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A clip from The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1978 made the social media rounds in mid-July. The guest that episode—astronomer and science educator Carl Sagan—offered astute criticisms of the then recently released Star Wars film for its myopic (and whitewashed) imagining of how organisms from other galaxies might look. In this collection, reporter Leonard David examines the government report published in June that surveys our evidence for extraterrestrial life so far (see “Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report”), and two of our opinion writers contemplate some specific circumstances for alien contact.

But Sagan’s prescient observations remind me that our search for other life in the universe will always be a strictly human endeavor: how we imagine aliens might look, think or operate and how we look for them or detect their existence— all these factors are based on the human framework of perception. Such limitations will only be problematic if we ignore them and fail to somehow jump beyond the bounds of our minds.

Ever since I can remember, I was constantly asking questions. My parents called me “Miss Inquisity” because of it. I was that quirky kid on the playground who played with butterflies and spied for ladybugs. After I came home from school, I binged How It’s Made on the Science Channel. Oh, that’s what makes my bubble gum so sticky! Or, this is what they put in Oreos, really? I thought to myself. Seeing all this, you’d think that STEM would be the perfect fit for me, right? For a long time, I thought so too. My initial impressions of the field were that it would satisfy my unrelenting desire to know why. But as I grew up, this only seemed farther from the truth.

In high school, when I finally had the academic freedom to explore my interests, I took full advantage. Planning my own classes, I loaded up on every science course I could find. Chemistry, biology, you name it, and it was on my schedule. Though I wasn’t sure exactly what it was I wanted to pursue in STEM yet, I hoped that these courses would help me find out. Come junior year, I was still undecided and even more concerned because it was supposedly the hardest point of high school. I had some of the most difficult classes on my agenda. AP chemistry, precalculus AB—most of my peers would barely give these a second glance. But once I started studying the material, I finally understood why they held back, why I consistently heard so many of my friends ask “When am I ever going to use this?” or “When is this ever going to help me?”

Much to my disappointment, the reality of studying these “hard sciences” is far removed from the way it is shown in the media—unlike anything I’d seen in watching all those episodes of How It’s Made. When you have so many formulas, constants and theorems to memorize, it is far too easy to get lost in the complexity of it all. After all, how motivating is it to remember a bunch of numbers when you don’t really know why it even matters to use them? And trust me when I say I completely empathize! It is hard.

This is why I nearly give up on pursuing STEM. I clearly remember a moment in AP chemistry, reviewing the basics of elemental composition, when I asked myself, Why do I even need to know this, what is the point of it all? I was drumming my mechanical pencil on the table for five minutes straight, stumped on this one problem, and barely had the stamina to continue. Thankfully, the assignment wasn’t due till a week later when I finally had the wake-up call I never knew I needed.

I didn’t expect to have such a breakthrough in my AP psychology class, but it was Ms. Brown’s unique approach to instruction that made me reconsider the idea of throwing it all away—my desire to pursue STEM, that is. She forewarned us that neuroscience was one of the more challenging units this year, and after my recent fallout with chemistry, I honestly wasn’t looking forward to it.

After she gave our class a brief overview of the unit, she immediately divided us into Zoom breakout rooms to analyze real-world scenarios using neuroscience terminology. I remember one in particular about a man who suffered cerebral trauma in a car accident and couldn’t feel any pain. She surprised us by popping into our room, waiting patiently for an answer. I always hated the awkward silence, and for no other reason than to just break the tension I quipped “Well, the adrenal gland of the endocrine system releases adrenaline, decreasing sensation to pain, allowing the man to feel temporarily stronger, taking control of his situation.” She commended my participation and lightly scolded the students with their cameras turned off as she left the room.

I think I might like this, I thought to myself. Shortly, one of my peers unmuted and said “Wow, you’re really good at this!” But at the time, I didn’t think it was so much my skill, as much as how I loved that neuroscience had reignited my passion for discovering the why. What makes people happy, biologically, what is really going on? What factors in our brains are conspiring to create a certain thought, reaction or emotion? But even more than these provocative questions was the idea that there is still so much we don’t know about the brain—meaning just that much more for me to discover!

So, if you really want to know why more young people aren’t entering STEM, I hope you’ll remember this story. While I may not have a concrete answer, I do have my experiences, and, knowing why—where your learning is going to take you—is one powerful feeling.

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

My quantum experiment, which has consumed me for more than a year now, has dredged up a creepy, long-buried memory. It dates back to the late 1970s, when I was a housepainter living in Denver. One day I found myself in a grungy saloon on Denver’s dusty eastern outskirts. Behind the bar was an aquarium with a single, nasty-looking fish hovering in it. A silver, saucer-sized, snaggle-toothed, milky-eyed, blind piranha.

Now and then, the bartender netted a few minnows from a fishbowl and dropped them into the piranha’s cubicle. The piranha froze for an instant, then darted this way and that, jaws snapping, as the minnows fled. The piranha kept bumping, with audible thuds, into the glass walls of its prison. That explained the protuberance on its snout, which resembled a tiny battering ram. Sooner or later the piranha gobbled all the hapless minnows, whereupon it returned to its listless, suspended state.

What does this poor creature have to do with quantum mechanics? Here’s what. Our modern scientific worldview and much of our technology—including the laptop on which I’m writing these words—is based on quantum principles. And yet a century after its invention, physicists and philosophers cannot agree on what quantum mechanics means. The theory raises deep and, I’m guessing, unanswerable questions about matter, mind and “reality,” whatever that is.

More than a half century ago, Richard Feynman advised us to accept that nature makes no sense. “Do not keep saying to yourself … ‘But how can [nature] be like that?’” Feynman warns in The Character of Physical Law, “because you will get ‘down the drain,’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.” Most physicists have followed Feynman’s advice. Ignoring the oddness of quantum mechanics, they simply apply it to accomplish various tasks, such as predicting new particles or building more powerful computers.

Another deep-thinking physicist, John Bell, deplored this situation. In his classic 1987 work Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Bell chides physicists who apply quantum mechanics while blithely disregarding its “fundamental obscurity”; he calls them “sleepwalkers.” But Bell acknowledges that efforts to “interpret” quantum mechanics so that it makes sense have failed. He likens interpretations such as the many-world hypothesis and pilot-wave theory to “literary fiction.”

Today, there are more interpretations than ever, but they deepen rather than dispel the mystery at the heart of things. The more I dwell on puzzles such as superposition, entanglement and the measurement problem, the more I identify with the piranha. I’m blindly thrashing about for insights, epiphanies, revelations. Every now and then I think I’ve grasped some slippery truth, but my satisfaction is always fleeting. Sooner or later, I end up crashing into an invisible barrier. I don’t really know where I am or what’s going on. I’m in the dark.

The main difference between me and piranha is that it is inside the aquarium, and I’m on the outside, looking in. I can take solace from the fact that my world is much bigger than the piranha’s, and that I know many things that the fish cannot. But it’s all too easy to imagine some enlightened, superintelligent being standing outside our world, looking at us with the same pity and smug superiority that we feel toward the piranha.

Plato presents himself as this enlightened being in his famous parable of the cave, which I make my freshman humanities classes read every semester. The parable describes people confined to a cave for their entire lives. They are prisoners, but they don’t know they are prisoners. An evil trickster behind them has built a fire, by means of which he projects shadows of everything from aardvarks to zebras onto the cave wall in front of the prisoners. The cave dwellers mistake these shadows for reality. Only by escaping the cave can the prisoners discover the brilliant, sunlit reality beyond it.

We are the benighted prisoners in the cave, and Plato, the enlightened philosopher, is trying to drag us into the light. But isn’t it possible, even probable, that Plato and other self-appointed saviors, who say they’ve seen the light and want us to see it too, are charlatans? Or loons? Given our profound capacity for self-deception, isn’t it likely that when you think you’ve left the cave, you’ve actually just swapped one set of illusions for another? These are the questions with which I torment my students. Here are some of their responses:

• Clearly, some people are ignorant and deluded, like flat-earthers, and others are well-informed. So yes, we can and do escape the cave of ignorance by going to college and studying physics, chemistry, history, philosophy and so on. We can reduce our ignorance still further with the help of reliable news sources, such as the New York Times and Fox News, and traveling to other countries to learn how other people see the world.
• Yes, we can escape the cave by studying physics and other fields, but we only end up in another cave, with equations projected on the walls instead of silhouettes of aardvarks and so on. The new cave may be more interesting, comfortable and better-illuminated than the cave we were in before, but it’s still a cave. Only a few rare souls experience ultimate reality, like Buddha, Jesus and Einstein.
• Plato wasn’t really talking about worldly knowledge, he was talking about spiritual knowledge, or enlightenment. So yes, we can leave the cave and see the light of truth, but only by accepting the teachings of great sages such as Buddha, Moses, Jesus or Muhammad, and perhaps by practicing spiritual disciplines such as prayer and meditation.
• With the help of philosophy, art, meditation and psychedelics, we can become more aware that we are in a cave, in a state of illusion; we can know, sort of, what we don’t know. But no mere human ever escapes the cave, not even the greatest sages and scientists. Not even Plato, Stephen Hawking or L. Ron Hubbard. Only God, if there is a God, can perceive absolute truth. And maybe not even God.
• Who cares if we’re in a cave or not? If we’re having fun, that’s all that matters. (Although only a few of my students have the courage to voice this option, I suspect it’s what many of them think, especially the business majors.)

To be honest, the fourth option—that not even God can escape the cave, plus the references to psychedelics, Stephen Hawking and L. Ron Hubbard—is mine. But my students come up with the other options on their own, with minimal prodding from me. By the time we’re done with this exercise, I start feeling guilty about rubbing the young, innocent faces of the non–business majors in the world’s inscrutability. To make them feel a little better, I bring up another possibility that usually doesn’t occur to them:

If we realize we’re in the cave, isn’t that the same, sort of, as escaping from it? Actually, if “ultimate reality” is inaccessible to us, isn’t that the same, sort of, as saying that it doesn’t exist? And hence that the cave, the world in which we live each and every day, is the one and only reality? And hence that the business majors are right, and we should just chill out and enjoy ourselves?

Maybe. On good days, I look out the window of my apartment at the shining Hudson River, crisscrossed by boats, and at the Manhattan skyline, a symbol of humanity’s ever-growing knowledge of and power over nature, and I think, Yes, this is reality, there is nothing else. But then I remember the quantum mist at the core of reality, which not even the smartest sages can penetrate, and to which most of us are oblivious. And I remember the piranha, bumping over and over again into the walls of its world, blind to its own blindness.

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Further Reading:

Is the Schrödinger Equation True?

Quantum Mechanics, the Chinese Room Experiment and the Limits of Understanding

Quantum Mechanics, the Mind-Body Problem and Negative Theology

I explore the limits of knowledge in my two most recent books, Mind-Body Problems, available for free online, and Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science.

See my recent chat with Russian writer/artist Nikita Petrov, in which we talk about the blind piranha, Plato’s cave and psychedelics.

The White House has rehired a climate scientist who was forced out by the Trump administration, and is proposing to dramatically increase the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Science is back” has become a Biden slogan. But listening to scientists is only the first step—and only a partial step, given the deep distrust many Americans have for experts. We must improve how ordinary citizens help shape science policy.

This is one of the findings of a recent report from the Hastings Center that examines the role of citizens in shaping policy in health and science. That role should not be limited to electing candidates and then, a few years later, expressing approval or disapproval of their job performance. Too many issues are in play at once for the voting–governing connection to be meaningful for many of them, and most people do not choose candidates on the basis of a clear understanding of policies, anyway

It is unlikely, for example, that elections will provide guidance about the governance of new technologies such as gene editing, assisted reproduction or artificial intelligence. That doesn’t mean that citizens’ views can’t help shape those policies through mechanisms such as public comment periods on proposed federal rules and public referenda at the state level. But those who influence rulemaking rarely represent the larger public, and neither comment periods nor referenda are deliberative processes in which people become informed about an issue and discuss it with people who might have different views.

What we need are opportunities for Americans to talk and listen to each other face to face, as equals, ideally in person but virtually if need be, about the values and the facts that should guide policy. Americans are not as divided as elected officials, and where they disagree, deliberation can reduce the distance between them. We also can learn to talk and listen with greater mutual respect. The nation was built on this principle of equality, and Americans of all political perspectives must live it.

There have been many small-scale efforts along these lines, mostly undertaken by academics or small nonprofits in what’s known as the civic renewal movement. Typically, these bring people from a community together to discuss local issues, which can help shift the focus from national politics and disagreements about issues that may be abstract and distant toward immediate, concrete problems and shared interests. For example, instead of discussing climate change in general, which is hard to disconnect from the national political divide, participants can focus on the effect of river flooding on farmers. This kind of local entry point can even lead to a deeper understanding of the broader national issue.

But deliberation is possible, and could be productive, at a national level as well. One example is America in One Room, in which 523 Americans spent a weekend together discussing a range of policy issues in order to become less polarized and more confident about U.S. democracy. Such an event is a logistical challenge, but similar events can be held online, which also reduces costs and allows more people to participate.

Public deliberation could also be tailored to the many issues that tend to elude the voting/governing feedback loop. Gene editing is a prime example. Reports from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and other bodies around the world have argued that policy on genetic editing technologies should be guided by public deliberation.

Public deliberation could also shape the distribution of scarce resources in a disaster like the COVID-19 pandemic, or the use of public health measures such as vaccine certificates. And the groundswell of support among the public for more attention to climate change suggests that public deliberation could help galvanize the political will to overcome the policy-making logjam in the federal government.

In the end, good science depends on democracy, and democracy depends on a deeper, richer engagement between citizens and governance structures. In a healthy democracy, institutions both private and governmental help create citizens who learn, talk and listen better—who are better able to be engaged and effective—and in turn, active, engaged citizens strengthen the institutions of a good democracy. We don’t just need good government: we need a good society that builds good citizens, who in turn build a better society.

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Horns, spikes and bony plates—dinosaurs developed many adaptations to protect themselves. But paleontologist Lawrence M. Witmer has discovered that a group of dinosaurs called ankylosaurs had a secret weapon. It was even more important than their tanklike armor, and it was hidden inside their skull: their nasal passages.

Ankylosaurs’ thick full-body armor protected them from predators, but it did not allow much heat to escape from their huge body. Paleontologists were puzzled at how these animals were able to regulate their temperature and survive under the blazing Cretaceous-period sun.

Using advanced scanning and 3-D modeling technologies in his Ohio University lab, Witmer and his colleagues discovered that Euoplocephalus, a genus of ankylosaurs, had strange corkscrew-shaped nasal passages that Witmer likens to a “child’s crazy straw.”

Jason Bourke, a former doctoral student of Witmer’s, now at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State, modeled the dinosaur’s nasal airflow and found the corkscrew shape allowed the passages to act like the coils inside a modern air conditioner. They helped cool ankylosaurs’ blood before it reached the brain, preventing the animals from dying of heat stroke.

Witmer’s study is part of a larger research effort to understand how different groups of dinosaurs dealt with the extreme heat of their environment. In in ankylosaur fossils, the answer was relatively easy to find: their nasal passages were well-preserved inside their bony skull. But the answer is proving more elusive in dinosaurs whose skull had large openings, including long-necked sauropods and carnivorous dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex.

For Witmer, unearthing this knowledge is not strictly about understanding the giants of the past. “Right now we’re seeing this unprecedented global warming, global climate change, which is disrupting all kinds of weather patterns,” he says. “Dinosaurs, in a sense, can give us some insight into how animals today might be able to deal with this increased heat that we see.”

I am very sure that there is life up there, somewhere in our solar system,” says Christine Moissl-Eichinger, a microbiologist at the Medical University of Graz in Austria. But like any scientist, Moissl-Eichinger knows full well that substantial proof is needed for such a substantial claim. So she and others are working to find that proof—both here on Earth and on Mars.

On the Red Planet, NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance is searching for fossils and traces of alien biochemistry in Jezero Crater, an ancient lake bed thought to have once offered habitable conditions for microbial life. Back home, microbiologists are investigating oxygen-poor environments that may mimic the habitat of early Mars. This two-pronged approach of grounding scientists’ extraterrestrial extrapolations with studies of Earthly analogues could help clarify the bedrock limits for life on rocky planets, greatly aiding the development and execution of future extraterrestrial missions.

The Mars Analogues for Space Exploration project (MASE) was a four-year-long effort that used Earth to understand Mars by analyzing five types of harsh but habitable terrestrial environments that may resemble those that once—or even now—existed on our neighboring planet. Its funding concluded in 2017, but MASE researchers continue to publish results about the habitability of Mars. The study sites included a sulfidic spring, a briny mine, an acidic lake and river, and permafrost. Because of the extreme conditions in these environments, organisms that live here are called extremophiles.

Extremophile research was pioneered by the late Thomas Brock, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He found, against all expectations, that certain hardy microbes could thrive in geothermal springs hot enough to poach an egg. The microbiologist’s curiosity led to the isolation of a molecule—from a heat-loving bacterium—that is now used in laboratories across the world to amplify and sequence DNA. Brock passed away in April 2021, but his legacy lives on.

Brock published his extremophile findings in April 1969, mere months before humans first walked on the moon. This paved the way for astrobiology, the study of life in all its forms on this planet and elsewhere in the universe. Astrobiology is not about making money off of space travel, says Luke McKay, a researcher at Montana State University, who was not involved with that study or Moissl-Eichinger’s recent research. It is about basic science and answering a single, timeless question: Does life exist beyond Earth?

This is a question so profound that so far scientists have only managed to chip away at its edges, with each hard-won revelation usually accompanied by a host of newfound mysteries. Moissl-Eichinger and her team’s chief contribution has been their attempt at cultivating extremophiles from MASE’s five environments, but even this straightforward task has been devilishly difficult. Out of more than 1,000 different extremophile species gathered from those sites, the team managed to grow just 31 in the lab. This is a common struggle in environmental microbiology. Because these microbes live in extreme places, it is difficult for researchers to re-create the exact conditions they require to thrive. To capture more of the diversity, the team’s scientists used genetic sequencing, which allowed them to look at all the microbial DNA in their samples. They specifically searched for genes that may help microbes survive hostile conditions, such as extreme temperatures or the absence of oxygen.

“Cultured [microbial] isolates are not representative of the environment, and that’s why it’s really cool what they did. By using isolates and sequencing, I think they really tried to cover all the bases,” McKay says.

Despite their trouble culturing their extremophile samples, the researchers discovered a vast diversity of microorganisms in all five locations. Even in the most extreme Earthly environments, it seems, life indeed finds a way. Most remarkably, the team’s DNA sequencing revealed 34 unique microbial sequences that were conserved in all MASE sites, which is evidence of microbes surviving a combination of extreme environments. According to Moissl-Eichinger, although many microbes are adapted to live in certain conditions such as intense cold or scant oxygen, it is novel to find a group of microbes adapted to survive a combination of these extreme stressors. This ability to survive in many types of environments strengthens the researchers’ claims that similar microbes could exist on Mars—not only in the deep past but even today.

“Microbes are everywhere. They can live in places where we’d expect they could not thrive, but somehow they do,” Moissl-Eichinger says. “Of course, on Mars, we do not know if these [extremophiles] are the types of microorganisms we expect to see. They may just be very adapted to life on Earth.”

One way these microbes may be particularly adapted to our planet is their dependence on carbon-based compounds, or organic matter. These are the molecular building blocks of life on Earth and may be rare in some otherwise habitable extraterrestrial environments. Some microbes in environments with scarce organic matter can instead get nutrients from inorganic substances, such as ammonia and certain sulfur compounds. Yet all the microbes cultured in the MASE studies relied on organic carbon to survive—even those that could survive without oxygen. According to Moissl-Eichinger, this could be because microbes that consume organic matter grow faster. So with more time, she and her colleagues might successfully culture microbes that get their nutrients from other chemical sources, potentially revealing new biochemical pathways and ecological niches to consider when searching for life on Mars.

“We are far away from understanding what microbes could look like on Mars and how we can find them. But of course, research always gives a little piece by piece, and at some point, the picture gets fuller,” Moissl-Eichinger says.

Understanding how all these disparate pieces fit together may change our definition of what it means to be alive. According to McKay, extraterrestrial environments for life may be like those found on Earth, or they could differ vastly. At present, given our sample size of only one confirmed life-bearing world, both possibilities appear equally plausible.

“If [extraterrestrial life] is too [similar] to our life on Earth, people will argue that it is something that we brought with us. But if it is too different, will we be able to see it?” Moissl-Eichinger says. “Now that is the question that drives us.”

LAUNCH SITE ONE, West Texas—The richest person on Earth has now traveled beyond it.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of the spaceflight company Blue Origin, launched into suborbital space with three other people today (July 20) on the first crewed mission of the company’s New Shepard vehicle—a landmark moment for the man and the space tourism industry.

“Blue Control, Bezos. Best day ever!” Bezos said while in flight.

The autonomous New Shepard, which consists of a rocket topped by a capsule, lifted off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One near the West Texas town of Van Horn today at 9:11 a.m. EDT (1311 GMT; 8:11 a.m.local time). 

The capsule carried Bezos, 57, his brother Mark, 53, 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk and 18-year-old Dutch physics student Oliver Daemen 66.5 miles (107 kilometers) above Earth, then came down for a parachute-aided, dust-raising landing in the West Texas scrublands. The rocket also returned safely, making a vertical, powered touchdown at its designated landing zone. Its descent was punctuated by a deafening sonic boom, along with raucous cheers from the Blue Origin workers here who watched the flight.

All of this action, from liftoff to landings, took just over 10 minutes. But it was doubtless the experience of a lifetime for the four passengers.

“I’m so excited. I can’t wait to see what it’s going to be like,” Bezos told NBC’s TODAY on Monday (July 19). “People say they go into space and they come back changed. Astronauts always talk about that, whether it’s the thin limb of the Earth’s atmosphere and seeing how fragile the planet is, that it’s just one planet. So I can’t wait to see what it’s gonna do to me.”

Bezos became the second billionaire to reach space in less than two weeks. On July 11, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson flew on the first fully crewed flight of the VSS Unity space plane, which is operated by Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin’s chief rival in the suborbital space tourism business.

Two decades of work

Bezos founded Blue Origin in September 2000, six years after he established Amazon. The spaceflight company worked stealthily for a decade, generally staying out of the public eye.

That changed in 2010, when Blue Origin won a contract from NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which aimed to encourage the development of private American astronaut taxis to fill the shoes of the space shuttle, which was about to retire. The company snagged another contract the next year but didn’t land the big deal; NASA announced in 2014 that it had selected the vehicles built by SpaceX and Boeing—capsules known as Crew Dragon and CST-100 Starliner, respectively. 

Blue Origin continued to work on its own vehicles, including New Shepard, which is designed to carry people and payloads on brief trips to suborbital space. The 59-foot-tall (18 meters) craft is named after NASA astronaut Alan Shepard, whose suborbital jaunt on May 5, 1961, was the United States’ first crewed spaceflight.

New Shepard first launched to suborbital space in April 2015. The capsule landed softly as planned on that flight, but the rocket crashed during its touchdown attempt. But the next New Shepard iteration aced a test flight that November, pulling off the first-ever vertical landing of a rocket during a space mission. (SpaceX nailed a landing of its own a month later with the first stage of its Falcon 9 orbital rocket, a feat Elon Musk’s company has now pulled off more than 80 times.)

In January 2016, the same New Shepard flew successfully again, notching another reusability milestone. Over the next five-plus years, that vehicle and two others flew 12 more uncrewed test missions, the latest an “astronaut rehearsal” this past April. 

All were successful, paving the way for today’s mission, which was the third flight of the fourth New Shepard vehicle, known as RSS Next Step.

Making, and acknowledging, history

Blue Origin announced the July 20 target on May 5. Both of those dates were chosen advisedly: May 5 was the 60th anniversary of Shepard’s pioneering flight, and July 20 is the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Bezos has often cited Apollo 11 as a big inspiration, saying that his dreams of spaceflight were born when he watched the historic lunar landing at the age of five.

Blue Origin made some history of its own today, and not just for the company annals: Funk and Daemen became the oldest and youngest people, respectively, ever to reach the final frontier.

The off-Earth journey was a dose of long-overdue justice for Funk. She’s one of the “Mercury 13,” women who passed NASA’s physiological screening tests in the early days of the space age but were never seriously considered for flight. Back then, you had to be a man—and more specifically, a white military man—to be a NASA astronaut. 

The agency didn’t fly a female astronaut to space until June 1983, when Sally Ride reached orbit on the space shuttle Challenger’s STS-7 mission. (Challenger’s STS-8 flight, which launched that August, carried Guion Bluford, the first African American to reach space.)

Funk takes the oldest-spaceflyer mantle from John Glenn, who launched at the age of 77 in October 1998 on the STS-95 mission of the shuttle Discovery, decades after becoming the first American to reach orbit.

Blue Origin announced on July 1 that today’s flight would include Funk. Daemen was a later addition to the manifest; the company revealed his participation just last Thursday (July 16). In mid-June, Blue Origin auctioned off the fourth and final seat on RSS Next Step, for the astronomical sum of $28 million. But the still-anonymous person who placed that bid had scheduling conflicts, company representatives said, so Daemen took their place.

Daemen’s father, Somerset Capital Partners CEO Joes Daemen, paid for the seat and decided to let his son fly, CNBC reported. So, in addition to all the other milestones, RSS Next Step flew its first paying customer today.

Suborbital space tourism lifts off

Virgin Galactic made its big announcement about Branson’s flight on July 1, the same day that Blue Origin did its Funk reveal. The dramatic news drops sparked many stories about a “billionaire space race,” which both Branson and Bezos have attempted to tamp down. 

”There’s one person who was the first person in space—his name was Yuri Gagarin—and that happened a long time ago,” Bezos said on TODAY, referring to the cosmonaut’s landmark orbital mission on April 12, 1961. (And Branson wasn’t the first billionaire to reach the final frontier. For example, megarich software architect Charles Simonyi bought two trips to the International Space Station, flying there in 2007 and 2009 aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft.) 

“I think I’m gonna be number 570 or something; that’s where we’re gonna be in this list,” Bezos added. “So this isn’t a competition. This is about building a road to space so that future generations can do incredible things in space.”

Blue Origin aims to help make those incredible things happen over the long haul. The company is building an orbital launch system called New Glenn and a lunar lander named Blue Moon. Blue Origin also leads “The National Team,” a private consortium that proposed a crewed landing system for use by NASA’s Artemis program of lunar exploration. NASA picked SpaceX’s Starship vehicle for that job, but The National Team and another unsuccessful submitter, Alabama-based company Dynetics, have filed protests about the decision with the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Whether or not there’s personal competition between Branson and Bezos, the companies led by the two billionaires are vying for the same relatively small pool of rich, adventurous customers.

Virgin Galactic’s most recently stated ticket price was $250,000. Blue Origin has not announced how much it’s charging for a regular (non-auctioned) seat, but it’s thought to be in the low six figures as well.

Both companies offer passengers three to four minutes of weightlessness and great views of Earth against the blackness of space. But there are significant differences between the two flight experiences. For example, New Shepard is an autonomous capsule that launches vertically and lands under parachutes, whereas VSS Unity is a two-pilot space plane that takes off under the wing of a carrier aircraft and lands on a runway.

New Shepard also gets a few miles higher than VSS Unity, a fact that Blue Origin highlighted in a couple of Twitter posts on July 9. Those tweets told folks that spaceflights with Virgin Galactic come with an asterisk because Unity doesn’t reach the Kármán line, the 62-mile-high (100 km) mark considered by some to be the point where space begins. (Unity does fly higher than 50 miles, or 80 km, the boundary recognized by NASA, the U.S. military and the Federal Aviation Administration.)

This competition will heat up soon, if all goes according to plan. Blue Origin plans to launch two more crewed New Shepard missions this year, with the next one targeted for September or October, company representatives said during a prelaunch press conference on Sunday (July 18). Those flights will presumably have paying customers on board, just as today’s did.

Virgin Galactic aims to fly a few more test flights this fall, then begin full commercial operations early next year from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Both companies plan to ramp up their flight rate over time, allowing them to reduce prices and broaden the customer pool substantially—perhaps enough for the rest of us to swim in it someday. 

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The Borg have landed—or, at least, researchers have discovered their counterparts here on Earth. Scientists analysing samples from muddy sites in the western United States have found novel DNA structures that seem to scavenge and ‘assimilate’ genes from microorganisms in their environment, much like the fictional Star Trek ‘Borg’ aliens who assimilate the knowledge and technology of other species.

These extra-long DNA strands, which the scientists named in honour of the aliens, join a diverse collection of genetic structures—circular plasmids, for example—known as extrachromosomal elements (ECEs). Most microbes have one or two chromosomes that encode their primary genetic blueprint. But they can host, and often share between them, many distinct ECEs. These carry non-essential but useful genes, such as those for antibiotic resistance.

Borgs are a previously unknown, unique and “absolutely fascinating” type of ECE, says Jill Banfield, a geomicrobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley. She and her colleagues describe their discovery of the structures in a preprint posted to the server bioRxiv. The work is yet to be peer-reviewed.

Unlike anything seen before

Borgs are DNA structures “not like any that’s been seen before”, says Brett Baker, a microbiologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Other scientists agree that the find is exciting, but have questioned whether Borgs really are unique, noting similarities between them and other large ECEs.

In recent years “people have become used to surprises in the field of ECEs”, says Huang Li, a microbiologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “However, the discovery of Borgs, which undoubtedly enriches the concept of ECEs, has fascinated many in the field.”

Their vast size, ranging between more than 600,000 and about 1 million DNA base pairs in length, is one feature that distinguishes Borgs from many other ECEs. In fact, Borgs are so huge that they are up to one-third of the length of the main chromosome in their host microbes, Banfield says.

Banfield studies how microbes influence the carbon cycle—including the production and degradation of methane, a potent greenhouse gas—and, in October 2019, she and her colleagues went hunting for ECEs containing genes involved in the carbon cycle in Californian wetlands. There, they found the first Borgs and later identified 19 different types from this and similar sites in Colorado and California.

Borgs seem to be associated with archaea, which are single-celled microorganisms distinct from bacteria. Specifically, those Banfield and her team have discovered are linked to the Methanoperedens variety, which digest and destroy methane. And Borg genes seem to be involved in this process, says Banfield.

Scientists can’t yet culture Methanoperedens in the laboratory—an ongoing challenge for many microbes—so the team’s conclusions that Borgs might be used by the archaea for methane processing are based on sequence data alone.

“They’ve made an interesting observation,” says systems biologist Nitin Baliga, at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington. But he cautions that when researchers sift through fragments of many genomes and piece them together, as Banfield’s team has done, it’s possible to make errors. Finding Borgs in cultured Methanoperedens will be necessary for the finding to be considered definitive, he adds.

Costs and benefits

Assuming Borgs are real, maintaining such a massive ECE would be costly for Methanoperedens, Banfield and colleagues say, so the DNA structures must provide some benefit. To learn what that might be, the researchers analysed the sequences of hundreds of Borg genes and compared them with known genes.

Borgs seem to house many genes needed for entire metabolic processes, including digesting methane, says Banfield. She describes these collections as “a toolbox” that might super-charge the abilities of Methanoperedens.

So what makes a Borg a Borg? In addition to their remarkable size, Borgs share several structural features: they’re linear, not circular as many ECEs are; they have mirrored repetitive sequences at each end of the strand; and they have many other repetitive sequences both within and between the presumptive genes.

Individually, these features of Borgs can overlap with those seen in other large ECEs, such as elements in certain salt-loving archaea, so Baliga says the novelty of Borgs is still debatable at this stage. Borgs also resemble giant linear plasmids found in soil-dwelling Actinobacteria, says Julián Rafael Dib, a microbiologist at the Pilot Plant for Microbiological Industrial Processes in Tucumán, Argentina.

Banfield counters that although the individual features of Borgs have been seen before, “the size, combination and metabolic gene load” is what makes them different. She speculates that they were once entire microbes, and were assimilated by Methanoperedens in much the same way that eukaryotic cells gained energy-generating mitochondria by assimilating free-living bacteria.

Now that scientists know what to look for, they might find more Borgs by sifting through old data, says Baker, who used to work in Banfield’s lab. He thinks he might already have discovered some candidates in his own genetic database since the preprint was posted.

Resistance is futile

When analysing the Borg genome, Banfield and colleagues also saw features suggesting that Borgs have assimilated genes from diverse sources, including the main Methanoperedens chromosome, Banfield says. This potential to ‘assimilate’ genes led her son to propose the name ‘Borg’ over Thanksgiving dinner in 2020.

Banfield’s team is now investigating the function of Borgs and the role of their DNA repeats. Repeats are important to microbes: differently-structured repeats called CRISPR are snippets of genetic code from viruses that microbes incorporate into their own DNA to ‘remember’ the pathogens so they can defend against them in the future.

CRISPR and its associated proteins have been a boon for biotechnology because they have been adapted into a powerful gene-editing technique—hinting that Borg genomes might also yield useful tools. “It could be as important and interesting as CRISPR, but I think it’s going to be a new thing,” says Banfield, who is collaborating on future investigations with her preprint co-author, Jennifer Doudna, a pioneer of CRISPR-based gene editing at the University of California.

One potential application that the researchers see for Borgs could be as an aid in the fight against climate change. Fostering the growth of microbes containing them could, perhaps, cut down the methane emissions generated by soil-dwelling archaea, which add up to about 1 gigatonne globally each year. It would be risky to do this in natural wetlands, Banfield says, but it might be appropriate at agricultural sites. So, as a first step, her group is now hunting Borgs in Californian rice paddies.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on July 16 2021.