Problems Facing the Development of Astrobiology
Many problems faced the development of Astrobiology as a credible science when it was first named in 1958. The most basic of these problems was skepticism on the part of many scientists of the time. The ideas of Astrobiology touched too closely with science fiction to be considered seriously. The idea of life on Mars was definitely science fiction: H. G. Welles' "War of the Worlds" and Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" attested to that. And the idea of life being seeded on Earth by comets has since been addressed by Gregory Benford and David Brin in "Heart of the Comet". Why would anyone take these ideas seriously as science?
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Another problem facing Astrobiology was a problem because it helped lead to the skepticism of other scientists. That is, Astrobiology lacked a solid definition. Not only was the field known by other names - exobiology, bioastronomy - but nobody really understood what it was that Astrobiologists should, or could, study. In the literature, Astrobiology was defined as the "science of extraterrestrial life" or of "life on other celestial bodies". It asked the questions "What kind of life is out there? Where is it? How may it have evolved?" To many, these questions were presumptuous. Life had never been proven to exist at all anywhere off of Earth. Astrobiology seemed to take life on other planets for granted and sought only to find what type of life it was. Life did not necessarily exist off of Earth, and if it did, our chances of finding it were much too slim to bother looking for it. And even if evidence of life was found, it more than likely wouldn't be intelligent. And even if it was intelligent, we wouldn't have the technology to communicate anyway. All of the money that would be spent chasing "ifs" through Astrobiology would be better spent trying to better understand life on Earth.
Despite all the criticism from other scientists, Astrobiology had a more fundamental problem, at least scientifically: the ideas of Astrobiology had made no predictions that were testable. This fact alone, by it's very existence, kept Astrobiology from being a science. There were many predictions: the surface of Mars changed cyclically from dark to light suggesting that intelligent life was growing and harvesting crops, comets were known to be made largely of water ice and so might be capable of carrying life from planet to planet, DNA was the "blueprint" of life and was replicated through RNA so the nucleic acids DNA and RNA might be the first molecules to self-replicate. In order to prove any of these predictions, however, scientists needed technology more advanced than any they had at the time. Only one theory was testable with the technology of the time. If intelligent life existed elsewhere in the galaxy, it might use light to send a message to other intelligent life as we on Earth have been doing unwittingly through television signals. By aiming radio telescopes at different sections of the sky, we might be able to detect just such a signal. This project, called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) was started in the 1960s with the help of astronomer Carl Sagan and is still at work scanning the sky even today.
A few other factors slowed the development of Astrobiology as well. The lack of a concrete definition of life, even based solely on what we know of Earth life, impeded the search for life elsewhere. And the need for interdisciplinary research into both biology and astronomy and who knows what else kept many scientists from talking to each other and sharing ideas even though they were interested in the same research ideas. Also, the need for specialization in one field kept many scientists from ever knowing much about any other field, making communication even more difficult. All of these problems - scientific skepticism, the presumptive definition of Astrobiology, the lack of testable predictions, technology, and a definition of life, and the need for interdisciplinary research - all added together to keep Astrobiology from being a true science which in turn kept a lot of astrobiological research from being funded.