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submitted by
hari
5 months, 24 days ago
space.com — ET is coming to your living room in "Extraterrestrial," and no one is being abducted. Over the past several months, a top-notch group of American and British scientists teamed up with Blue Wave Productions, Ltd. (for the National Geographic) to imagine what ET is like on other worlds. It's all based upon our scientific understanding of life, stars and planetary systems. When filmed, Dr. Michael Meyer was NASA's astrobiology program scientist, and now serves as NASA Headquarters Mars Program Scientist; Dr. Seth Shostak is a senior astronomer here at the SETI Institute; Dr. Chris McKay is a leading Mars researcher at NASA Ames Research Center, Dr. Laurance Doyle conducts research on animal communication, and planetary systems around binary stars at SETI Institute and is the lead scientists at PlanetQuest, Inc. a new non-profit that will engage the public in finding extrasolar planets. Dr. Simon Conway Morris is a world-leader in evolutionary biology at Cambridge University in England....and the list goes on. These are serious and accomplished scientists--legitimate guys applying everything they know about stars, planetary systems, planetary evolution, and most especially, the evolution of life, to speculate on what life might be like on other worlds.
In a word, the outcome is WILD!
It's science meets science fiction. Scientists are often accused of being too conservative in their predictions about the future, but in this case, these guys expand our understanding of what life might be like on alien worlds. It's not just another simple variation on bilaterally symmetrical humanoids. The questions these scientists ask about life on alien worlds are at the core of the cross-disciplinary science astrobiology, which seeks to understand life here on Earth and to seek life elsewhere in the universe.
"Extraterrestrial" explores worlds that would have been promptly discarded by planetary scientists as unsuitable for life a decade ago. Before the discovery of gas giants orbiting their stars in just a few days, astronomers had concentrated on looking for planetary systems like our own. Systems that featured nice middle-sized, middle-aged stars like the Sun. The cooler stars like red dwarfs and the double stars that about comprise half the stars in the galaxy were thought unsuitable for stable planetary systems. Astronomers are rethinking those judgements.
It's all changed with the discovery of more than 150 planets in orbit about nearby stars. Most of these
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