Nathalie Cabrol (Simon & Schuster (UK); Scribner (US))
David Bowie wasn’t the first or last to wonder if there is life on Mars. The question of whether we are alone in the universe is still a great mystery. Some believe aliens have been visiting our planet for millennia, live among us and have even infiltrated the White House and 10 Downing Street.
For the more scientifically minded, there are authoritative voices like that of Nathalie Cabrol. She is one of the world’s leading astrobiologists and director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute in California. Cabrol also develops strategies for NASA’s explorations of Mars and Saturn’s moon Titan, and researches areas such as how life can survive in hostile environments.
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That mission to explore life off-Earth fuels The Secret Life of the Universe: An astrobiologist’s search for the origins and frontiers of life. We are, she writes, “living in a golden age in astrobiology, the beginning of a fantastic odyssey”, guiding readers on a colourful tour of Earth, our solar system and the universe’s distant corners, stretching back 4.6 billion years.
Her two main lines of enquiry – the origin of life as we know it and the search for other life – aren’t truly separate. As the astronomer Carl Sagan, after whom Cabrol’s centre was named, once said, these are “two sides of the same question – the search for who we are”. Cabrol calls that sprawling endeavour “a balancing act of microscopes exploring the most elemental bricks of life and radio telescopes searching for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations in the farthest reaches of the universe”.
Our understanding has increased dramatically in recent decades. We are the first humans to see Earth from afar. Voyager I’s “pale blue dot” image of Earth from 6 billion kilometres away and the discovery of thousands of exoplanets have transformed our view of ourselves and our place in the universe.
Finding even the smallest of microbes on another world would be incredibly important in terms of potential intelligent life in the universe, says Cabrol. She also explores the possibility that, rather than life originating on Earth, rocks from Mars could have carried organic molecules or even primitive organisms to Earth, where they found more favourable conditions: “We might be the Martians we so relentlessly strive to discover,” writes Cabrol.
Her book is full of such wonders. Cabrol clearly communicates big ideas and condenses decades of exploration and research into fast-paced chapters, with references to the likes of Star Wars worked in. She celebrates advances in our technology and knowledge, looking forward to the next two decades when remote missions will return samples to Earth and giant space and ground-based telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope (from which Cabrol says “nothing short of a quantum leap” is expected), will drive understanding forward again. We could, she says, even land a crew on Mars in a decade.
While Cabrol allows for the prospect that humans are alone in the universe, she thinks it is unlikely. The universe could be “teeming with federations of galaxies, time travellers, stellar harvesters… curious beings like us, born from the same universe, related to us by stardust, but separated by light-years”.
Alien worlds may be “hiding in plain sight” in our sky, and we could find the first evidence of past or current life in the coming decade, writes Cabrol. Indeed, we may have already encountered alien communications too advanced for us to recognise. Chances are that any first contact would be with “pioneer extraterrestrial robots” rather than living beings, she writes.
She sounds notes of caution, too, reminding us of Stephen Hawking’s fear that the messages scientists are sending into the universe might be “h” by advanced and unfriendly aliens. Then there is artificial intelligence, which might complicate how we see intelligence at all.
The Secret Life of the Universe is a reminder of how far we have come and how fast. We are at the start of our journey to understand life and the universe. As Cabrol says, the best approach for future research is to “expect the unexpected”.
Graeme Green is a writer based in Derbyshire, UK
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