American Astrobiologist Henry Throop is convinced that there is life out there, somewhere, in outer space. How? The presence of bacteria in enormous salt lakes and burning hot geysers, acidic mineral-rich mines and ocean floors has told him what he needed to know.
American Astrobiologist Henry Throop is convinced that there is life out there, somewhere, in outer space. How? The presence of bacteria in enormous salt lakes and burning hot geysers, acidic mineral-rich mines and ocean floors has told him what he needed to know.
"We used to think it was just our planet out there," Throop told Grocott’s Mail. "We know it’s the earth cycling the sun and the sun is one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. The galaxy is one of a hundred billion stars in the universe."
"Put that together and there’s probably 10 to the 23rd (power—that’s 23 zero) different planets out there in the universe."
To Throop, this means it would be highly surprising if there were no planets out there with conditions similar to those on Earth.
This Scifest, Throop took school kids, with teachers in toe, on a 45 minute exploration of our In his talkshop, "Astrobiology—the search for life in the universe", the senior scientist from the Planetary Science Institute in Pretoria and Tucson, Arizona, did just that.
He took the audience from the scorching pools of the Yellowstone National Park in America to the deadly acidic waters of Spain’s Rio Tinto Mines, from the crushing depths of the Mediterranean Sea floors to bacteria living off of arsenic in California’s Mono Lake.
These places should be barren, he said, yet bacteria survive in these inhospitable conditions.
So why not in outer space?
“The search for life is really the search for liquid water,” he said.
Water used to be present on Mars, he said, but the question of the existence of life is still being debated.
Enceladus, a Saturn moon, gushes with water geysers.
A Jupiter moon, Europa, is a barren and frozen wasteland, but it may hold water beneath its surface, and maybe, just maybe, some sort of life, he concluded.
Throop will give a lecture, "New Horizons: NASA’s mission to Pluto and beyond" on Friday 18 March, in the Monument’s Guy Butler Theatre at 6pm.
