Will science one day prove that there's life out there?

Will science one day prove that there's life out there?

Colin Pillinger (Professor of Planetary Sciences) gives expert video advice on: Do you think there will be a base on the moon?; Do you think we will colonize other planets?; What are the benefits of space science to humanity? and more...

Science will find life out there somewhere. If it's not on Mars, then we'll move on and look at Europa. If it's not on Europa, we'll be looking further afield than our solar system because we're building telescopes that will not just look at planets around other stars, but will analyse the atmospheres of planets around other stars. That was another thing we were going do on Mars to test this out. We were going to try to analyse the atmosphere on Mars to look for small amounts of compounds that wouldn't be there unless biology constantly produced them. On Earth, there are things in our atmosphere that are produced by biology. You'd look for these things to find life. Methane is a case in point. Methane shouldn't be there because it should be cleaned away by the oxygen. On Earth, methane has a lifetime of only about twelve years. The fact that there is methane in our atmosphere means that biology is continuously pumping it out. It would be the same on any other planet because making methane is the simplest biological reaction that we know to get energy. Producing carbon to give you hydrocarbon is gives you energy. That's what biology wants. It needs the power to run itself.