BOULDER, Colorado – Consider it nothing short of the cosmic quest for all time: Understanding the origin, evolution, distribution, and fate of life on Earth and in the Universe.

That’s a tall order…but within the sights of experts gathering here this week to take part in the 2005 Biennial Meeting of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

From the formation and evolution of habitable worlds to the origins of life, extra-solar planets, and future exploration technologies and strategies – dedicated scientists are tackling big questions in a big universe.

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Unanswered questions
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Scientists plugging away
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Earth look-alikes?
The growing roster of planets found outside our solar system has shored up the prospect for “a whole lot of life” out there,” said Jill Tarter, Director of The Center for the Study of Life in the Universe at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

“What a fabulous opportunity to think about the boundaries of what that life might be like,” Tarter said. “The planets are there. We can’t deny that anymore. It’s really setting the backdrop and driving forward everybody’s thinking. So it just gets more exciting to think about how nature might have generalized biology and geology,” she said.

Tarter also pointed to the Kepler mission and its future scouting for Earth-like planets. “This decade we’re going to be able to tell you something about the demographics of terrestrial planets. Either they are prevalent or they are very rare. But this is the decade to get those data,” she said.

read the full and interesting Story at Space.com
Experts Examine Thread of Life In The Universe

and this

The top three reasons for humans in space

It’s late at night, and you receive an urgent phone call from the White House. “The President wants to know why we should continue to put humans in space. He wants a one-page summary on his desk by tomorrow morning.” What do you write?

Lists of reasons for human spaceflight are readily available. The National Space Society has a detailed list, and SPACE.com has its Top 3 and Top 10. Nonetheless, there is a need for a concise list that can be easily recalled—perhaps something like this:

Humans are in space:
3. To work
2. To live
1. To survive

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Many agree that it’s time for colonization. “The goal of the human spaceflight program should be to increase our survival prospects by colonizing space,” wrote Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott in Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe. “If we were up there among the planets, if there were self-sufficient human communities on many worlds, our species would be insulated from catastrophe,” wrote Cornell space scientist Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot.

Colonization is not guaranteed. Human spaceflight is not guaranteed. They are the results of choices made by individuals in political offices, in government agencies, in boardrooms, in offices and in homes. These choices will influence this generation, but more crucially they will determine the lives of a great many generations to come:

“The theme of this book is that humanity is more at risk than at any earlier phase in its history. The wider cosmos has a potential future that could even be infinite. But will these vast expanses of time be filled with life, or as empty as the Earth’s first sterile seas? The choice may depend on us, this century.”
— Cambridge cosmologist Sir Martin Rees, Our Final Hour


The top three reasons for humans in space

Greetings from Germany NRW
Ulli S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club m7 ©

Thanks, nice reading reading Sir Ulli.

One of the reasons people give for colonizing Mars is that a NEO could smash into Earth and wipe us all out. We shouldn't have all our eggs in one basket, so to speak.

I support this notion, of course. I just keep imagining, however, the accomplishment of a massive effort to colonize Mars and terraform it. Then, ironically, after so many years of work, the first planetkilling asteroid event in human history happens to Mars.