In a recent lecture, delivered as part of the GREAT talk series organised by the British Council, Lewis Dartnell offered a fascinating insight on Astrobiology and alien life.
The word ‘alien’, however, must not be equated, as Dartnell joked, with a green, bug-eyed monster like ET, but with life in our solar system. Dartnell, author, presenter and Professor of Science Communication at the University of Westminster, graduated from Oxford University, and completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Astrobiology at University College London. His book, The Knowledge, was Sunday Times Book of the Year and an international bestseller, and his recent book, Origins: How The Earth Made Us, is also a Sunday Times bestseller.
In an interview, Dartnell spoke about microbial life on Mars, and the launch of Chandrayaan 2.\
What are the concepts explored in your two bestsellers?
The Knowledge is a thought experiment on how we can reboot civilisation after the apocalypse. I don’t think the world is about to end. As a scientist imagining what to do if that were to happen is a great way of peering behind the scenes of the modern world and asking about things we take for granted.
Food magically appears on supermarket shelves. Tools, devices and machines are made for us. I sit in a car and I turn a key and I whistle down the road at 80 miles per hour. Where does all that come from?
I think the idea of the apocalypse and the loss of all that we take for granted is a great way of exploring where it all came from in the first place.
Origins zooms out even further from where The Knowledge left off. It looks at not how the humans built the world we live in, but how the earth itself has performed a profound role in the whole of the human story; not just origins of the species in East Africa, but also across the thousands of years of human civilization. There is a distinctive signature of features of the planet. Whether it is the wind systems or plate tectonics, the earth has helped put us where we are today. I am of course not denying economics, politics and sociology have an important history, but beneath the layers are these planetary forces that I explore in Origins.
Could you tell us about your research for microbial life on Mars?
My particular research is on extremophile, which are hardy microbes on earth that can survive in hostile conditions similar to those on Mars. I look at how long different lives can survive, the signs of life have once been there, life has survived from the excesses of radiation and therefore what signs of life we could look for with our probes and rovers to be launched on Mars.
What are the tools used to detect life?
One of the techniques I use is Raman’s spectroscopy, invented by Indian scientist CV Raman. Raman’s spectroscopy, apart from other instruments, will be on board the ExoMars rover that is being launched by the European Space Agency to Mars next year.
What is the significance of the launch of Chandrayaan 2?
It is exciting for two reasons: No one has ever landed on the south pole of the moon. That will be the first. Scientifically it is exciting because we would be looking for water ice in permanently shadowed craters and they will be critical to support a human base on the south pole. You would need that ice to melt and drink and split to give us oxygen.
What about the catastrophic climate change we are witnessing on Earth?
The problem we are facing is a solution we have created from a previous solution. We are running out of the energy.
The Industrial Revolution was powered by coal and we realised we could find ancient fossilised sunshine underground in Britain and around the world. We dug up and started exploiting oil, which comes from a different period of earth’s history. But I am optimistic that we will find a solution and I hope we find it quickly enough, and that, as a society, we act on that solution.