Woo hoo! I have the cover of Sky & Telescope magazine! Yes, the cover story for the March issue is by yours truly. “Did life come from outer space?” Well, that’s the catchy phrase for the cover. The actual title of the article is “Lord Kelvin and Space Seeds”.
The article isn’t by me alone; Dennis Danielson is my co-author. If you are thinking to yourself, “That name sounds familiar”, that is because Dennis coauthored the new book A Universe of Earths with me, and the Sky & Telescope article is adapted from that book.
I am pleased to have the Vatican Observatory represented here on the cover of S&T. And on a personal level, I’m as pleased as can be. When I was in eighth grade, my grandparents gave me a copy of S&T — the March 1979 issue (which you see at top, on the left-hand side). I had been interested in astronomy for a long time then, but I had not encountered a magazine like that. I read every word of that issue, including the ads.
I soon had my own subscription (asked for it for my birthday, I think), and I have subscribed, on and off, pretty much ever since — and when I’m not subscribing, I access it through my local library. S&T has had a huge impact on my career as an astronomer and historian of science. And let me tell you, to my teenage self, anyone with an article on the cover of that magazine was one serious dude. So young me thinks old me is one serious dude!
So, “Did life come from outer space?” Actually, this article, and this part of the book, have their origins in Sacred Space Astronomy postings of mine — click here and here and here — so you probably have some idea of what the answer to that question is. (Br. Guy is always saying that your support of the Vatican Observatory makes our work possible; here you see support through this website translating directly into a cover story on a major astronomy magazine.) If you do not subscribe to S&T and want to read the article, you can access it freely through many libraries via EBSCO’s Academic Search or MasterFILE services. And if you don’t have any access to S&T at all, send an e-mail through the “contact” page; we can probably get you an electronic copy.
Meanwhile, I will leave you with a bit of our closing paragraph:
This evolving Big Bang universe offers no answers to the question of life’s origins. … Earth initially had to be lifeless because it was too hot. The universe, however, was once far, far hotter. Moreover, since the universe has a finite age, so too must life. In fact, life can’t have started before the time when some part of the universe first cooled enough to allow it to exist. Yet clearly, life originated somehow — we are here, after all! And yet, we don’t see life arising from inanimate matter in nature, and we have so far been unable to generate life from inanimate matter in a laboratory. Never in the history of science have we been so in the dark as we are today about the fundamental question of how life came into existence — or, perhaps, so cognizant of how in the dark we truly are. Science has revealed to us a puzzle in the form of an astonishingly vast, but apparently infecund, universe.
