| EXPERT Q&A |
| Christopher Chyba is the Carl Sagan Chair for the Study of Life in the Universe at the SETI Institute. He's also an associate professor at Stanford University. Chyba was chair of the Science Definition Team for NASA's Europa Orbiter mission. Jack Farmer is a professor of geology and director of the Astrobiology Program at Arizona State University. He has been an active participant on NASA advisory committees the past decade, helping plan future missions to explore the solar system. Previously, Farmer was a research scientist with the Exobiology Branch of the NASA Ames Research Center. Bruce Jakosky is a geology professor and director of the Center for Astrobiology at the University of Colorado. His book, "The Search for Life on Other Planets," was published by Cambridge University Press in 1998. |
| THE QUESTIONS |
|  > What have we learned about ET in the past 30 years?
> What are the odds of ET? > What is the dream destination to search for ET? > How do we find ET? > If we find ET, what do we do with it? |
| SCIENCE TUESDAY
Visit SPACE.com each Tuesday to explore a new science feature. Archives |
The list of candidates inour solar system most likely to harbor life or show signs of past life hasnarrowed in recent months. A hot debate now rages, inside NASA and throughoutthe science world, over where and how best to conduct the hunt.
Uniquely human, we cannotagree on how to answer the biggest questions in life.
So SPACE.com posed ahandful of tough questions to three leading astrobiology experts, each of themin the thick of the debate. The answers are more varied than we expected, andthey illustrate both how simple and how complicated it will be to conduct thesearch, and to ultimately find out whether or not we have company in the solarsystem.
The driving force
Because of the financialand philosophical implications, the search for life has, many researchersagree, become the primary driving force in science. That is certainly the caseinside NASA, which is in the driver's seat, most literally, when it comes todeciding when, where and how our species will learn if we have cosmic cousinsor astral ancestors.
"It's the primedirective," says John Charles of the Johnson Space Center in Houston."It has brought a focus to our program unlike any focus since the Apollodays, when the goal was to beat the Russians to the Moon."
And that's a focus thattosses more than $14 billion dollars around every year. Throw in budgets of theEuropean Space Agency members, as well as China, Japan and Russia, and thewildcard possibility of a privately funded search, and soon you're talking realmoney.
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