The stars we see glittering in the evening, as the whole universe, the material was once a 'smoke' like that. God has said in the Qur'an:
Then he headed to the creation of the heavens and the sky was still a smoke, ... (Al Fushshiilat, 41: 11)
Because the earth and the sky above it (the sun, moon, stars, planets, galaxies, etc.) is formed of 'smoke' the same, then it can be concluded that the sun and the earth used to be a single entity. Then they split up and formed of 'smoke' which is homogeneous. God has said:
And if those who disbelieve known that the heavens and the earth were of one piece, then We parted them. (Al Anbiya, 21:30)
Dr. Alfred Kroner is one of the leading geographers. He is a Professor of geology and head of the Department of Geology at the Institute of Geosciences, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. He said: "If you view the home of Muhammad ... I think it is highly unlikely if he could find something like origin of the universe of matter which one, because scientists have only learned this in a few years ago through a variety of complex ways and with advanced technology. This is the reality. " He also said: "Someone who does not know anything about nuclear physics 14 centuries ago, in my opinion, will never be able to know, through his own thinking, that once the earth and the heavens are from the one."
One of the Reasons I love astronomy is that? It does not Flinch from the big questions. And one of the biggest is: are we alone?
Another reason I love astronomy: it has a good shot at answering this question.
Even a few Decades ago the hard-headed realists pooh-poohed the idea of aliens. But times change, and so does science. The data we've accumulated enough That makes the question-Fetched far less than it once was, and I'm starting to think That the question is "Will we find life?" But rather "Which method will find it first?"
There are three methods that, to me, are the front-runners for finding life on other worlds. And I have an idea as to the which one may find it first.
Life on Mars?
The first method follows the principle That when you're looking for something, it's best to start close to home.
We know of one That has life planet: Earth. So it makes sense to look for other places with Earth-like conditions: That is, liquid water, oxygen in the water, Nutrients for growth, and so on.
The most obvious place to look is Mars. At first glance it Appears dry, cold and dead. But if you can see past that, Things start to look up. The polar caps, for example, have lots of frozen water, and we've directly seen ice at lower latitudes on the Red Planet as well - Impacts meteorite craters have left behind shiny, digging up fresh ice from below the surface.
Several Mars rovers and Landers have uncovered evidence tantalising That Might liquid water just flow Beneath the surface, but we still lack any conclusive evidence. However, if you broaden your timescale a bit, there is excellent evidence in the past That - Perhaps a billion years or so ago - our planet had neighbouring Oceans of liquid water and water Thicker. In fact, conditions were pretty good to develop life as we know it even before it popped up here on Earth.
It's entirely possible That life got a toehold (or pseudopod hold) there long ago, and Died out. If that's the case, we may yet find fossils in the Martian rocks. Again, there's no conclusive evidence yet, but we've literally barely Scratched the surface there. Now that it has successfully landed on Mars, we have the exciting possibility That the plutonium-powered, car-sized rover Curiosity will soon use its on-board laser and other tools to crack open and examine rocks in the Gale Crater, the which were laid down billions of years ago in the presence of liquid water.
And Mars is not the only possibility in our solar system. Liquid water exists inside Saturn's moon Enceladus, where geysers of liquid water erupt from deep canyons at its south pole. Energized by the gravitational tug of the giant ringed planet Itself, the interior of Enceladus may be a the vast ocean of liquid water even while the surface is frozen over. That does not guarantee we'll ever find alien fish swimming moon's seas That, of course. But it's an interesting place to look.
Europa, a moon of Jupiter, almost Certainly has an undersurface ocean as well. If you relax your constraints even more, Saturn's moon Titan has liquid lakes of methane and Ethane on its surface, too. The chemistry for life would be different there - it's a rather chilly-180C on the surface - but it's not impossible to suppose Might Arise life there too.
Finding out whether this is the case means getting up close and personal. That we're doing for Mars; however, the likes of Europa and Enceladus may have to wait a decade or four.
Phone home
But maybe we do not have to go anywhere. Instead, we Might Be Able to sit here and wait for alien Beings (of whatever form) to message us.
SETI is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and its name Tells you its story: it's a group of astronomers looking for signs of intelligent life in space. Various They use advanced methods to look for aliens, but the most promising one is to listen for any messages sent across the skies.
The basic assumption is that? SETI aliens are out there and want to contact us. If that's the case, there's a good way They can signal us: radio waves. They're the perfect medium: they're cheap, easy to make, easy to encode with information, They travel unimpeded across the whole galaxy, and They move at the speed of light, the fastest thing we know. So SETI scours the skies looking for radio signals from ET.
They have not found anything yet, but as SETI astronomer Seth Shostak points out, we've just started looking. There's a lot of galaxy and a lot of radio wave frequencies to shift through. But our technology gets better all the time, allowingfor more sensitive searches. According to Shostak, if they're out there and currently sending signals our way, we should have an answer one way or another in about 25 years given the way Things are going.
I think SETI is a good idea. In a practical sense Their radio engineers are advancing our technology and signal processing, and philosophically I think it's interesting to listen for alien signals. But I do wonder about the basic assumption That aliens are out there and want to contact us - it's a big leap, and based on our own human motivations. So while this is Certainly worth the effort, it's hard to know if it'll pay off, and the 25-year deadline reflects that.
But I suspect another method may have the edge.
New world order
For a long time, we Only Knew of nine planets (including Pluto, though this was downgraded from its planetary status five years ago), and only one That Could life support. Then, in 1995, astronomers found the first planet to orbit another sun-like star. Was not the planet like ours at all - more massive than Jupiter, and the Orbiting so close to its parent star over its temperature is 1.000 C. But it was a watershed moment. We finally Knew That other planets exist.
Since then, NASA's Kepler space telescope, the European Space Agency's Corot mission and ground-based instruments have found nearly 800 other planets, and that 'Grows number every week. We know of enough other planets Orbiting stars That we can actually start to extrapolate some numbers: it looks like approximately half of all stars in the galaxy have planets, and planets may in fact outnumber the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way.
We still do not know how many of these worlds are like ours, but it seems a like it's a good bet the number is in the million, if not billions. We're finding smaller and smaller planets all the time, and statistically speaking Earth-sized planets should be fairly common.
The big question is how many of these have life? We do not know. But Consider this: That we have evidence life on Earth started almost Immediately after its surface was cool and stable enough to allow it. For three billion years That Earthly life consisted of one-celled organisms, and it's only Relatively recently evolved into these That the type of multi-celled creatures That Inhabit now every niche of this blue planet.
It means That any Earth-like planets we find may be populated by ... yeast. But that counts. It's life. And life does something special: it ingests excretes chemicals and other chemicals.
Tell-tale signs
One Such chemical is oxygen. On Earth, we breathe it in, but plants breathe it out. There's a lot of it in our water, our atmosphere is more than 20% oxygen. If we found a planetary atmosphere with lots of oxygen gas, that would almost Certainly be an indicator of life.SETI is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and its name Tells you its story: it's a group of astronomers looking for signs of intelligent life in space. Various They use advanced methods to look for aliens, but the most promising one is to listen for any messages sent across the skies.
The basic assumption is that? SETI aliens are out there and want to contact us. If that's the case, there's a good way They can signal us: radio waves. They're the perfect medium: they're cheap, easy to make, easy to encode with information, They travel unimpeded across the whole galaxy, and They move at the speed of light, the fastest thing we know. So SETI scours the skies looking for radio signals from ET.
They have not found anything yet, but as SETI astronomer Seth Shostak points out, we've just started looking. There's a lot of galaxy and a lot of radio wave frequencies to shift through. But our technology gets better all the time, allowingfor more sensitive searches. According to Shostak, if they're out there and currently sending signals our way, we should have an answer one way or another in about 25 years given the way Things are going.
I think SETI is a good idea. In a practical sense Their radio engineers are advancing our technology and signal processing, and philosophically I think it's interesting to listen for alien signals. But I do wonder about the basic assumption That aliens are out there and want to contact us - it's a big leap, and based on our own human motivations. So while this is Certainly worth the effort, it's hard to know if it'll pay off, and the 25-year deadline reflects that.
But I suspect another method may have the edge.
New world order
For a long time, we Only Knew of nine planets (including Pluto, though this was downgraded from its planetary status five years ago), and only one That Could life support. Then, in 1995, astronomers found the first planet to orbit another sun-like star. Was not the planet like ours at all - more massive than Jupiter, and the Orbiting so close to its parent star over its temperature is 1.000 C. But it was a watershed moment. We finally Knew That other planets exist.
Since then, NASA's Kepler space telescope, the European Space Agency's Corot mission and ground-based instruments have found nearly 800 other planets, and that 'Grows number every week. We know of enough other planets Orbiting stars That we can actually start to extrapolate some numbers: it looks like approximately half of all stars in the galaxy have planets, and planets may in fact outnumber the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way.
We still do not know how many of these worlds are like ours, but it seems a like it's a good bet the number is in the million, if not billions. We're finding smaller and smaller planets all the time, and statistically speaking Earth-sized planets should be fairly common.
The big question is how many of these have life? We do not know. But Consider this: That we have evidence life on Earth started almost Immediately after its surface was cool and stable enough to allow it. For three billion years That Earthly life consisted of one-celled organisms, and it's only Relatively recently evolved into these That the type of multi-celled creatures That Inhabit now every niche of this blue planet.
It means That any Earth-like planets we find may be populated by ... yeast. But that counts. It's life. And life does something special: it ingests excretes chemicals and other chemicals.
Tell-tale signs
One Such chemical is oxygen. On Earth, we breathe it in, but plants breathe it out. There's a lot of it in our water, our atmosphere is more than 20% oxygen. If we found a planetary atmosphere with lots of oxygen gas, that would almost Certainly be an indicator of life.
As it turns out, we're on the verge of being Able to do just that. Planets are dim and Huddle close to Their stars, but there are techniques to separate the light from the two objects. Oxygen has a signature, like a fingerprint, that can be detected in That light. It will take an extremely sensitive telescope and very clever techniques to see it, but we have the technology now to build Such machines. Such a one is the James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch in 2018. It should be Able to detect oxygen in an alien planet's water. And many other instruments are being planned and built That can carry out similar observations.
Our technology is getting so good so Quickly That finding alien biological atmospheric signatures is probably our best bet. To me, the numbers add up better than for the other strategies: there must be lots of this type of planets out there, life seems a to Arise easily, and biology messes with a planet's chemistry in a detectable way. We do not know if Mars or Those watery moons have life at all, and even if They do It could take a long time to find it. And who knows if smart aliens are out there, and want to talk to us? But it may only be a few more years until we point a telescope at a FLECK of light, absorbing one by one Those photons, sifting through them, and finding in them - literally - the breath of life.
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Dr. Alfred Kroner
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Johannes Gutenberg University
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Qur'an
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