The InterPlanetary Festival will be held on Earth from June 14 to 16. We present SFI Miller Scholar Laurence Gonzales’ firsthand report of the inaugural festival’s “Origins of Life in Space” discussion in anticipation of another captivating experience:

At the 2018 InterPlanetary Festival, audience members pay close attention to a panel discussion. (Kimberly Corante photo)

As I walk by the stage, [SFI Professor] Chris Kempes catches my eye. I don’t recognise the man sitting next to him, but I soon hear that he is Caleb Scharf, Columbia University’s Director of Astrobiology, and that piques my interest. He wrote The Zoomable Cosmos, a visually stunning journey from the scale of the entire universe to the scale of a single subatomic particle, complete with stunning images. I’m interested in hearing what he has to say, as well as what Chris has to say. I take a seat and listen to him talk about Frank Drake, who attempted to estimate “how many communicative species are out there in our galaxy” in 1961, to use Caleb’s words. This endeavour culminated in the so-called Drake equation, which took into account things like how many new stars emerge each year. Drake then inquired as to how many of those stars are home to planets. The answer is that planets exist in almost every star. The fact that ten to forty percent of those planets resemble Earth is the next factor to consider. The third aspect Drake considered was the frequency with which life appears on those little rocky worlds.

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Caleb comments, “And that’s where we hit a brick wall.” And we have no knowledge of the subject. In truth, we have no idea what life is like. There is no universally agreed-upon definition.

Life is erupting all around them as they converse. We can see a green and brilliant tree behind the elevated platform where they sit, people passing by with umbrellas against the summer sun, and even one of the gigantic Roadrunner trains roaring and dinging as it speeds past because the stage has no back to it. The wires hanging down, the made-in-China chairs with stainless steel frames, the white plastic pitcher of water on the Mies van der Rohe cuboid table, and the scattered obscure and heavy-looking electronic equipment, some with odd and alien-looking antennae that give no hint of their fun, make it a typical messy rock-and-roll stage with the very cluttered signature of life all over it. The cottonwood seed, however, swarms in the air between the audience and the speakers as the wind blows, as if mocking their conversation: This is life, this spermy, unpredictable, random, yet astonishingly certain impulse toward reproduction.

Love is imperceptible.

Love is God.

Stevie Wonder is deafeningly deafeningly deaf

As a result, Stevie Wonder is the God.

That’s the Drake formula for you.

Chris offers a musing on what life could be, as well as a broad overview of the challenge of addressing Drake’s final question. According to Chris, when a big planet or asteroid collided with the earth and created the moon, the impact thoroughly sterilised the globe, and whatever life that existed was extinguished. After that, life arose in the form of basic one-celled animals in barely half a billion years. That, he claimed, was positive in terms of Drake’s ultimate required amount. Those cells, on the other hand, needed a billion years to become eukaryotes and acquire (create?) nuclei. So it’s possible that the adjustment will be difficult. Remember that these are all necessary steps on the way to becoming “communicative species,” which eukaryotes are not.

Is that the case?

Caleb responds by pointing out that, unlike physics, we don’t have any first principles or fundamental ideas of life. We have a rough idea why crap happens in the world outside of biology. We don’t do it when it comes to live things. As a result, we don’t have any methods comparable to those used in physics to estimate the likelihood of life arising. He does, however, point out that there is another path to the solution, which is to figure out how to count the instances of life in our galaxy. Just a few years ago, this could have seemed like a ridiculous notion, similar to stating that the best way to comprehend the human brain was to expose it and watch its gears turn. Of course, technologies like Magnetic Resonance Imaging have enabled us to accomplish just that, and when it comes to exoplanets, or planets outside of our solar system, we’ve started to develop the technology to not only see planets around other stars but also to measure what’s in their atmosphere.

“We now have a far larger sample of situations in which we might be able to look for biosignatures – signatures of life,” Chris explains. To put it another way, we’re trying to figure out whether or if someone is passing gas on another planet. That is the only way to express it in a way that conveys its core. We’re on the lookout for methane. Also, there’s oxygen. And there’s a lot more.

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NASA aims to launch the James Webb telescope in 2020, which will considerably improve the chances of finding methane on other worlds. Caleb believes that we will start to see evidence of life within a year or two of the launch. We should be able to tell anything about the possibility of life anyplace within a decade.

Chris brings it full circle by pointing out that what we learn about the dynamics of exoplanets can help us govern our own planet more intelligently in regards to concerns like resource management and climate change. And it is there that he captures the essence of the InterPlanetary Project itself: to use the entire galaxy, if not the entire universe, as our kindergarten for becoming InterPlanetary Citizens with a good record of stewardship of our own world, making us worthy of visiting (or being visited by) another world. And perhaps by bringing all of these potential citizen scientists to the InterPlanetary Festival each year, we can gently steer humanity’s great ship in the direction of making it a somewhat more urgent business in order to avoid destroying the world.

Caleb claims to be an astrophysicist, therefore planets are mind-bogglingly difficult to him, whereas “stars are simple.” With a few lines of equations and a little physics, we can figure out how stars work at their most fundamental level. Planets are incredibly complicated.”

However, he claims that the potential for this new research into exoplanets are brilliant, allowing us to peer deep into a planet that is the equal of our own globe when it was a billion years old. We can even find one that depicts our world a billion years in the future and use it to learn about our future.

“In many ways, this festival is about the future, our future as a species.” Then he says, “It’ll all be over for life on the surface of the earth in around a billion years.” And the crowd lets out a collective sigh as we understand we’re speeding toward oblivion, learning and dancing as quickly as we can in this lemonade brightness of our youth.