SPI Fellows’ Corner: Evidence for Life on Saturn Moon

Last week, the popular BBC radio show and podcast, Infinite Monkey CageÔÇösomething of a hybrid of Bill Nye the Science Guy and Wait, Wait… DonÔÇÖt Tell Me!ÔÇöstopped in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts at the end of a national tour. The hosts, a British physics duo, were joined by a guest panel that included astronomer Seth Shostak and SPI Fellow Carolyn Porco, a renowned planetary scientist. Their discussion was on ÔÇ£UFOs, Alien Probes, and Other Close Encounters,ÔÇØ although UFOs did not end up getting any stage time.

Porco is the U.S. Team Leader of the Imaging Science Subsystem for NASAÔÇÖs Cassini Mission to Saturn. During the show, she shared that she and her Cassini colleagues have found empirical evidence of microbial life on one of SaturnÔÇÖs moons, and expressed that she favors such support for the existence of extraterrestrials to ShostakÔÇÖs view of a likelihood based sheerly on universal ÔÇ£real estateÔÇØ. She and Shostak debated these viewpoints throughout much of the evening.

But Porco had the final act, with a picture of a crystal-clear Earth in the background of SaturnÔÇÖs rings. The image was a Cassini probe shot from 2013, which was juxtaposed with a photo of our planet taken by Voyager 1 decades ago, no bigger or clearer than a ÔÇ£pale blue dotÔÇØ. The crowd received her presentation with silent awe.

Last Thursday, Fellow Elham Manea wrote in the Huffington Post about an unreasonable punishment for a man in Qatar, who wrote a poem and recited it to a small group in his apartment in 2011. Unbeknownst to him, one of the just seven people in attendance recorded his private performance and published it to YouTube. Now, the man is serving a 15-year prison sentence on charges of ÔÇ£publicly inciting to overthrow the ruling systemÔÇØ and ÔÇ£publicly challenging the authority of the EmirÔÇØ, although his poem merely refers to other victims of QatarÔÇÖs oppressive tactics over the years.