Review: The Pale Blue Data Pointby Jeff Foust
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| As he puts it, “whether we like it or not, planet Earth provides us with a solitary data point, pale blue in color, that represents—at least for today—our single example of life, wondrous in all its diverse forms.” |
That challenge—looking for something beyond Earth that we so far only know to exist on Earth—is at the heart of The Pale Blue Data Point by Jon Willis, a professor of astronomy at the University of Victoria in Canada. The title takes its name from the famous “pale blue dot” image of Earth taken by Voyager 1 35 years ago on its way out of the solar system. The image, he writes, “appears to show life on Earth existing in stark contrast to the dark void of space.” But, he asks, is Earth really a “lonely outpost of life in a bleak cosmos” or one of many worlds home to life?
That is the central question of astrobiology, but one that is based on what we know about the evolution of life here on Earth: that pale blue data point. As he puts it, “whether we like it or not, planet Earth provides us with a solitary data point, pale blue in color, that represents—at least for today—our single example of life, wondrous in all its diverse forms.”
The book is primarily a globetrotting adventure for Willis, as he goes from Australia to Chile to Morocco, as well as at sea, for the various ways astrobiologists try to study life on Earth to better understand how it might exist beyond Earth, as well as searching for more direct evidence of extraterrestrial life. That ranges from the almost obligatory journey to a mountaintop observatory where astronomers study exoplanets to being on a ship in the Pacific monitoring a robotic submersible exploring vents on the ocean floor that harbor life, possible analogs for habitable environments deep within Europa and Enceladus.
That travelogue can be entertaining at times. In one chapter, he travels to a town in the Australian outback that advertises itself at the hottest in the region in a quest to find fossilized stromatolites, remains of perhaps the oldest life on Earth. As he drinks a beer in a hotel where the barkeep is busy bottle-feeding baby kangaroos, he notes he was wise enough to visit in late winter, when the temperatures peaked about 35 degrees Celsius. “Had I traveled to this part of Australia in the summer, the temperature would be in the high 40s, and I would be in a body bag.”
But these adventures also seem a bit empty. He goes to Australia to see the fossilized stromatolites (as well as living ones on the coast) but he is not there to study them or observe others studying them. Most of the chapter is about other research into the fossils and their relevance to looking for evidence of past life on Mars, work that could be done without leaving his home office. Similarly, his trip to the Chilean mountaintop observatory offers a bit of perspective on what it’s like to conduct observations there, but most of the chapter is about the history of the search for exoplanets in general and potentially habitable ones in particular. That's largely unrelated to that visit to the observatory; we don't even know what objects the astronomers are studying in the description he offers to open the chapter.
The underlying theme of the book rings true: to search for life beyond Earth, we have to understand life on Earth and what lessons it can offer for what to look for elsewhere, from fossils on Mars to biosignatures of telltale gases in the atmospheres of exoplanets. We may—in a year or a decade or longer—finally find that firm evidence that we are not alone. For now, we are that solitary pale blue dot in a bleak cosmos.
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