Chances are that a lot more people in the world believe that God had some role in the creation of Humanity than the scientific version, which begins with the Big Bang.  As such, then, God is the most popular choice for First Contact, or interaction with an extraterrestrial.  Actually, he has no competition in this vote because no intelligent life form has yet ever made contact, as confirmed by any reliable source. This might well be my shortest posting, for what would be the point of confirming or refuting the title?  Well, this gives me another opportunity to compare religion with science. I start with  Global Religion 2023 , a 26-country Global Advisor survey by Ipsos. These countries were all reasonably developed, with 46% of the respondents believing in some form of Christianity.  Only 7% Buddhist, 6% Muslim, mostly Sunni, and 4% Hindu.  Interestingly enough, 29% with no religion or not religious. India, Turkey, Japan and Thailand were surveyed, but the...

For my science Wednesday, I return to outer space.  It is more and more appearing that just about every star out there has a surrounding solar system, meaning planets, or, relative to us, extrasolar planets, or exoplanets.  In fact,  Forbes , speculated that for every star, there are from 100 to 100,000 planets.  Most of these are rogue planets in the spaces between stars.  The ones astrobiologists  are interested in for possible life must, of course, have a close-by star to provide energy. Any photos of them?   Actually one was announced  in April of this year, using the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea, together with the Hubble Telescope.  Well, maybe not quite, as this a globe about 9 times the mass of Jupiter at an early stage of planet formation.  It was located circling star AB Aurigae located 508 light years away. If that counts as one, then now two, as the  James Webb Space Telescope  just reported imaging another. Ex...