How Planetary Science Unifies the Search for Life Beyond Earth – Prof. Jonathan I. Lunine

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

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Summary

Prof. Jonathan Lunine explains how planetary science unifies the search for life beyond Earth by integrating astronomy, geology, chemistry, and atmospheric science to investigate habitable environments on Mars, Europa, Enceladus, Titan, and exoplanets.

This lecture was given on July 18th, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speakers:

Jonathan Lunine is the Chief Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Professor of Planetary Science at Caltech in Pasadena, California. Beforehand, he was the David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences and Chair of the Department of Astronomy at Cornell University. Lunine is interested in how planets form and evolve, what processes maintain and establish habitability, and what kinds of exotic environments (methane lakes, etc.) might host a kind of chemistry sophisticated enough to be called "life". He pursues these interests through theoretical modeling and participation in spacecraft missions. He is co-investigator on the Juno mission now in orbit at Jupiter, using data from several instruments on the spacecraft, and on the MISE and gravity science teams for the Europa Clipper mission. He was on the Science Working Group for the James Webb Space Telescope, focusing on characterization of extrasolar planets and Kuiper Belt objects. Lunine has contributed to concept studies for a wide range of planetary and exoplanetary missions. Lunine is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has participated in or chaired a number of advisory and strategic planning committees for the Academy and for NASA.

Keywords: Astrobiology, Biosignatures, Enceladus, Europa, Exoplanets, Habitability, James Webb Space Telescope, Mars Exploration, Planetary Science, Titan

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.0	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.0	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tomistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.0	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:25.2	Today, I'm supposed to tell you about how, so I'm supposed to,
0:31.0	because Father Davenport told me what I was supposed to do,
0:34.2	tell you about how planetary science as a sort of a derivative field of the basic sciences
0:43.3	really unifies the search for life beyond the Earth.
0:47.3	And it's a pleasure to do that because I am a planetary scientist, and so most of my research over the last 40, 45 years has been in that area.
0:58.3	So it's kind of a fun exercise to go through and think about how planetary science relates to
1:05.5	the other sciences. So if we go back to a time before 1960, planetary science, which is the study of the planets in our solar system,
1:18.0	and since the 1990s the planets around other stars, they're known to exist.
1:23.4	Really, planetary science didn't exist as a field.
1:27.2	There was astronomy, which was the study of the heavens.
1:32.0	There was geology.
1:33.3	Of course, there was chemistry and physics as well, and atmospheric science.
1:38.1	But planetary science kind of came into its own with the space age.
1:42.1	And prior to that, if you think about when astronomy kind of came into its own with the space age. And prior to that, if you think about when astronomy kind of came
1:46.5	into its own as a quantitative field in the 1600s and 1700s, it was really with the understanding
1:53.7	that space was enormously large, enormously larger than people had thought before, that really, I think, opened the door to what we call the modern field of astronomy.
2:05.6	And it was not the measurement of stellar distances by parallax.
2:10.6	It was actually the measurement of stellar distances by the aberration of starlight,
	...

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