‘A Passion for Knowledge’
NASA engineer, science fiction writer talks science, humanity’s future, more
NASA engineer B. Gentry Lee, who co-authored books with Arthur C. Clarke and worked on the television show “Cosmos” with Carl Sagan, spoke about science, space, aliens and the future of humanity during his lecture Thursday at Texas A&M University-Texarkana.
Lee, whose father was born in De Queen, Ark., was the keynote speaker for this year’s Program for Learning and Community Engagement lecture series “Science and Technology.” The reading for the series is Carl Sagan’s “The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.”
He said Sagan was disappointed with society when he died almost 21 years ago, and that if he were still living, he’d be even more upset with the lack of humanity.
“Late in his life, Carl became discouraged … the world had so many scientific illiterates and in so many places in the world, there was so much information that was being spun that was not the truth and that people had stopped learning critically,” he said. “That was why he wrote ‘The Demon Haunted World.’”
Lee said the book is about a way of approaching life, a way of thinking and of asking questions.
“He got out early,” Lee said. “He did not see the time period that we are alive in now, because if he had, he would have been even more discouraged. There’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is the internet is available for everybody. The bad news is so much crap is posted in it that people who look at it had better figure out very quickly how to discriminate between those things that are true and those things that aren’t.”
Lee is the chief engineer for the Solar System Exploration Directorate at the Jet Population Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. He has worked on the Galileo and Viking projects, the Dawn mission to asteroids Vesta and Ceres, along with the Juno mission to Jupiter and moon landings. He has also provided engineering guidance for the Phoenix and Rover missions to Mars and the Deep Impact and Stardust missions.
Lee earned a Bachelor of Arts
with summa cum laude honors in 1963 from the University of Texas at Austin and a Master of Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964.
When speaking about the definition of life, he said scientists ask several questions, including if the species recreates itself and transforms energy to be metabolized. He said there is a reasonable probability of finding microbial life in the solar system.
“The most likely situation is we will find it subterranean on Mars … every single mission we have sent to Mars since Viking has suggested more and more that the likelihood that life might develop on Mars is reasonable,” he said.
Other places include Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which has liquid geysers spurting all the chemicals of life.
“We are just desperate for the mission to go there,” he said. “Jupiter’s moon Europa also has more water on it than there is on Earth, underneath the ice and crust. In the future, we will go there and we will look for microbes.”
Lee said it is important to ponder
the possibility of life elsewhere and to ask questions about human existence.
“One of the greatest puzzles that exists in all of life is what exactly is it that makes us human? What is it that distinguishes us from others?” he said, adding that the raw chemicals humans are made of come from the stars. “You couldn’t put those chemicals in a jar and shake it up and produce a human being. It was a very intricate process that produced us. What were the keys to that process?”
He said it is that kind of question that should be dominating our society to help us survive 10,000 years in the future.
“I don’t care what you believe about miracles, but I stand before you and say that we were born and made, forged in the death throes of stars,” he said. “It’s a miracle beyond any kind of religion. You can ascribe it to anything you want. I want you to walk out tonight, I want you to look up at the sky, and I want you to say, ‘Thank you, parents.’”
For more information on the PLACE lecture series, go to tamut.edu/place.