paleonet Lecture of the Week: Part III: Astrobiology

["Wirt Atmar" <atmar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A member of Paleonet, who is also a member of ECOLOG-L, where I've
been regularly posting these announcements, suggested that I post them
here as well. If you feel they are inappropriate, please don't
hesitate to let me know.

The subject of the lectures is evolutionary biology, in all of its
facets, including paleontology. Indeed, so far in the series there
have been several well known paleontologists who have been featured:

David Jablonski, on the latitudinal diversity gradient
http://aics-research.com/lotw/lotw20060417.html

Andy Knoll, on the value paleontology brings to evolutionary thought
http://aics-research.com/lotw/lotw20060515.html

and a little later in the summer,
Jere Lipps, on life and death processes on icy worlds

Wirt Atmar

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The Evolutionary Biology Lecture of the Week for June 5, 2006 is now
available at:

     http://aics-research.com/lotw/

The talks center primarily around evolutionary biology, in all of its
aspects: cosmology, astronomy, planetology, geology, astrobiology,
ecology, ethology, biogeography, phylogenetics and evolutionary
biology itself, and are presented at a professional level, that of one
scientist talking to another. All of the talks were recorded live at
conferences.

This is the third lecture in a summer-long series on the new science
of astrobiology.

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June 5, 2006

Part III: Astrobiology

Taking the Galactic Planetary Survey
Gregory Laughlin, University of California, Santa Cruz
35 min.

"There are two distinct possibilities: either we are alone in the
Universe,  or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."
     — Arthur C. Clarke

The knock against astrobiology has remained the same for forty years
now: astrobiology is an area of study without a known subject. George
Gaylord Simpson famously wrote in an issue of Science (v.143, p.769)
in 1964: "this 'science' has yet to demonstrate that its subject
matter exists!"

Yet even should the discovery of a second, independent genesis of life
elsewhere in the universe remains decades away, astrobiology will
nonetheless profoundly change of our views of the evolution of life on
Earth, in the absence of that singular discovery. Geology was the
science that informed and transformed evolutionary thought during
Darwin's time. Comparative planetology, although it is a new field of
inquiry, will do the same during ours.

Speculating on the evolution of life in the universe has always been a
risky business, and one not always highly regarded. Two hundred and
fifty years ago, when the first thoughts that the formation of the
planets must have occurred by secular (natural) means in the two
competing cosmogenies of Buffon and Laplace, rather than as part of a
supernatural command, the ideas were met with at best only tepid
enthusiasm.

Indeed Thomas Jefferson, our most intellectual and erudite president,
wrote fifty years later, in 1804, "Dreams about the modes of creation,
... [are] too idle to be worth a single hour of any man’s life."

Almost certainly Simpson and Jefferson would now change their minds
when confronted with the possibilities of the discoveries that await
us. Life, up until recently, has always been a property unique to the
planet Earth. It really hasn't been considered in any other context.

But we are now beginning an extraordinary new voyage of discovery: we
are beginning to take a galactic survery of planets, at least in our
very small region of the Milky Way. Because of this, we are beginning
to get a sense of the diversity of planetary systems possible.

So far the results have appeared less than promising. The planetary
systems we're finding would seem incapable of supporting life in
general, and certainly not the kind of life we see here on the Earth.
But those results have been greatly biased by the detection
technologies we've devised so far.

In this lecture, Greg Laughlin describes four of the technologies that
are currently being employed: astrometry, radial velocity
measurements, direct imaging and transiting. The first three methods
only work well for large planets, but the third, planetary transits in
front of their host star does present us with the opportunity to
detect Earth-sized planets, if we are lucky enough to be aligned with
the remote star in its plane of its ecliptic. Moreover, it does not
require the massive observational equipment that the first three
methods need.

The chance of discovering transiting planets using this method is high
enough that since Greg gave this lecture, he and Tim Castellano, of
NASA Ames, have formed transitsearch.org, a mechanism designed to
recruit amateur astronomers in the search. Because increasing numbers
of amateurs are now able to acquire affordable telescopes with CCDs
and computers, amateurs can play an important role in monitoring
extrasolar planets for possible transits, a step crucial to detection
follow-up. A modest 8- or 10-inch telescope is all that's necessary
for such work.

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