At NASA, Making History And Looking for Life

Steven Dick, NASA's chief historian, has lived in the Washington area since 1979 and moved to Ashburn Village in 2004. In an e-mail interview with loudounextra.com staff writer Jeff Koslofsky, he discussed his career as an astronomer and science historian and his research on extraterrestrial life.

QTell us about a typical day for you as the chief historian at NASA.

A This year NASA celebrated its 50th anniversary, and as NASA chief historian, the scope of my work covers the entire 50 years of NASA's history. A typical day involves my own research and writing, monitoring contracts for research and writing that we support, seeing NASA history books through the press, answering internal and external inquiries, planning conferences, coordinating the work of my staff, and occasionally traveling to meetings.

Among the books we have published recently is a volume on how spaceflight has impacted society and one on the 50th anniversary of the Space Age.

What do you enjoy most about your job?

There is a great deal of satisfaction in making things happen, whether books, conferences or other things. There is always a good deal of excitement being at the center of things at NASA headquarters, seeing the new discoveries from spacecraft come rolling in, monitoring the latest space shuttle missions and just enjoying the ambience of a cutting-edge agency. NASA is the world's foremost agency for exploration, and we are continuing an American tradition of exploration dating back at least to the expeditions of Lewis and Clark.

You are a member of the International Academy of Astronautics' SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Permanent Study Group, and some of your publications discuss the debate over extraterrestrial life. What sparked your interest in this topic?

I think most people have a natural fascination for this subject, a natural desire to know if anyone else is out there. It's a fascinating subject for a historian, because it ranges from UFOs and science fiction to the search for life in the solar system and for other planets beyond the solar system.

My dissertation was the first history of the extraterrestrial life debate, and my books "Plurality of Worlds," "The Biological Universe" and "Life on Other Worlds" cover the history of the debate from the ancient Greeks to the present. Over the course of my career, I've been able to attend many meetings in astrobiology and bioastronomy and gotten to know the leaders in the field. It's a never-ending source of curiosity as new discoveries are made.

After all your research, do you think there are other forms of intelligent life in the universe?

Yes, the only question is how rare it is and what it would be like. Our Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across with 200 billion stars, and it would seem very unlikely that we are the only intelligence. And there are billions of galaxies beyond the Milky Way. People used to say there was no evidence of any planets in the midst of all those stars, but in the last dozen years or so, 350 planets have been found, and the Kepler spacecraft launching next month will likely find thousands of Earth-like planets.

The origin and evolution of life remain big questions, but the discovery of life in extreme conditions on Earth increases the likelihood of life in the universe. If it evolves to intelligence it may not be anything like us and probably [is] more advanced. I once wrote a paper arguing that the universe may be postbiological, in the sense that most intelligence may be machine intelligence -- that cultural evolution may have gone beyond flesh and blood. Some people think that may happen on Earth in a few generations!