Advanced technology that lets us see previously unseen parts of the solar system, combined with the frequent discovery of “Earth-like” planets, has strengthened our longstanding cultural belief that aliens could exist (not to mention the fact that extraterrestrials continue to capture our imagination at the box office). And now, there’s even more to the idea that there is life beyond our planet.
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Some of the latest scientific theories supporting the existence of alien life are collected in an anthology of essays called “Aliens,” edited by theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili. He and a couple of contributors weigh in on why scientists are more optimistic than ever before that we’re not alone in the universe.
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Excerpts From The Anthology, "Aliens" From “Where Is Everybody?” by Jim Al-Khalili:
“Of course, an alien planet being suitable for life is one thing, but the really big unknown is this: given the right conditions, how likely is it that life could evolve elsewhere? To answer is that we need to understand how life began on Earth. If we are indeed alone in the vastness of the cosmos, then we need to understand why we are so special. Why would the Universe be apparently so finely tuned for life to exist, yet harbour it in just one isolated corner? One way of thinking about this is to ask yourself how come you exist? What were the chances that your parents would meet and produce you? Indeed, what were the chances of their parents meeting, and so on all the way back? We are each of us the culmination of a long and highly unlikely chain of events leading back to the origin of life itself. Break any one of the links in that chain and you would not be here to ask the question in the first place. Maybe our existence is really no more remarkable than the lottery winner contemplating his or her good fortune: had that sequence of numbers not come up, then someone else would have won and they would also reflect on the improbable odds of their win. What life on Earth can tell us about alien existence elsewhere in the Galaxy is limited by the fact that we have a statistical sample of just one. Our own example tells us nothing about the likelihood of life elsewhere, or what it would look like if it did exist. Could there be advanced alien civilisations out there or would they only be in the form of simple, single-celled microbes? If we can’t begin to address that issue, how will we even know where to look? Most profound of all of course is what it would mean for us if we did find them?”
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From “What Are We Looking For?” by Nathalie Cabrol:
“At the crossroads of scientific disciplines, astrobiology uses advances in all fields to answer these questions: How does life begin and develop? Does life exist elsewhere in the Universe? What is life’s future on Earth and beyond? These questions represent a puzzle of cosmic proportions, to which we are missing several key pieces. We do not have a clear definition of what life is. Could it have been seeded on Earth through panspermia (in which comets and asteroids transfer material between other bodies in the solar system on impact) and planetary exchange (the idea, for example, that there was some exchange of material between Mars and Earth at the time they were forming)? Or was it created on our planet through abiogenesis, a process by which life arises naturally from simple organic compounds and chemical processes? We also do not have a record of when – or in which environment – the transition from prebiotic chemistry to life took place. We don’t know whether life is a common universal occurrence or a fluke. But if we are to solve the puzzle, it makes sense to start with us. The terrestrial biosphere we inhabit – even if it hasn’t provided the answers to the questions above – is a record of life’s evolution and adaptation driven by environmental and cosmic bottlenecks, extending over billions of years. Further away, we can see the solar system we belong to as a lab where, over eons, nature has created a diversity of environments surpassing in complexity anything we could develop in an experiment. Beyond the solar system, our most sophisticated instruments provide windows in space and time where we can catch a glimpse of how galaxies, stars and planets are formed. Last, but not least, the human mind can model, theorise, and generate limitless thought experiments. With this in hand, we have started to build an understanding of what, where and how to search for life beyond our planet. By necessity, our vision is still anthropocentric: we are searching for life as we know it, and this approach is a logical one because it is always easier to start with what you know, when what we know of life is still so limited. As our knowledge broadens, hypotheses and models grow more complex, and the technology to test them becomes more sophisticated, which allows more discoveries to be made, and fundamental hypotheses and models to be refined. This is an iterative process. In that regard, the past few decades of exploration of the Earth’s most extreme environments, the solar system, and deep space have revolutionised our definition of habitability and life potential.”
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This is some cool stuff thnx for posting...
Thank you.
Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:
https://the1a.org/shows/2017-05-09/jim-al-khalilis-aliens
But I mentioned this link in my post.