Last week experts from a variety of fields answered a call from Steven Dick, the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress, to meet for two days and discuss the possible discovery of extraterrestrial life and the impact such a discovery would have on society. The symposium consisted of individual talks and panel discussions, along with remarks by Rep. Lamar Smith, chair of the House science committee, Mary Voytek of NASA’s astrobiology program, and Steven Dick, who spoke on how far we have advanced our understanding.
Some spectators from the media and “UFOlogists” in the audience may have been disappointed when Seth Shostak from the SETI Institute opened by stating that no signal from extraterrestrial intelligent beings has been discovered as yet. On the first afternoon I gave a talk about the “Landscape of Life,” which—as philosopher of science Carlos Mariscal put it—is extremely difficult to evaluate, since N still equals 1: There is only one biosphere we know of. And given that life on Earth is already extremely diverse, we can only image how diverse it would be in the universe.