Monthly Members’ Night - second Wednesday of each month except January.

Tonight - A presentation, followed by informal chat over tea or coffee. Telescope viewing possible afterwards depending on weather and availablilty of scope operators.

Tonight’s Talk

Life in the Solar System:
Building Blocks, Extremes, and Possibilities

Speaker: Jonathan Park (from Hamilton Astronomical Society)

Are we alone, or might we share our Solar System with microbes? Tonight, we’ll explore one of the most compelling questions in science: could life exist elsewhere in the Solar System?

If we do find life beyond Earth, it's unlikely to be anything more advanced than single-celled microbes - though the possibility of simple multicellular life can't be ruled out. We'll begin by asking the deceptively simple question: What is life? From there, we'll examine the building blocks of Earth life and whether they are present beyond our planet. We'll also consider how life may have started here on Earth, and briefly highlight extraterrestrial environments where some Earth microbes could, in principle, survive. Extremophiles - microbes that thrive in environments lethal to most organisms - show us that life can adapt to astonishingly harsh conditions. This opens the door to the possibility that microbial life could survive in places once thought to be uninhabitable.

Putting this all together, we will examine the evidence for ancient microbial life on Mars and consider whether life could exist there now.

Looking ahead, in November we’ll continue this theme by diving into some of the many alien oceans of the Solar System - some of the most promising places to search for life.