Lunch hour lectures repository Spring 2010
- Beating cigarette addiction – the latest evidence
- Interpreting opera through economic theory
- Deconstruction today
- See no evil...: The (Im)morality of denying genocide
- Genetic testing for heart disease risk: fact or fiction?
- What would an alien look like?
- Wet dreams: making urban water systems sustainable
- Jeremy Bentham and UCL: Corpse and corpus
- Venomous Women: Poison murderesses in nineteenth-century Germany
- Smartcities + eco-warriors
- Energy and climate; clearing the fog
- Love, death and the pursuit of happiness: How evolution invented Hollywood
- The end of Roman Britain: what ended, when and why?
- Do books have a future?
- Sex, drugs, and rock and roll: Who is doing what in England?
- The social brain
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What would an alien look like?
27 November 2009
Thursday 4 February 2010
Dr Lewis Dartnell (UCL Centre for Planetary Science)
'Astrobiology’is a new field of science, encompassing research into the origins and limits of life on our own planet, and where life might exist beyond the Earth. There is every expectation that a new space telescope, Kepler, will discover dozens of Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars in just the next three years. Extraterrestrial plants and animals developing on these worlds would be subject to the same laws of physics and engineering constraints as us, but may have followed evolutionary paths unexplored by terrestrial life. So what might alien life really look like? And more importantly for the science of astrobiology, how will this understanding help us to actually detect signs of life on another world?
Page last modified on 27 nov 09 08:36
