92 | Kevin Hand on Life Elsewhere in the Solar System

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2020

⏱️ 116 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s hard doing science when you only have one data point, especially when that data point is subject to an enormous selection bias. That’s the situation faced by people studying the nature and prevalence of life in the universe. The only biosphere we know about is our own, and our knowing anything at all is predicated on its existence, so it’s unclear how much it can teach us about the bigger picture. That’s why it’s so important to search for life elsewhere. Today’s guest is Kevin Hand, a planetary scientist and astrobiologist who knows as much as anyone about the prospects for finding life right in our planetary backyard, on moons and planets in the Solar System. We talk about how life comes to be, and reasons why it might be lurking on Europa, Titan, or elsewhere.

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Kevin Hand received his Ph.D. in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University. He is currently Deputy Chief Scientist for Solar System Exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He has collaborated with director James Cameron, and is a frequent consultant on films, including acting as a science advisor to the movie Europa Report. His a cofounder of Cosmos Education, a non-profit organization devoted to science education in developing countries. His new book is Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everybody, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll and today we're going to go looking for life elsewhere in the universe
0:08.1	I think that with the discovery of many new planets around stars over the last few decades
0:14.1	The idea that there might be life elsewhere in the universe has become more and more of a scientific
0:20.2	Project of course we've always been looking for it
0:22.6	We've been wondering we've been doing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and so forth
0:26.6	But now we have a more focused idea of where we might look and a little slightly more optimistic
0:32.2	perspective on how many places there are out there where life could be
0:36.1	We also talked on this podcast previously about the idea of the origin of life
0:40.5	I mean if life only ever existed on earth than search for it elsewhere would not be very helpful
0:46.2	But we talked to people like Kate Adamala to Sarah and Marie Walker about why life came to exist in the first place
0:53.1	Today we're going to roll up our sleeves a little bit and think about looking for life
0:57.1	And it's one thing to look for extraterrestrial intelligence very very far away
1:01.4	Today we're going to talk about looking for actual living beings here in our solar system
1:07.0	People of a certain age namely my age
1:09.9	Came of age and at a time when we were looking for life on the surface of Mars with the Viking landers in the 1970s
1:16.6	It was very exciting but also a little bit inconclusive
1:19.4	We didn't find any life Mars is a pretty dry planet and these days we talk a lot about whether or not Mars might have had life in the past
1:27.4	Less so about whether it has life now
1:30.1	But don't get the wrong idea because there's other places here in the solar system where life really could exist
1:36.1	And we are actually going to go look for it today's guest is Kevin hand who is deputy chief scientist for solar system
1:44.0	Exploration at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here in Pasadena, California
1:48.3	Kevin is educated in physics and geology and biology and astronomy and planetary science and all of these things
	...

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