The director of the Carl Sagan Center on the possibility of life elsewhere in our solar system, what Venus can teach us about global heating, and what she thinks of Elon Musk
he astrobiologist Nathalie Cabrol was born in 1963 and raised near Paris. She completed a PhD at the Sorbonne on the evolution of water on Mars and moved to the US in 1994 as a researcher at Nasa Ames. She has worked extensively in the Atacama desert and the Chilean Andes, exploring how life adapts to extreme environments analogous to those on other planets. Cabrol, who lives in Northern California, is now the director of the Carl Sagan Center at the Seti Institute.
The easy answer is Carl Sagan’s response: “That would be an awful waste of space.” We have been searching intellectually for life for thousands of years, but searching in a meaningful way with technology for only 60 years, so this is a very young search. Also, you have to look at the distances. Even if by some miracle are thinking and communicating in similar ways to us and are interested in what’s happening around them, our radio bubble is barely 200 light years in diameter. That’s small.
But Enceladus is definitely my favourite. I love it because it’s just throwing stuff at you in geysers or plumes . Obviously it’s quite complicated to slow down a spacecraft to grab samples, but we could do incredible things on Enceladus.When you look at what happens to a planet when you have a runaway greenhouse effect taking place, then this is Venus. And the planet that’s too hot that’s losing its water, that’s Mars. We have that right in front of our eyes.
Projecting ourselves into space is challenging our brains to find solutions that we would not otherwise be seeking on our planet. Certainly, sending a was not the right message when you are trying to create space policy and prevent planetary contamination.As a scientist, UAPs are interesting to me, because first we have to take them for what they are: unidentified phenomena. The jump I’m not making is saying that they are necessarily extraterrestrial phenomena, as in flying saucers and so on.
But Seti is not into aerial phenomena – our instruments are pointed much farther away. I always say, joking, that we are looking for ET in its own habitat, whereas people looking for UAPs are trying to see ET in ours. But if you tell me tomorrow that you have irrefutable evidence of an alien spacecraft that’s been captured in a video somewhere, I’ll be the happiest person in the world.
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