I have been ruffled over the past few days by various e-mails, calls, and even welcome visits to this poor man’s house in a couple of cases, of people interested probing deeper whether our planet is the only habitable planet in the universe. Earth has shown evidence of life over at least 800 million years, But are there other planets within our telescopic perception, whether orbiting around a nearby star or a distant one, within the galaxy or without, that could sustain life?

Having discussed this mother of sciences sufficiently in both the recent and the remote past, we will revisit only something unsaid yet. Not the commonplace knowledge about life on Earth. This issue, together with the creation of universe, has blighted mankind forever and me too for as long as I can remember, so much so that often I talk to myself in trying to find an answer.

Many aspects of life elsewhere in the universe, as understood by us astronomers so far, make the whole study appear as a hoax to the unwary reader. The sole reason for this perception is astronomers themselves, many of whom believe that life elsewhere should be of the same hue as life here on Earth, that is, gleefully swimming in a sea of oxygen and nitrogen, being carbon-based and proliferating at will.

A lizard, a diplodocus of the distant past — in fact all those dinosaurs, a lion, a seahorse, a snail, a python, an ocean, the atmosphere, or a human being — all have been manufactured by stardust. The stardust by itself is not packed with elements that go into direct and unhindered creation of life, but still manages to do so with the processes aided by the inexplicable and as yet uncertain alien forces. These mysterious sources are being probed for quite some time, on whom the credit for initiating life may be crowned.

But life has one basic denomination all over the universe: the all-prevailing stardust. When a star blows up, having lived its life, it causes the greatest blast in the universe, only less — and far less — than the king of them all, the Big Bang. This is called a supernova. Its debris spreads in all directions at tremendous speed, often rivalling the speed of light.

With time it slows a little and soon trundles down to a few thousand miles per second. Not that the speed is such a big factor, but the debris keeps spreading for up to tens of thousands of years, and trillions upon trillions of miles, leaving a footprint of what once was a star. Eventually it slows down to converges into a star and its family of planets, thanks to gravity. The accretion may or may not lead to life on one such planet in due course of time. Many variables are involved though.

One supernova leads to the birth of at least one star, around the size of the Sun (presently 865,000 miles in diameter, besides eight or nine or more planets and numerous moons; from the leftover material.) Everything in the region (six billion miles in all directions in our case, but a little less or more in other cases), is made of this stardust, popularly called ‘star stuff’. It has the potential to lend itself into a thousand shapes and forms. The complexity of life on Earth is only one such variety. And remember that life, as we see it now, has progressed painstakingly, incrementally, over the past one billion years. Give an additional two billion years to the pervading amoeba and other microscopic life striving to improve into the present-day variety.

Life elsewhere in the universe does not have to be based on the same pattern, or a mix of the same chemicals as on Earth. The mix of chemicals could be a little different and shapes could be vastly different. Maybe such a scenario has no nitrogen at all, or oxygen in a very small amount, even none at all. All these, and several such factors may result in men, animals and fauna of strange shapes and varieties. Only what chemicals and raw material that particular star is made of will finally determine what ‘cloud’ the supernova will end up in, what kind of life will eventually result from this. One can only make a conjecture of the variety of life(s) that would be influenced by whatever variety of the exploding star (supernova).

This guess can never, repeat never, be attributed to a particular form or a shape. But some astronomers grab an opportunity as soon as fresh discussion presents itself. They jump to play the show-boys of astronomy coming up with weird ideas and expect people to take their word hook, line and sinker, only to be debunked by others of their ilk.

It appears that the great riddle of how life appeared on planet Earth is open to many conjectures without reaching a definitive conclusion. Maybe in times to come it will reach such a conclusion. Until then, let us revolve around the conjecture of the planet having germinated by loitering comets, (as assumed by old Fred Hoyle), the lingering factors of evolution, or other similar hypotheses. The question of life will continue to grab the attention of a lot of scientists for a long time yet to come.

There is nothing in my assertion that is not substantiated by a vast number of scientists, and I hope that what I maintain will whet the appetite of a lot of aspirants of astronomy hungry for new ideas.

The writer is a professional astronomer and can be reached at *astronomerpreone@hotmail.com***

Published in Dawn, Young World, February 25th, 2017