Extraterrestrial

[SeriousMoney]

Cutbacks to space program will hinder exploration
Poughkeepsie Journal, By DAN SHAPLEY
Sunday, March 19, 2006

Ah, Solarquest, that late-'80s Monopoly knock-off played on a scale that defies even a Trump-sized ambition. It was one of my favorite board games. My neighbors and I spent hours moon-hopping through the solar system, buying up extraterrestrial real estate.

The game came to mind a few days ago with the news that spacecraft Cassini may have spotted geysers of water spewing from one of Saturn's moons, Enceladus. If Solarquest was reprinted today, you can bet the value of that icy moon 800 million miles from Earth would rise.

"We realize that this is a radical conclusion — that we may have evidence for liquid water within a body so small and so cold," Carolyn Porco, Cassini's imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in a news release. "However, if we are right, we have significantly broadened the diversity of solar system environments where we might possibly have conditions suitable for living organisms."

Life on other planets, or moons. It sounds as tantalizing and unbelievable as the childhood dreams I had lying in the backyard staring up at the stars in Salt Point.

The idea gains legitimacy with the growing evidence the substance so critical to life on our planet, water, may be found in places like Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa. Add in the theory that the building blocks for life on Earth may have arrived from comets, and one can imagine the same cosmic reactions triggering life on Earth.

Bacteria's sustainability

The idea gains from ongoing discoveries here on Earth about the versatility of bacterial life. It can thrive at our icy poles. It thrives in acids that would sizzle skin. It lives in the absence of sunlight on a diet of methane and the extreme heat from the Earth's fiery bowels at the bottom of the sea. Some forms of bacteria may even survive miles deep in the Earth's crust.

After all, extraterrestrial life is less likely to resemble little green men than it is minute, green algae.

Still, even bacteria inhabiting another world would have to re-order our view of ourselves. It took long enough for intelligent life to get over Copernicus' big bang — that the Earth revolves around the sun — and not vice versa. We might not be humble enough to believe we share the universe with other life, but that doesn't mean we don't.

It's a shame, then, NASA's astrobiology budget will be cut in half next year, and other research budgets similarly slashed. The space program's focus will be on sending humans back to the moon, instead of new explorations of other watery worlds or research into "extremophile" life here at home.

No question, it takes enormous sums of money for this kind of research and NASA's budget will remain close to $16.8 billion. But the government is also the only thing around with pockets big enough to pay for research on this scale.

As for Solarquest, even 10 years after it went out of print it is apparently still popular enough to inspire its own lengthy Wikipedia entry on the Web. Asking prices on E-bay Friday ranged from $4.99 to $9.99.

Now there's a bargain.

http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060319/COLUMNISTS07/603190361