Mediaboss Marketing

At the 2012 Astrobiology Science Conference, Astrobiology Magazine hosted a plenary session titled: "Expanding the Habitable Zone: The Hunt for Exoplanets Now and Into the Future."

Originally formulated as part of our "Great Debate" series, this panel of exoplanet hunters and thinkers held a lively discussion about some of the most important issues facing the search for and understanding of alien worlds orbiting far-distant stars.

In the final installment of this 10-part "Hunting for Alien Worlds" series, the panelists and audience members give their thoughts on exoplanet science today.

Audience: Doug Archer, Johnson Space Center. I wanted to say two quick things. One, David in response to your question about names, I think like Dirk said, once we get to know a little bit more about the planets then I think the naming will kind of fall out of that. Especially once we can reach some level of certainty that theyre actually there. You know I can just imagine the conversation that I have with my three-and-a-half year old his favorite planet no longer exists because somebody did a different fast Fourier transform on the data. Once we know more about the planets and can confirm that they are actually there to some degree of certainty, then that will fall out of that and I think if we go through the IAU or the IAU resists, as the exoplanet community counts themselves and comes together and grants themselves the naming authority. Then that'll happen naturally. [Planets Large and Small Populate Our Galaxy (Infographic)]

David Grinspoon: I guess it will eventually, but we could be too too careful. I mean, I bet you more people know about the planet Nibiru that doesn't exist then know about Gliese 581 d.

Doug Archer: Yes. And then the last comment that I just want to say. I appreciate the efforts of one of the panelists that brings the small engineering model. And to be working on something like that, because I think that one thing in planetary science and space science in general that's just killing us is the growth and complexity of missions. So when you go from one instrument to two instruments, it doesn't double the cost, it squares the cost or it cubes the cost. So instead of saying to the American public or world at large, "This is really cool, please give us more money", we need to be figuring out ways that we can do this better, for the amount of money that we have. Because frankly 17 billion dollars a year is a lot of money. And as a scientist I look at that and I see how a lot of that is spent, and I'm not confident going to the American public and saying yes, every dollar that you are giving us is being well-spent. And so projects that you're working on, I think that's the future. We've got to figure out how to do it cheaper. And as scientists, we can really help do that. And once we go in that direction we will amazingly find this increase in capability as we start driving costs down. So I just wanted to say thank you for working on stuff like that and encourage everyone else to get involved with stuff like that.

Sara Seager: Thanks.

David Grinspoon: Over here. Yes?

Audience: Hi, my name is Sarah Rugheimer. I went to an event at MIT recently about standing up for science where it involved the media and how scientists can better talk with the media. And the question that I had at that conference, I'd like to pose to the panelists: Is there a problem we've had several maybe contentious press releases over the past year and a half? And when I talked to a lot of people who are non-scientists, I tend to find kind of two opposing attitudes. One where they completely trust some science. And the other one where they completely distrust some science. And you can see this in the case of maybe global warming, some medicine issues, stuff like that.

And so my question is, Do you think when we, because of wherever the miscommunication gap happened, it plays into a larger problem in our society where propagating distrust of science, and that might actually have big impacts in so far as people getting cancer treatment, or global warming, stuff like that?

View original post here:
Hunting for Alien Worlds (Part 10): The Last Word in Exoplanets