life on Mars considerably.
1) We will have first contact by 2040. Scientists predict that we will discover another intelligent life in about 20 years because of the powerful Keppler space telescope and the upcoming incredible James Webb telescope which will launch in 2021. It is much larger than Hubble, and is 100 times more powerful. Unfortunately, we will likely never meet them in person. We may be able to communicate with them over multiple years at the speed of light, but we will never actually encounter them? Why? because even the nearest star to is 4.5 light years away. It would take 185,000 years at the fastest speeds we can currently travel, about 17 kilometers/second, or 11 miles per second. But even this speed is slower than snail’s pace when considering galactic distances. And even our communications at light speed will take multiple years to reach them, and multiple years to reach back to us.
