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Hunten had a scary reputation but he is one of the smartest guys
there is, and I always found it rewarding to get his scientific advice
when my ego could stand it. After a few moments of silent prayer in the
hallway, I knocked on his door and said, “I have something I’d like to
get your comments on, but I’m worried you might think it’s a little
flaky.” He glanced at the Grinspoon and Sagan abstract, cleared his
throat menacingly, and grunted, “Well, considering who the two
authors are, I wouldn’t doubt it,” without cracking a smile. I suppose I
set myself up for that. Though I temporarily felt two inches shorter, as
usual Hunten followed the sarcasm with a thoughtful critique that
helped me improve the work. It ended up expanding into a chapter of
my Ph.D. thesis.
My thesis, completed in 1989, touched on exobiology in several
places. Half of it was about how terrestrial planets get their oceans, and
the other half was on the climate of the early Earth. In my flowery
introduction, I related my research to the habitability of planets and the
search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In the rest of the thesis I stuck to
the “serious” scientific problems at hand. I did, after all, wish to gradu-
ate. As I reread my dissertation now, it looks like a work of astrobiol-
ogy, only we didn’t call it that back then. Times have changed.
Ultimately, the public attention gained for planetary exploration
helped offset the perceived drawbacks and risks of exobiology.
Scientists took note of Sagan’s clear success in helping maintain official
backing for our planetary missions by tapping into the public’s sense of
wonder. Although it is hard to avoid some sarcasm when one of your
own starts showing up as a regular guest on Johnny Carson’s show,
alongside Tony Bennett and the dancing ferrets, most people in the field
came to appreciate the role that Carl had played in relating planetary
exploration to the masses.
Exobiology is over forty years old now. It was born at the same time
as planetology, and though we have sometimes tried to ignore it, it has
been here all along. The ideas promoted by Sagan throughout his career
are just now, seven years after his death, being embraced by many at
NASA headquarters and in the planetary science community as the cen-
tral themes motivating our solar system exploration strategy.
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It will be especially interesting to see whether it is
astronomy that absorbs biology, or the other way
Image unavailable for
around.
electronic edition
—FRED HOYLE
Image unavailable for
Nothing takes the past away like the future.
electronic edition
—MADONNA,
“NOTHING REALLY MATTERS”
S A Y Y O U W A N T A R E V O L U T I O N
True story: During the First Astrobiology Science Conference at
NASA’s Ames Research Center in April 2000, President Clinton was, by
coincidence, landing at the adjacent Moffett Field Air Base, where Air
Force One parks when the president comes to the San Francisco area.
In a scene right out of The X-Files, one of his Secret Service men, who
had stopped a suspicious-looking scientist, was heard to shout anx-
iously into his walkie-talkie, “What the HELL is astrobiology!?”
It’s a good question. Popular books and magazines announce it as a
new scientific revolution. In the introductory chapter of Rare Earth,
entitled “The Astrobiology Revolution and the Rare Earth Hypoth-
esis,” we read, “A whole new science is emerging: astrobiology, whose
central focus is the condition of life in the Universe. . . . We are wit-
nesses to a scientific revolution. . . . It is very much like the early 1950s, when DNA was discovered, or the 1960s, when the concept of plate
tectonics and continental drift was defined.”
But where is the revolution, and will it be televised? What is the new
world-melting idea? We think of Copernicus banishing Earth to the
margins of space, Darwin linking all past and present life together,
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Einstein warping light and time, Bohr dissolving solid matter at its
smallest into shadowy waves of quantum probability. These ideas
destroyed our notions of space, time, matter, and life. They left us per-
manently changed. What about the “astrobiology revolution”? What’s
the big idea? That other planets may be inhabited? That is certainly a
pretty rad thought, but we’ve been kicking it around for at least twenty
generations.
Well, then, is all this “revolution” talk based on the premise that we
are perched on the edge of a devastating new discovery that will rock
our universe? Thirty years ago, Carl Sagan wrote in The Cosmic
Connection that the study of extraterrestrial life had “finally come of
age.” The preface to David Darling’s 2000 book, Life Everywhere: The
Maverick Science of Astrobiology, stated, “Poised on the brink of a
momentous breakthrough that will change forever how humankind
thinks about itself and the universe around it, astrobiology is quickly
coming of age.” Which causes me to wonder: Just how long can we
stay poised on a brink? We don’t know if we’re any closer to finding
life now than when Viking was on its way to Mars in the 1970s. When
we do make the big discovery, bag an ET, which could be tomorrow
afternoon in time for the evening news, or two centuries from now*—
that will be the start of the real revolution.
If astrobiology is not a revolution, then what is it? Perhaps a new dis-
cipline, a novel field of research. Try telling that to anyone who was
already pursuing exobiology before the new hubbub began in the late
1990s. Some recent descriptions of astrobiology tend to ignore exobiol-
ogy’s checkered history and present it as a virgin birth, sprung immacu-
lately into the world. In truth it is more of a resurrection. Is that all it
is? Have we just dusted off exobiology, given it a new name, and sent
out press releases?
No, it’s more than that. Astrobiology may not be, as advertised, a sci-
entific revolution, but it is an important new movement—marking a
shift in attitude about ET life. Exobiology had always survived on the
*In general I say the sooner the better, but I’m not sure how I’d feel about a major discovery between now and the publication date of this book. . . . When Kubrick was working on 2001: A Space Odyssey, he actually tried to buy an insurance policy against the possibility that extraterrestrial intelligence would be discovered before the film opened, rendering his work obsolete.
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fringes of planetary society. It was fed scraps but made to sleep outside.
Reborn as astrobiology, it has rather suddenly been invited inside the
main house and embraced as the mascot of our space science enterprise,
receiving official encouragement and generous funding in the bargain.
In 1998 the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) was started with an
&
nbsp; initial annual budget of $5 million. By 2002 this had increased to $15
million (this does not include the much higher cost of spacecraft mis-
sions). As NASA has funneled money into astrobiology, planetary sci-
entists are discovering a latent interest in the astrobiological implica-
tions of their research. Biologists, chemists, and earth scientists are
joining in the feast. Nothing like a new watering hole to get all the jun-
gle animals to pay attention, come together, and talk about life. For
some, it was a chance to finally receive funding—and community
approval—for research they had always wanted to do. For others it was
a chance to branch out into an area they had never considered working
in. Since the late 1990s, planetologists, biologists, and others have con-
verged several times a year at large astrobiology conferences, and two
new journals have started up, Astrobiology and the International
Journal of Astrobiology. Now astrobiology is going worldwide. Centers
affiliated with NASA’s institute have sprung up in Spain, France,
Australia, the UK, and Japan. In May of 2001 the First European
Workshop on Exo/Astrobiology (a title that hedges its bets) was held in
Frascati, Italy.
Increasingly as well, astrobiology has become the public face of
NASA, in press releases, schools, TV documentaries, and museum
exhibits—astrobiology is the new hook. Across a wide spectrum of
activities, aliens are in at NASA, like never before.
But, why now? The mid-1990s saw a convergence of several surprise
breakthroughs. Each, by itself, would have generated sparks, but
combined, they ignited a conflagration. These were, in order of impor-
tance, (1) the discovery of possible fossils in the Martian meteorite
ALH84001, (2) the discovery of the first planets outside our solar sys-
tem, and (3) Galileo’s images confirming the likely presence of an ocean
on Europa. When all these occurred within a two-year period, the
excitement was cumulative. Something happened.
What happened was that Dan Goldin, NASA’s administrator at the
time, took heed of the lavish press coverage and the enthusiastic public
reaction to these discoveries. Halfway through his nine-year tenure at
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NASA (1992 to 2001), Goldin seemed to become convinced that exobi-
ology, rechristened as astrobiology,* should largely define NASA’s mis-
sion and its public image. We were given a green light to write press
releases and funding proposals highlighting the question of alien life.
This fanned a positive feedback loop between media, science, and
government, all egging each other on. An astrobiology spin helped get
their science in the papers. The new wave of public visibility pleased
NASA administrators and made it easier for them to sell their programs
to Congress. This translated into increased funding. Suddenly, astrobi-
ology was not only hip but profitable. A renewed research focus, more
headlines, and more funding all followed.
It helped that, by the nineties, the second generation of planetologists
was becoming well established in the field.† The insecurities about
being taken seriously by other sciences, and the reluctance to be associ-
ated with the search for alien life, were fading away. Also, since the
time of Viking, planetary science (and science in general) had become
much more media savvy. Scientists realized, especially after the Cold
War fizzled, that they could not take public support for granted. No
American planetary missions were launched for a decade between
Pioneer Venus in 1978 and Magellan in 1989. Through the crucible of near extinction, planetary scientists became better adapted to the media
age. In the nineties it became de rigueur to issue a press release anytime
a paper was published that might possibly be seen as newsworthy.
When “the Mars rock” was greeted with global headlines in 1996, it
suddenly seemed that the only angle that mattered was the life angle.
Stories about all areas of planetary science were being reported with an
alien-life spin. Any result that could be cast in terms of the search for
life had an excellent chance of making the news.
Meanwhile, out at Jupiter, Galileo had recently entered orbit and had
its first close encounters with Europa. The spacecraft, sharp-eyed but
autistic, was slowly sending down a stream of new images that
increased the circumstantial evidence for an underground ocean slosh-
*Wes Huntress, the former NASA associate administrator for Space Sciences, apparently suggested this title for NASA’s renewed commitment to what had formerly been called exobiology.
†It cracks me up to see my grad school contemporaries leading planetary missions, chair-ing important committees, and pontificating at meetings. They act like real scientists, but I am not fooled.
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ing beneath Europa’s cracked icy face. Galileo scientists were encour-
aged to talk about what this could mean for life there, in a way that
would have been frowned upon seventeen years earlier during the
Voyager encounters. Times had changed and attitudes had shifted.
Planetary encounters in the late 1990s were much more strategically
packaged for the public than they had been in the 1970s. The rocks at
the Mars Pathfinder landing site, where the little Sojourner rover romped in July 1997, were given cute, media-friendly cartoon names
like Scooby-Doo and Yogi. The rocks at the Viking lander sites had
mostly just been assigned numbers.* The new rocks weren’t any cuter
than the old ones, but a later generation of scientists, raised on car-
toons, video games, MTV, and computers, was more tuned in to the
rhythm and the value of catchy sound bites.
At times we have gone overboard, conspiring with the media to exag-
gerate or distort the significance of our results. It gives them easy head-
lines and us an ego boost, visibility, and easier access to funding. For a
while, it seemed that nearly every discovery of the Galileo mission,
from magnetic fields to intriguing surface patterns on the moons, was
somehow spun for the press with an extraterrestrial-life angle. I real-
ized that this had gone too far a couple of years ago when I received an
e-mail from my eleventh-grade English teacher, Martie Fiske.† An avid
follower of science news, she was annoyed by the twentieth story she
had read that year with the headline “Galileo Discovers New Clues to
Possible Life in Europa!” Martie asked me, “Why do you people keep
feeding us the same story over and over again?”
Though it can be taken to questionable extremes, all in all it’s a wel-
come change that scientists have become more aware of how their
work relates to the concerns of John Q. Public. Newsworthy angles are
now sought for results that might otherwise seem obscure. Sometimes
the right spin can reveal a human-interest angle lurking in the most
arcane research.
The movement was encouraged by the (accurate) perception that
new funding was available for old projects successfully recast as astro-
biology. To some extent, success in
securing funding has gone to those
*Actually, four rocks at the Viking 2 site were named Mr. Badger, Mr. Mole, Mr. Rat, and Mr. Toad after characters in The Wind in the Willows, but these never received the prime-time star billing that the Pathfinder cartoon-character rocks got twenty years later.
†A teacher who changed my life by getting me to read the right books at the right time.
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who could most eloquently describe, in astrobiological terms, whatever
research they were already doing. This is not a bad exercise to have to
go through—relating your work to the big picture. At any rate, it’s
what we call good academic survival skills, and if you don’t have them,
you’re probably doing something else.
We’ve all done some of this repositioning. For over a decade, with
funding from various NASA research programs, I’ve been making com-
puter models simulating the evolution of the environments of terrestrial
planets. These models can also be used to explore questions about the
early habitability of local planets, as well as the habitability of Earth-
like planets (still hypothetical, but not for long) around other stars.
Recently I’ve received money from both NASA and the National
Science Foundation to use my models in the service of astrobiology—
something I used to mention only as an aside in my proposals.
V I V A !
Astrobiology may at times have been falsely hyped as a scientific revo-
lution or a brand-new discipline, but it is a refreshing and encouraging
development. A revolution really is going on—not a scientific revolu-
tion, but a revolution in the culture of science, one that is healthy for science in a number of ways.
First, the biocentric tilt of NASA allows us to come clean about our
true reasons for wanting to explore and understand the cosmos.
Questions about life in the universe have always been behind our
exploration of space. We just haven’t always been free or willing to
admit it. The rise of astrobiology as a highly visible backbone of
NASA’s space exploration efforts represents a new alignment of our
public priorities with our private dreams. Even when we explore desic-
cated, sun-broiled Mercury or frigid and fragile little comets—places
we don’t really expect to find life—we are searching for ourselves out
there, trying to understand just how we’ve arrived on the cosmic scene.