Staring into the abyss… Am I really reaching anyone out there?” Lisa Kaltenegger is laughing about the unsatisfactory experience of teaching astrophysics over Zoom during Covid lockdowns, but she could be talking about her vocation: trying to discover if there’s life beyond our solar system.
Kaltenegger founded the Carl Sagan Institute in 2015 to investigate just that. A burst of sunny energy and infectious enthusiasm on a grey day, she’s speaking to me from the legendary extraterrestrial life researcher’s old office, now hers, overlooking the leafy Cornell campus in upstate New York. The institute brings together researchers across a range of disciplines to work out what signs of life on other planets might look like from here, so that we recognise them if (or when) we find them.
It’s a big job at the forefront of exceptionally hard science. Kaltenegger collaborates with Nasa, has won multiple awards and published extensively over two decades. But her latest project is no peer-reviewed paper: it’s a pop science book about the search for life. Alien Earths – at least the UK edition – has a cover of brightly coloured orbs; inside there are cartoonish line drawings and a bookmark with planet stickers, which Kaltenegger mentions delightedly. It’s not a kids’ book (though interested teens and younger enthusiasts will love it), some of the concepts are necessarily complex, but it’s a joyful, eye-opening introduction to a topic many are too intimidated to tackle.
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