Last week I finished up a short online course through the University of Edinburgh on astrobiology, the science concerned with the possibility of the existence of life on other planets. It was fascinating, if a bit short at only five weeks with a handful of lectures each week. While it is probably easy for the ignorant to misunderstand and mock this discipline, the question of whether or not life exists on other worlds is a legitimate and interesting field, and it encompasses so many smaller areas of study. Astrobiology seeks to understand how life arose here on Earth in the first place, wondering how it started, what early earth was like--and as far as that goes, what the first life looked like. It also studies life in great extremes, whether extremes of heat or of pressure, to try to grasp the limits to life in order to understand where life might possibly exist (as an aside, were you aware that microbial life survived in space for over a year, in one experiment?). Along with that, i...
Occasional author. Lover of coffee.