Astronomy has always been an important part of my life. Growing up on a farm gave me many nights of fantastically good views of the stars, planets, and the Milky Way. I remember paying attention to the IGY (International Geophysical Year) in 1957-1958 when I was 10. It was especially exciting to see Sputnik go over and pass through the constellations.
Walt Disney teamed up with Werner Von Braun to produce a 3 part series about space flight in the mid-50s. They were Man in Space, Man and the Moon, and Mars and Beyond. I loved those shows. They fueled my imagination. Multi-staged rockets, lunar landscapes, and Martian myths and legends planted the seeds of the possibility that alien life existed on some worlds out there in space.
Last Sunday's N.Y. Times had an OpEd piece Alien Life, Coming Slowly Into View by Ray Jayawardhana that captured my attention. It reflected my sense of wonder from 55 years earlier.
Schoolchildren may feel a similar sense of wonder when they see pictures of a Martian landscape or Saturn’s rings. And soon their views of alien worlds may not be confined to the planets in our own solar system.
After millenniums of musings and a century of failed attempts, astronomers first detected an exoplanet, a planet orbiting a normal star other than the Sun, in 1995. Now they are finding hundreds of such worlds each year. Last month, NASA announced that 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a space satellite.
Kepler is staring at a patch of thousands of stars. By measuring the brightness of each, it can perceive the passage of a planet in front of the star by a slight dimming of the signal. It has even recorded one star with six planets. Five of them orbit closer than our Mercury orbits our Sun.
The pace of discovery, supported by new instruments and missions and innovative strategies by planet seekers, has been astounding.
What’s more, from measurements of their masses and sizes, we can infer what some of these worlds are made of: gases, ice or rocks.
The crux of the search is to identify planets that orbit in a zone of distance from their star that is considered friendly for the development of life. It is hoped that the right mix of distance, light, water, and nutrients will be suitable for life to grow.
Detecting signs of life elsewhere will not be easy, but it may well occur in my lifetime, if not during the next decade. Given the daunting distances between the stars, the real-life version will almost certainly be a lot less sensational than the movies depicting alien invasions or crash-landing spaceships.
The evidence may be circumstantial at first — say, spectral bar codes of interesting molecules like oxygen, ozone, methane and water — and leave room for alternative interpretations. It may take years of additional data-gathering, and perhaps the construction of new telescopes, to satisfy our doubts. Besides, we won’t know whether such “biosignatures” are an indication of slime or civilization. Most people will likely move on to other, more immediate concerns of life here on Earth while scientists get down to work.
But, what if we were to detect an alien radio signal? That would certainly add some excitement to the search. The possibility that intelligent life exists out there would offer this world some interesting challenges.
However it arrives, the first definitive evidence of life elsewhere will mark a turning point in our intellectual history, perhaps only rivaled by Copernicus’s heliocentric theory or Darwin’s theory of evolution. If life can spring up on two planets independently, why not on a thousand or even a billion others? The ramifications of finding out for sure that ours isn’t the only inhabited world are likely to be felt, over time, in many areas of human thought and endeavor — from biology and philosophy to religion and art.
My dreams as a 10 year old might just come true in my lifetime. I'm optimistic. It would take decades to decode and understand the meanings, I suppose. But, it would certainly be a powerful force to drive the imaginations of millions of young kids all over the Earth to dream of what could be in their future. And "knowing that we are not alone just might be the kick in the pants we need to grow up as a species."