A few weeks ago, I put the finishing touches to one of the most visionary projects I’ve ever been asked to present. The Essential
Guide to the 21st Century is the BBC World Service’s flagship series for the start of the new Millennium. My brief was to investigate where science will take us in the future – and what are the big discoveries coming up.
In the course of a whistlestop tour from the depths of the CERN particle accelerator under the Alps to NASA’s Mars mission control overlooking Los Angeles,
scientists predicted some pretty mind-blowing ideas. Around 2020, we’ll be wearing mini-computers as fashion accessories, with mini-robots surging around our bloodstream to scavenge viruses. High overhead, astronauts on the International Space Station will be attended by their own colourful, football-sized personal satellites. And, in case A Brief History of Time wasn’t enough, we’ll have to face the fact that the Universe isn’t made of just three dimensions, but contains six or more tiny extra dimensions all curled up on themselves.
But all the scientists I interviewed were abuzz about the biggest story of all. They agreed that this is the millennium in which we will discover intelligent alien life – and make contact with it.
Bizarre lifeforms
Until recently, we’ve looked at life in a pretty conservative way. Wildlife films on TV help to reinforce the notion that we – and our fellow-creatures – live within a fairly narrow range of temperatures and environments, and that, deep down, we all bear a strong family resemblance.
But this complacency has all changed. In just the past three or four years, biologists have discovered that life on Earth can exist in the most extreme places, and in the most bizarre forms. Microbes have been found down boreholes two kilometres deep. They live inside rocks scattered across the freezing wastes of Antarctica. White crabs and giant tubeworms inhabit scalding deep-sea vents that never see the rays of the Sun.
These forms of life may look more akin to ‘green slime’ than to our usual idea of life on Earth. But they are still alive. When life gets started, and wherever, it seems determined to hang on … for dear life! So if life got started on our planet – and it did so pretty quickly – then why not on some of our neighbour-worlds in the Solar System?
Where are the Martians?
Mars has long been a favourite with film directors, yielding untold numbers of B-movie aliens. But many scientists are taking things a little more seriously. Knowing that Mars is a smaller, colder version of Earth, they figure it is a good place to start to search. Mars probably
once had a thicker atmosphere that could have supported embryonic life. And it almost certainly had water on its surface in the past – perhaps even oceans. Water is the essential lubricant of all living things: without water, life as we know it cannot exist.
Both NASA and European space scientists have planned a bold program of unmanned Mars exploration that will sniff out life - if it exists – or even the remains of long-extinct life-forms. The American missions are likely to be delayed a couple of years, after the recent losses of NASA’s Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander. This makes me less confident of something I was loudly predicting last summer – that we would see a manned landing on Mars in 2019, exactly 50 years after the Apollo astronauts reached the Moon.
And casting my mind back to last summer brings up vivid thoughts about life in the Universe. My mission then was to cover an international
conference on ‘bioastronomy.’ This regular Bioastronomy Conference is held every three years, at some of the most beautiful and inspirational places on Earth – the previous time it was Capri, and next time it will be the Great Barrier Reef. The latest conference was held on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Mars was high on the agenda. Much of the debate concerned possible ‘Martian bugs’. In 1996, strange strucctures – looking like fossilised wiggly worms - had been discovered inside a meteorite which had been blasted out of the planet and landed in Antarctica. The consensus last summer – alas - was that the bugs were too small ever to have been life.