Ellen Stofan Quotes

The question we ask is - if there is life on other planets, should we expect it to be based on the same molecules, i.e. be universal - or should we expect it to depend on the local conditions, i.e. on the planet's geochemistry. So to find out, we try experiments on biomolecules, starting with such geochemistry conditions.

Life is extremely resilient once it takes hold, but it requires rich chemistry, large energy sources, and stability, right from the beginning. The comparative planetology of our solar system makes it seem like those initial conditions are hard to come by.

Planets that don't currently sport plate tectonics, such as Venus and Mars, are scarcely habitable. Tectonics might be a requirement of any world that aspires to a rich diversity of life.

Mars is much closer to the characteristics of Earth. It has a fall, winter, summer and spring. North Pole, South Pole, mountains and lots of ice. No one is going to live on Venus; no one is going to live on Jupiter.

Discovering traces of life on Mars would be of tremendous scientific significance: The first time that any signs of extraterrestrial life had ever been detected. Many people would also find it heartening to learn that we're not entirely alone in this vast, cold cosmos.

The thing that sets Mars apart is that it is the one planet that is enough like Earth that you can imagine life possibly once having taken hold there.

We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don't know the probability that a planet develops life.

Earth as an ecosystem stands out in the all of the universe. There's no place that we know about that can support life as we know it, not even our sister planet, Mars, where we might set up housekeeping someday, but at great effort and trouble we have to recreate the things we take for granted here.

The more we look at the kinds of soils and the nature of the atmosphere and the polar caps, it all adds up to tell us that some liquid, which we very much believe was water, did flow in abundance on Mars in the past.

Every observation that we make, every mission that we send to various places in the solar system is just taking us one step further to finding that truly habitable environment, a water-rich environment.

That planet has a considerable but moderate atmosphere. So that the inhabitants probably enjoy a situation in many respects similar to ours.

I haven't done a marathon for a long time. So we'll see. I will need good luck.

The discovery and investigation of life on other planets is likely to change many of our ideas about how life arose on the Earth and even what is life and its natural development.

No planet is more earth-like than Earth itself, so if life really does pop up readily in earth-like conditions, then surely it should have arisen many times right here on our home planet? And how do we know it didn't? The truth is, nobody has looked.

Wherever you are on Earth, there is more life present than in the rest of the known universe.

Whether Earth was deliberately terraformed, in other words, or whether it was seeded with the spores of life from crashed comets or whether, indeed, life arose here spontaneously and accidentally, it is reasonable to hope that we might find traces of the same kind of process on Mars.

I haven't a clue if there is life on other planets but I'd be charmed if we found a unicellular organism on Mars. It would change our whole concept of life on Earth.

We know too little about how life began on Earth to lay confident odds. It may have involved a fluke so rare that it happened only once in the entire galaxy. On the other hand, it may have been almost inevitable, given the right environment.

Water is the key to life, but in frozen form, it is a latent force. And when it vanishes, Earth becomes Mars.

I do definitely believe that there is life away from this planet. I mean, we've kind of established that with the fact that we found bacteria on meteorites, and we've kind of used that to backtrack and show how this Earth, this planet, could have formed the ability to sustain life in the first place.

I think there must be some other life forms, even if they're microscopic.

We do care about planets like the Earth because by now we understood that life as a chemical system really needs a smaller planet with water and with rocks and with a lot of complex chemistry to originate, to emerge, to survive.

Things take a long time, but when it's right things move fast.

If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.

Just as Mars - a desert planet - gives us insights into global climate change on Earth, the promise awaits for bringing back to life portions of the Red Planet through the application of Earth Science to its similar chemistry, possibly reawakening its life-bearing potential.