Dear readers, today marks a very special day. Today is the day I finally discovered the NASA Astrobiology website, which is essentially a haven for amateur exobiologists like myself. (Yes, exobiologist: while astrobiology focuses mostly on carbon-based life forms, exobiology takes into consideration the fact that there may be other types of creatures, such as lithovores – silicon-based life forms.)
Anyway, in honour of today, this blog post will be about the history of exobiology, starting from hundreds of years ago and moving up to the present time.
Many ancient beliefs held traces of exobiology in them. Most cultures around the globe had some belief in ‘worlds’ populated by different creatures – gods, demons, humans, etc. Of course, it is possible that these gods and demons are nothing more than figments of an overactive imagination – but then again, it is equally likely that they are actually what they are made out to be: otherworldly beings. There is even a PBS series on this, Ancient Aliens, that discusses the idea that perhaps humans are not the ones responsible for such ancient wonders as the pyramids of Egypt – highly advanced extraterrestrials with superior technology are.
Moving on a few centuries – as the Catholic Church gained more power in Europe, belief in such creatures was condemned as heresy and quashed. Many prominent astronomers, such as Galileo Galilei and Nicolaus Copernicus, were forced to keep their radical ideas secret for fear of being persecuted by the Church. However, by the late nineteenth century, exobiology was rapidly picking up followers. Percival Lowell, an American astronomer, looked at Mars through his telescope in 1895 and observed what he believed to be a series of canals crisscrossing the planet’s surface. These ‘canals’ became fodder for much speculation concerning intelligent life on Mars, and it was only in 1965 – seventy years later – when NASA’s Mariner 4 took photos of Mars’s surface and determined that Mars was not in fact a wet planet, but a barren, dry, crater-filled world.
Just three years after Lowell’s canal-sightings, in 1898, British author H.G. Wells penned The War of the Worlds, a science-fiction novel about a Martian invasion of Earth. This sparked a new exobiological subculture; one that relied far more on fantastic flights of imagination than scientific evidence. Many comics and movies of that era – and this one, for that matter – had extraterrestrial characters and stories set light-years away from this planet.
In the latter half of the 20th century, scientific interest in exobiology picked up once again and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) was founded by Frank Drake, an American astronomer. In 1972 he, along with Carl Sagan, another famous astronomer, designed the Pioneer plaque – a giant pictorial representation of the history of life on Earth, to be carried on spacecraft in order to explain our origins to any extraterrestrial beings the astronauts happened to meet. (They didn’t meet any, but better safe than sorry.)
But Drake’s greatest contribution to exobiology was his creation of the Drake Equation, a multi-variable equation that yields the rough number of intelligent, communications-savvy extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy. Now, if only we knew the values of half the variables.
Today, more exobiological breakthroughs are happening even as I write. Recently, a study has been commenced wherein a 500-million-year-old bacterial gene has been injected into a sample population of E. coli bacteria, to see if evolution will proceed in the same way it did billions of years ago. More and more exoplanets are being discovered, and quite a few of them are Earth-like in nature. Signals are being constantly detected by SETI instruments, although all of them so far have turned out to be false alarms – Earthling radio signals or nearby pulsars. And, of course, there are hundreds of books, movies and TV series, both nonfiction and fiction, being churned out every year, helping to inform (and occasionally misinform) the general public about the fascinating world of extraterrestrial science.
Interesting information. The word “exoplanets” is gaining a lot of popularity nowadays, in fact at the Museum of Air and Space in Washington DC, there is an entire show focusing only on exoplanets and it is an omnimax show too. Though it does seem plausible that “Aliens” might be a figment of someone’s imagination, just for conjecture let us think it possible that there are some out there (there is no smoke without a fire right !!!). My conspiracy theory runs something like this: Some beings probably came to earth, saw the colossal damage we did to it and flew so far away that we would never spot them ever again so as not share the same fate as earth. What we are finding as signals is just them trying to figure if we are anywhere in the vicinity and running away from us. I know this sounds bleak but we will not find any aliens in this generation’s lifetime.
That’s an interesting thought… Some people actually believe that life on Earth is nothing more than a science experiment being conducted by a group of super-intelligent extraterrestrial beings – this might not be as completely crazy as it sounds, as certain science experiments conducted during the twentieth century showed that the basic compounds that make life possible on Earth can, indeed, be formulated in a laboratory.
Actually, we might already have found life – a certain piece of rock found on Mars was noted to bear a strong resemblance to a fossil, and even had certain traces of a special carbon indicative of living organisms. Maybe the Red Planet isn’t quite as barren as we think!
That sounds correct. I thought the theory was that life originated on Mars and came to earth via other modes like meteors etc. So finding life on mars is kinda going backward but then again origins hold so many clues.
This is very interesting, You’re a very skilled
blogger. I’ve joined your feed and look forward to
seeking more of your magnificent post. Also, I’ve shared your site in my social networks!