A noted astrobiologist told a Bates College audience that he believes the truth is out there.
LEWISTON – Alien life is out there, but a successful search will depend on altering a lot of popular assumptions, says a prominent astrobiologist.
David Grinspoon, an adviser to NASA on planetary exploration and the author of “Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life,” spoke recently at Bates College.
Grinspoon believes NASA’s robotic missions to Mars likely will verify that it’s a dead planet now, but there is a possibility that fossil evidence of life will be found.
Findings such as a sub-surface icy ocean on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, and volcanic activity on Io, another moon of Jupiter, are good leads to follow, he said.
He warned that there may be too much emphasis on seeking worlds with liquid water. He favors the “living world hypothesis,” which underscores active geology such as volcanism or movement of tectonic plates.
Important discoveries and spectacular blunders were part of the lecture, as Grinspoon pointed out historical pitfalls in the search for extraterrestrial life.
For example, Percival Lowell’s mistaken observation of man-made canals on Mars nearly 100 years ago served to taint the public’s acceptance of finding life on other worlds.
Nevertheless, humans have a long history of belief in UFOs and in ancient spaceship visits that accounted for the pyramids, Stonehenge and the gigantic Nasca desert lines in Peru. Grinspoon discounted those beliefs, saying, “Maybe our own ancient cultures were more clever than we give them credit.”
Exotic species
Grinspoon suggested that the search for extraterrestrial life “holds some wonderful possibilities and some scary possibilities. We have to mix science and ethics.”
So far, scientists are in the very early stages of learning about planets around other suns, Grinspoon said. About 100 have been found and none is “Earth-like.”
Definitions of life will be changing, he said, so it’s not critical that we look only for sites similar to Earth. He pointed out that we are still discovering extremophiles, which are exotic species of life in extreme environments, such as tube worms in deep undersea volcanic vents and subterranean rock-eating worms.
Will we find “life as we know it” or some other conformation of life?
“Right know, we know next to nothing about where it is, or even what it is,” Grinspoon said.
“We actually assume we don’t know what we’re doing,” he said. However, he expressed confidence that remarkable discoveries in the field of astrobiology remain to be made.
Grinspoon is pushing for NASA to send a robotic lander mission to Venus.
He also applauded the missions of Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. He called them “science in real time” and said they give ordinary people “a rare window into the scientific process.”
The lecture at Bates College was sponsored by Sigma Xi and the departments of geology and physics.
Grinspoon is an adviser to NASA on planetary exploration strategy and is the principal scientist in the Department of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Internationally recognized as an authority on planetary research, Grinspoon has written for Slate, Scientific American and Astronomy magazines. His Web site is www.lonelyplanets.net.
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