The Book Club: is there alien life in our own solar system?

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🗓️ 3 June 2020

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Is there life, as David Bowie wondered, on Mars? In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the astrobiologist Kevin Peter Hand, author of a fascinating new book Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space. Kevin explains how and where we're currently looking for extraterrestrial life in our own solar system - and why on the basis of sound science he's optimistic that we'll find it. He tells us about the brilliantly ingenious scientific deduction that has established that there exist oceans of liquid water deep under the icy shells of moons of Saturn and Jupiter, why it's quite possible to suppose that aliens might be living in those oceans - and how we can even speculate about what those aliens might look like. And if Kevin's old schoolmate Elon Musk is listening, he has a favour to ask...

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The Book Club is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Book Club is brought to you in association with Charles Stanley Community,
0:03.6	providing our clients, colleagues and friends with practical supporting conversation.
0:07.6	Find out more at Charles Stanley Community.
0:15.5	Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books Podcast.
0:18.6	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.
0:21.7	And this week we're going to be talking about alien life. I'm joined by Kevin Peter Hand, who is an astrobiologist
0:27.2	at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, and whose new book is called Alien Oceans,
0:33.6	The Search for Life in the Depths of space. Kevin, welcome.
0:38.2	Thank you, Sam.
0:38.9	Pleasure to be here.
0:39.7	The first and easiest to dispatch question, which I imagine everybody asks you is, is their life on Mars?
0:49.0	Yes, that is sort of the standard place that we think of when we think of the search for life beyond
0:57.8	earth. For decades, Mars has been the centerpiece of the search for life beyond Earth within our
1:04.2	solar system. And rightfully so. Mars is a wonderful place to search for signs of past life.
1:11.3	We think that Mars had oceans billions of years ago, lakes, streams, rivers.
1:16.9	You can see the geologic evidence for that in the rock record.
1:21.1	And the Curiosity rover that's on Mars right now could tomorrow turn a corner and find some rocks with ancient
1:31.2	microbial life preserved in them. But that life, the life in the rocks, would not reveal to us
1:39.6	its biochemistry, its DNA or RNA or all of that molecular workings.
1:45.0	To really find life that works on some other biochemistry, we need to find living life, extant life.
1:53.0	And that's what brings us to the outer solar system, to these alien oceans.
1:57.0	Now what's kind of fascinated to me in this book, which, as you describe it, for a very
	...

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