We’re putting the final touches on our show with Natalie Batalha, a research astronomer and mission scientist with NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. What is she searching for? Exoplanets: terrestrial planets with liquid water approximately the size of Earth that exist outside of our solar system.
But, we may not have to look that far. NASA’s Curiosity Rover transmitted back this incredible panorama (well, actually stitched-together images) of the Mars surface. Adam Mann reports on Wired:
Late on Feb. 8, Curiosity drilled a 6.4-cm-deep hole into a rock nicknamed John Klein on the surface of Mars. The area the rover is in appears to have been repeatedly flooded with water in the past and the drilling operation will allow scientists to uncover the complex aqueous history of the place.
Nevertheless, it’s edifying to know that parallel efforts are taking place to discover more about the strata of deep time and our place in this sacred universe.
An argument often given for why Earth couldn’t host another form of life is that once the life we know became established, it would have eliminated any competition through natural selection. But if another form of life were confined to its own niche, there would be little direct competition with regular life. And, in any case, natural selection doesn’t always mean winner-takes-all.
— Paul Davies, from his op-ed “The Aliens Among Us” in last Thursday’s New York Times.
The theoretical physicist/cosmologist/astrobiologist who appeared in “Einstein’s God” posits that we should look “under our noses” — right here on Earth — for extraterrestrial life as well as scanning the universe. If you’re at all intrigued by the thought of extraterrestrial life, this article will get the synapses firing.
Trent Gilliss, senior editor
