Alien shores
Scientist ponders search for extraterrestrial life
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/09/2016 (2763 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
On Page 1 of All These Worlds Are Yours: The Scientific Search for Alien Life, Canadian astronomer Jon Willis gives away a major spoiler, concluding: “Do aliens exist? Is there life beyond Earth? Well, yes there is. Probably lots of it.”
While he admits to immediately providing readers with an answer to a question they are likely asking, Willis doesn’t stop there, but rather guides us on a long and fascinating journey to explain how he came to that conclusion. Along the way, he illustrates cosmic evolution, exobiology, and the logistics and economics of space travel in a way that is both entertaining and informative, and accessible to interested lay readers.
Willis, a cosmologist at the University of Victoria, teaches astrobiology; after reading his book, many readers may want to sign up for his classes. His writing style is very approachable, filled with puns and occasional sarcasm, but he clearly lays out reasons why alien life could exist on astronomical bodies near Earth. In fact, with the recent news that life may exist on a planet confirmed to exist around Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to Earth, the timeliness of this book is very significant.
In All These Worlds Are Yours (the title is a nod to Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010, the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey), Willis challenges the reader to consider what, exactly, constitutes life — and whether Earth is unique in possessing it.
Early in the book, Willis offers us a thought experiment: if you were NASA and had $4 billion to spend, where would you send a spacecraft to look for life in our solar system? He spends the rest of the book describing in detail why various astronomical bodies (Mars, Venus, Titan, Enceladus, etc.) might have life, and how the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program has progressed during the last century. Willis’s historical meanderings contain many nuggets of insight, such as why our bias towards water-based life might be too narrowly focused, and why we still don’t know if there has ever been life on Mars, despite many visits by spacecraft.
In a chapter on the discovery of planets beyond our solar system, Willis details how astronomers use sophisticated technology to block out the glare of individual stars and detect faint glimmers of what may be new earths.
All These Worlds Are Yours is full of curious facts about our universe and space exploration. Did you know that Saturn’s moon Titan is the only astronomical body outside Earth where you likely don’t need to wear a spacesuit in order to survive? And that we have done orbiting experiments around Earth itself to try and detect life, in order to see if our studies of Mars are too limited in the search for life on other worlds?
Despite pop-culture ideas of Martians (Looney Tunes’ Marvin et al.), Willis emphatically states that repeated tests with our best instruments tell us “Mars is dead, dead, dead.” And yet, he predicts that within 100 years, we will discover alien life.
Willis notes one of his motivations in writing this book “was to investigate the five most plausible scenarios for the discovery of alien life in the universe.”
With regard to Mars, he looks not only at the possibility of life existing in nooks and crannies on the red planet, but wonders if terrestrial life could survive on Mars. In fact, he even discusses the danger of backward contamination from attempts to bring back samples from other planets and moons in chemical tests for life.
But would we even recognize alien life? Have the Mars rovers already detected Martian microbes, and we have failed to realize it?
Late in the book, Willis makes his choice of how he would personally spend $4 billion on space exploration to search for alien life. He provides considerable insight into how space probes are funded and how politics plays a major role in designing space missions decades into the future.
Finally, on the last page of the book, Willis explains why he selected a dollar value of $4 billion to spend on a space mission to discover alien life.
But that would be another spoiler.
Chris Rutkowski is a science writer who finds intelligent life on Earth to be rare as well.