How Astronomers Came to Think We Are Probably Not Alone
NASA has long suspected that life was possible, even likely, on other planets. The real importance of the Kepler news this week: more motivation to fund further exploration.
To the average American, the news about NASA’s Kepler spacecraft discovering evidence of potentially “billions” of Earth-like planets in “habitable” solar orbits in the universe might feel like a paradigm-shifting moment. If there are billions of Earth-like planets out there, the possibility of life existing somewhere other than Earth suddenly goes from seeming like an odds-against to an odds-on notion. But to NASA’s scientists, that paradigm had shifted long before the headlines hit—indeed, before Kepler even launched. While the majority of the public’s attention (and NASA’s funding) over the past decades was focused on the human spaceflight program, NASA’s astronomical science program slowly was chipping away at some of the biggest mysteries of the universe, including the origins of the elements necessary for life. By the time NASA was founded in 1958, astronomers had already figured out that all the heavier elements in the periodic table, which are necessary for life as we know it,not only could be produced, but actually were produced in the high-temperature supernova explosions of large stars. How those materials might be transported to potential planets in orbit around still-healthy stars, however, was still a mystery. (via How Astronomers Came to Think We Are Probably Not Alone - Lane Wallace - The Atlantic)
