SPACE
The search for extraterrestrial life is literally the work of centuries," says Timothy Ferris.
Ferris has spent most of his adult life writing about cosmology and the social implications of life beyond Earth. He's the author of nine books, including Coming of Age in the Milky Way, and is a consultant to NASA on space-exploration policy.
Fifteen years after his critically acclaimed 1985 PBS special, The Creation of the Universe, Ferris' new documentary, Life Beyond Earth (which premieres November 10; the companion book, from Simon & Schuster, arrives in May), investigates how close we may be to a close encounter. Ferris explains what's behind his latest star search.
Wired: If you headed NASA, what would you change?
Ferris: I'd cancel the space station and start putting that money into a mission to Mars. The main product of the space station - at best - is likely to be slightly better ball bearings.
But you believe there's more out there.
One thing we've learned is that life on Earth is a whole lot more robust than we used to think. No one has yet drilled a core sample deep enough not to bring up microorganisms. And way up on the upper edge of the atmosphere you also find life-forms. So once established, life seems pretty tenacious. The question then is, How often does it get established? My guess is there's a lot of life out there. Just looking at our solar system, there's a lot of interest in Europa right now. And I think we'll be interested in Mars for some time to come.
In Life Beyond Earth, you speculate that alien civilizations may already be communicating via something you call an "interstellar Internet." Can you explain?
When you think about how interstellar communication would take place if there were many civilizations in the galaxy, you quickly come to the conclusion that it makes sense to automate. You'd put a node out on an asteroid to handle the information traffic, and anyone on one planet who wants to tap in only has to access that one post. It turns communication between civilizations from a telephone model into something more like the Internet. The biggest gulf separating interstellar civilizations isn't space, which is fairly easy to bridge. It's time.
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