Pearl River      On a clear night in the predawn with a new moon, if you’re sleeping in, you’re missing some thrills by not looking up at the stars, if you can get some distance from light pollution.  Lucha, my Australian Shepherd, and I were out and about along the Gulf Coast in just such a situation around 5am the last couple of days.  Normally, we maintain as brisk a pace as she and I are able to maintain along the roads, so she was befuddled at how many times, rather than foraging forward, I was stopping to stare in different directions at the planets and stars, obvious even to the naked eye.

Now, I understand that some of us have been stargazers all of our lives.  Maybe we had an introduction to the wild sky in school studies or on camping trips with the Scouts, family or friends?  Perhaps, we had just enough to find Polaris, the North Star, for simple navigation if we were lost, so we’d be found.  Maybe not?  With new apps like Sky Map, we can open our phones, walk this way or that, point them one direction or another, and pick out more planets and star formations, and even learn to identify them in the future without the app.  Today, it was easy to see Orion, Scorpio, Cancer, Castor and Pollux, Ursla Major, Sirius, and more.  Jupiter, Venus, and others were also visible with the thin sliver of moon.  Other constellations less known, as well as numerous stars and exo-planets known to the app and astronomers by their numbers, also tried to inform and educate us.  The night sky was amazing before us in the predawn, even as we could hear owls hooting much closer to our road.

I was especially fascinated this weekend, because I have been listening to an audiobook as I drive, The Secret Life of the Universe:  An Astrobiologist’s Search for Origins and Frontiers of Life by Nathalie Cabrol.  According to Wikipedia, she’s “a French American astrobiologist specializing in planetary science. Cabrol studies ancient lakes on Mars, and undertakes high-altitude scientific expeditions in the Central Andes of Chile as the principal investigator of the “High Lakes Project” funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI)…. She was appointed in August 2015 to head the SETI Institute’s Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe.”  I have to be honest.  I have spent no time thinking about life in the universe.  I don’t read science fiction.  I didn’t dream of being an astronaut as a boy or ponder these questions at any length.

Nonetheless, Cabrol offers a catch-up course on what scientists like herself are trying to determine about whether and where life my exist are out there, and it’s amazing.  I’ve learned about the possibility of underground oceans on hot planets or their moons, that I never would have imagined.  I’ve gotten a better appreciation of why some are now more excited about Mars and its prospects.  These astrobiologists are doing some new and exciting things.

When it comes to the universe and other life that might be out there in one form or another at some stage of development or another, I have to admit that she’s pretty much convinced me on the math.  The pure volume of stars, galaxies, exo-planets and more in the wide and wild sky literally numbers in the millions and likely billions.  The Hubble telescope was able to identify more than 150,000 stars as a sidebar to its main mission.  The pure mathematical probability that we are the only life form in this vast universe is unlikely.  The odds are that we can’t be alone.  At one level, there are earth-like conditions that seem to exist in other galaxies that we are exploring and have recognized.  It would also be wrong in this vast universe to assume that there might be other conditions light years away that produce other lifeforms different than ourselves, either more or less advanced.

All of which has me looking differently at the night sky.  I have no idea or clue what might be out there, but I’m impressed that there are many, including in our institutions and financed by our government, that are looking.  Furthermore, listening and looking, they are making progress.  How exciting a wake up in the morning is that?!?