Sunday, February 26, 2012

Big Picture Science for 02/27/12 - Rife with Life

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Big Picture Science - Rife with Life

“Follow the water” is the mantra of those who search for life beyond Earth. Where there’s water, there may be life. Join us on a tour of watery solar system bodies that hold promise for biology. Dig beneath the icy shell of Jupiter’s moon Europa, and plunge into the jets of Enceladus, Saturn’s satellite.

And let’s not forget the Red Planet. Mars is rusty and dusty, but it wasn’t always a world of dry dunes. Did life once thrive here? Also, the promise of life in the exotic hydrocarbon lakes of Titan.

Science-fiction author Robert J. Sawyer joins us, and relates how these exotic outposts have prompted imaginative stories of alien life.

Guests:
  • Robert J. Sawyer – Hugo award-winning science fiction author
  • Cynthia Phillips – Planetary geologist at the SETI Institute
  • Alexander Hayes – Planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley
  • Rachel Mastrapa – Planetary scientist for NASA and the SETI Institute
  • Robert Lillis – Space and planetary scientist at the Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley

Permalink: http://radio.seti.org/episodes/Rife_with_Life

You can listen to this and other episodes at http://radio.seti.org/, and be sure to check out Are We A Blog?, the companion blog to the radio show.

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