Britain’s high house boffin is satisfied ET exists as ‘life is in all places’
One of Britain’s top space boffins is convinced ET exists.
Professor John Zarnecki, who led a team that successfully sent a probe 746 million miles to Saturn’s moon Titan, is certain aliens are out there.
The space science guru, who currently heads Europe’s ExoMars mission to send a rover to the Red Plant, declared there is `life everywhere – and probably lots of it’.
He is such an out-of-this-world expert he has an asteroid named after him.
And his comments could be seen as the biggest endorsement yet of what a host of global boffins – and your Daily Star – have been saying for years: “We are not alone.”
“It’s very simple – either we’re totally alone in the universe or life is everywhere” he said.
“It’s hard to come up with something in between. If we find other life in the Solar System it almost certainly means life is common everywhere. We’ve discovered over 6,000 planets around other stars which means they’re incredibly common.
“Planets are everywhere which means the number of places where life could develop is just enormous. It’s almost infinite. So I think we are not alone. There is life elsewhere and probably lots of it. It doesn’t have to be on Earth-like planets either.
“Those will be the boring ones because they’ll be kind of like us. It will be the ones that are completely different like in sci-fi movies.’’
The 74-year-old Cambridge-educated boffin is better placed than most to understand the odds of extraterrestrial existence after devoting his life to studying space.
For the past 11 years he has been a director of the International Space Science Institute in Berne, Switzerland.
He has been a professor of space science at the Open and Kent universities and is a world expert on space debris, dust and impacts.
John became president of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2016 after being awarded its coveted gold medal and in the course of his career has worked on hardware for multiple space missions.
He was part of the team that developed the Faint Object Camera for the Hubble Space Telescope and was project manager for the Dust Impact Detection System on board the Giotto probe that visited Halley’s Comet for seven years from 1985.
John helped design the Surface Science Package for the Huygens robotic space probe that successfully landed on Titan in 2005.
His team collected over three-and-a-half hours of data which featured in a BBC documentary called Destination Titan.
In 2006 Asteroid 17920 was named `Zarnecki’ by the International Astronomical Union in recognition of `spacecraft instrumentation to study the surfaces and atmospheres of planets, satellites and small bodies’.
The professor’s current ExoMars project is designed to search for signs of life on the Red Planet.
It was suspended by the European Space Agency following Vladimir Putin ’s invasion of Ukraine but is expected to resume in 2028 with US space agency NASA providing the rocket instead of Russia.
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