Who inspired you to search for extraterrestrial life?

Who inspired you to search for extraterrestrial life?

Colin Pillinger (Professor of Planetary Sciences) gives expert video advice on: Is it your life ambition to find life on other planets?; Who inspired you to search for extraterrestrial life? and more...

I was inspired to search for extraterrestrial life by John Kennedy standing up and saying, "We're going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, not because it's easy but because it's hard." That was the project that I was thrown into. Once you're thrown into a project, there's definitely an aura that you possess: "e did this, we can do anything, we can be anything." That was a phenomenal achievement and it was just the same for the scientists, because none of them had ever seen a sample of the moon and they didn't know what to do with it. They all knew what they wanted to do with it but they didn't know what to expect or how to handle it. We were able to come up with things and get data, and we now know a great deal about the moon. There isn't a really hard scientific reason for wanting to go back to the moon. There are things that we can do that we haven't done before, and there are things that we can do better now than we could do thirty years ago. We know a lot of the basic stuff.