Tornado Alley (PROG)

[janice shell]

If people continue to be willing to put money into it, I think you may see a person on Mars. Me, probably not. Musk feels strongly that we need places to go, just in case. And I think one iteration of his idea is to figure out how to live elsewhere in the solar system and maybe the larger galaxy, and then let Earth regain its original beauty as a sort of nature reserve. There are, of course, problems with that.

What I think interesting about the general questions raised is whether there is other sentient life out there. Long ago, even when I was in high school, that seemed to me to be a no brainer. We're just one little planet in an enormous universe; of COURSE there'd be plenty of life, practically everywhere.

More than 50 years have passed since then. By now we've done a great deal more exploration, and so far, though we've found the elements that combine to produce life all over our solar system, so far, no life. Yet it still seems unlikely that by some utterly extraordinary coincidence of development, we're the only living things in the universe.