Television Space Journey: Part 2
Friday, March 12th, 2010For the second hour of my space journey this week I hopped on board the space shuttle BBC television programme Sky at Night, where they were debating the chances of finding extraterrestrial life. Although we are making great technological advances, things don’t look good at the moment.
Patrick Moore Introduces the Sky at Night and Discusses Life
Patrick Moore introduced the programme by stating that we don’t know if there is extraterrestrial life, or how life began on Earth; life on Earth could have been brought here by a meteor from space.
Dr. Lewis Dartnell UCL astro-biologist joined Patrick, and explained that: life survives in harsh conditions on Earth, so might elsewhere. Life on Earth developed very quickly, couple of hundred million years, so might happen on other planets too. But intelligent life takes a long time to develop, so we’re not likely to find anything as intelligent as humans.
Dartnell also confirmed that we have a massive gap in understanding. Science is now good at understanding probotics like the building blocks of DNA, but not on how we get amino acids and DNA that can hold the genetic code and replicate itself.
Search for Extraterrestrial Life in the Universe
We found the first planet outside our solar system in 1995, and have now found 400. But they are large gas giants, like Jupiter, so not likely to have life.
Talks to Kepler, who is leading the latest telescope mission hunting for planets around other stars. It’s like a giant camcorder in space looking for habitable planets. Looks at planets passing their sun, and judges how big they are by how much they dim the sun.
A habitable or goldilocks zone is where the temperatures are good for life because they are the right distance from a planet’s sun, as we on Earth are from our sun.
Dr. Jill Tartar of the Seti Institute later said she didn’t know if there’s life out there, and the main way we’d find anything out there is if they are using technology: that they are broadcasting messages as we are from Earth.
Dr. Alan Chapman then dismissed the search for life as like looking for fairies in the garden, and said he had to be blunt, and considered Seti’s work as a waste of time.
Life in Harsh Conditions on Earth Offers Hope for Life on Mars or Europa
Microbiologist, Prof. Charles Cockell also described how we only live in a small thin strip of the planet’s surface, with 90% of life depending on photosynthesis from sunlight, which had relevance for my Surface trilogy of poems. However, some life such as microbes live by eating rocks two or three miles under the surface on Earth, and do not rely on photosynthesis, so that gives hope for life on rocky planets like Mars, and icy moons like Europa, which don’t look like they have life on the surface but might have underneath.
Conclusion
Dr. Chris Lintott joined Patrick Moore to give a hopeful conclusion, saying that they are probably only five or ten years away from finding a star with planets in the Goldilocks zone, and that will start a rush of investigation.
Wheew! Last part of my Space Trilogy tomorrow. This space travel is more tiring than it looks!
Tomorrow: Is Everything We Know About the Universe Wrong?