The Search for Who We Are

The Search for Who We Are

Long voyage home 

The planet Earth is a place of blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests and soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. In the cosmic perspective our planet is poignantly beautiful and rare, but it is also, for the moment, unique. In all our journeying through space and time, it is, so far, the only world in which we know with certainty that the matter of the Cosmos has become alive and aware. We are privileged to live among brilliant and passionately inquisitive people, and we live in a time when the search for knowledge is generally prized. It is on this world that we developed our passion for exploring the Cosmos and it is here that we are, in some pain and with no guarantees, working out our destiny. Human beings, born ultimately of the stars and now for a while inhabiting a world called Earth, have begun their long voyage home.

Planet Earth. Illustration by Elena

On the countless other planets that may circle other suns, is there life also? Is extraterrestrial life, if it exists, based on the same organic molecules as life on Earth. Do the beings of other worlds look much like life on Earth? Or are they stunningly different – other adaptations to other environments? What else is possible? The nature of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question – the search for who we are.

Occasionally someone remarks on what a lucky coincidence it is that the Earth is perfectly suitable for life – moderate temperatures, liquid water, oxygen atmosphere and so on. But this is, at least in part, confusion of cause and effect.

In fact, we, earthlings are supremely well adapted to the environment of the Earth because we grew up here. Those earlier forms of life that were not well adapted died. We are descended from the organisms that did well. Organisms that evolve on a quite different world, will doubtless sing its praises too.

Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity. Wernher von Braun. Image : © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)