Hello, friends!
Today I’d like to share a very old video I found on YouTube. It’s a series of man (and woman) on the street interviews where people are asked if they think we’ll find life on other planets.
According to the video description, this was filmed in 1962. It’s interesting to me to hear people talk about the possibility of finding “vegetable” and/or “animal” life on Venus. At that time, the Soviet Union’s Venera 1 spacecraft would have already visited Venus; however, due to a technical glitch, Venera 1 failed to transmit any data about Venus back to Earth. So surface conditions on Venus were still unknown to us Earthlings.
But setting aside the Venus stuff in particular, in general people’s opinions about space exploration and extraterrestrial life have not changed much since 1962. Some people are enthusiastically optimistic, others think it’s all nonsense, and a lot of people don’t seem to care one way or the other.
Then, of course, you get the one guy who swears he’s seen a U.F.O. And then, of course, you get the guy who’s “working off the theory of the Bible,” where it says God only created life on one planet (F.Y.I., I’ve read the Bible too, and I don’t remember it ever saying that). So again, not much has changed since 1962.
But my favorite is the woman at 1:40 who says she doesn’t expect we’ll find any life on Venus, but then goes on to say we’ll still find “something worth knowing.” I’d say she was right on both counts!
Personally, I do think there’s life on other planets, and also on other moons (I’m looking at you, Europa). But regardless of whether or not we find alien life out there, we should absolutely keep searching and keep exploring. I suspect we will continue to learn all sorts of things that are worth knowing!
Next time on Planet Pailly, we’ll learn how to dance like binary stars.
Planet Pailly 
So many possibilities remained open in 1962. It was still possible we might be able to walk out in the open on Mars, and that Venus might be a humid jungle, with complex life, if not intelligent life of some type or the other possibility existing on both planets. It was the consensus view of most space opera until then, right up until the Mariner flybys.
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There is something really fun about those old space opera stories. They seem quaint now, but at the time they were written, there was no reason to think they were implausible.
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Recently there were some anthologies put together with stories set on “old Mars” and “old Venus”, the version of those planets that existed in our collective imagination before the space age. I haven’t read them, but I found it interesting that people would be nostalgic enough for that old vision to make those books a success.
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That is kind of surprising, but I guess there’s a niche audience for just about anything these days.
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Somewhere out there beyond the realm of human comprehension lies a vast conscience which can’t be explained cos like its not human. We try but fail so amazingly because we’re human and the universe isn’t, so why should God or these ” lifeforms” look even remotely human?
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A fair point. Though if we ever do find some sort of intelligence out there, I hope it’s enough like us that we can communicate with it on some level.
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This is the thing, there are so many people and so many opinions. The problem is that until we know how life formed on Earth we cannot say for certain whether life exists on other worlds. Because our journey of understanding has only just begun all we can do is search for other life. It’s a bit of a paradox
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But also if we do find life on other worlds, it may help us understand better how life started here on Earth.
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This is very true…
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