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Mountain View CA - Apr 22, 2004
The third of NASA's Astrobiology Science Conferences -- held every two years at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California -- has just ended. Every one of these has drawn a considerably bigger crowd of scientists than the previous one. This might seem peculiar for what one scientist has described as "the most lively scientific field not to have any actual subject material yet".
But another, at the Conference, noted that a sizable number of graduate students are attending these conferences AGAINST the advice of their advisors, thereby proving that the field has genuine emotional drawing power and an ability to ignite people's interest which may allow it to endure for a very long period of time until the first evidence of alien life finally does turn up.
Whereas the first conference in 2000 consisted entirely of sequential talks in a single multi-day session held in an auditorium, the number of speakers has now increased to the point that several hours of each day was devoted to six sessions of talks held simultaneously with each other, making it impossible for this poor reporter to make it to a lot of the talks he would have liked to attend.
The majority of them -- including all the single-session talks in the mornings and evenings -- were held in a literal Big Tent: an enormous plastic affair whose sides snapped and cracked in the Bay Area's winds like the sails of a three-master, leading to many an apprehensive upward glance on the part of the audience. But everything held together for the duration, and so I'm here to give a rundown on some of the conference's more interesting talks.
There were a great many talks -- some of them extremely esoteric -- on the chemical mechanisms that might play a role in the initial appearance and evolution of life, or in allowing so-called "extremophile" microbes to survive under incredibly rugged conditions that no one 20 years ago thought microbes possibly COULD survive.
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