We still love you

We had the pleasure to have professor Jayant Narlikar from Pune, visiting us at ESO for the last weeks. He gave a series of lectures on cosmology and yesterday he spoke about Searches for life in the Universe.

"The first part of this talk will highlight the vastness of the universe, the commonality of planetary systems and the abundance of organic molecules in interstellar space, all suggesting that life as we know it may not be uncommon in the Galaxy. Some attempts to find advanced form of life will be outlined. The second part of the talk will concentrate on the search for extraterrestrial micro-organisms in the vicinity of the Earth, as implied by the panspermia hypothesis revived in the 1970s by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe. The results of an experiment carried out in 2001 under the sponsorship of the Indian Space Research Organization will be presented."

Very interesting stuff. He started by saying that in a Universe with about 10^21 stars, how can it be that we are all alone??

Instead of looking for aliens in exoplanets, professor Narlikar joined a team that runs an experiment with a balloon that is sent at different levels of the atmosphere and tried to detect microorganisms. It seems that so far they have found something that resembles a lot some of simple forms of life we can find on Earth. However, this is not a result of a contamination of the sample, but they truly believe they have caught something! Really clever idea indeed. I will keep following this study for further results!