search for life in the universe
vlicata | May 2, 2010While driving to the Astrobiology 2010 Conference last week, I and a graduate student from my lab briefly discussed Stephen Hawking's recent declaration that humans should try to avoid contact with what would surely be hostile aliens. It seemed odd to be attending a conference where a primary aim is finding extraterrestrial life while the news media and the blogosphere was reverberating with Hawking's hawkish alien opinions. What really made the whole situation even more odd, however, was the almost total absence of any reaction to, or even general acknowledgement of Hawking's remarks at…
vlicata | April 18, 2010Astrobiology is an amazingly interesting, highly interdisciplinary, and relative new field of science. Basically, it's both the search for life elsewhere in the universe, and it's the study of how to sustain human life in space and on other planets (and how to protect other planets from Earth life). Our lab works on several different astrobiological projects. Given both the amazing breadth of science that falls under the heading of "astrobiology," and the fact that it is a branch of "space exploration", some of the titles of talks and papers in this field can seem rather bizarre when seen…