Taxi Drivers Spur Astrobiologist To Tackle Life’s Big Questions

Somewhat akin to barbers and bartenders, taxi drivers have long been known to offer a wellspring of opinions on pretty much everything under the Sun. But in a new book, renowned U.K. astrobiologist Charles Cockell uses remembrances of his talks with taxi drivers —- usually while en route to some international scientific conference —- as a springboard to tackle some of the most difficult questions about life in the cosmos.

Most of the questions posed in Cockell’s book —- “Taxi From Another Planet: Conversations with Drivers about Life in the Universe” —- will be familiar to those with a rudimentary knowledge of astrobiology and space science. But to his credit, Cockell manages to add his own take on many of these age-old conundrums and, in the process, hit some unique high notes.

“As soon as you open that door and take your seat, taxi drivers start the questioning, drawing on what they perceive to be important and probing what you have to say in response,” Cockell writes.

The book’s title was inspired by one of Cockell’s drivers who wondered if another earthlike planet might harbor alien taxi drivers conversing with their fares in the same manner as they might in New York or London.

“After that day, I began to use taxi journeys as an opportunity to ask, talk, and think about life in the universe,” writes Cockell.

Cockell introduces each new chapter with questions generated by real life exchanges with drivers he’s had since 2016. It’s a clever narrative device that Cockell, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, uses well to cover the book’s astrobiological talking points. Here are a few.

A century ago, it was commonly accepted that Mars probably had sentient life

This was a new one to me. But as Cockell notes during a discussion prompted by a taxi driver’s query about the potential for life on Mars, he reminds his readers that at the turn of the 20^th century the French Academy of Sciences’ Prix Pierre Guzman actually offered a category for the first person to communicate with an alien civilization.

“Mars was exempt because the prize committee figured that communicating with Martians would be too easy,” writes Cockell.

That’s because incredibly at the turn of the twentieth century, it was widely thought that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings. Today, we know that Mars is as barren as Death Valley. The Red planet lost most of its atmosphere early on and even though it appears to once have had lakes and even an ocean, today all bets are off as to whether it ever had microbial life.

At the time, Cockell notes, even though many educated people accepted that Mars might have intelligent life, there was no panic in the streets. Life went on; people paid taxes and aside from prompting another round of drinks at society dinner parties, life was pretty much unaffected.

Is the prospect of alien contact potentially dangerous?

Cockell thinks it more probable that an alien civilization capable of traveling across the galaxy to get here would not be motivated by a desire to wipe us out. But he offers an interesting take on the possibility of direct alien contact.

“If the aliens arrive in a spaceship, at a minimum it is likely that they will have an equal understanding of the universe, and potentially they will have a much superior one,” Cockell writes.

Otherwise, he notes, they would not be able to plan a spacecraft trajectory or calculate the effects of gravity in order to safely land here on Earth.

When will space travel truly become routine?

“At age eight, I really thought I would travel to Mars in the 1980s,” writes Cockell. “The era’s futurists foresaw space journeys as routine, not just for the lucky few who had the “right stuff” to become astronauts.”

I can understand how Cockell feels. Any space enthusiast who came of age in the 1960s can’t help but have a tinge of disappointment at our lack of progress in venturing back to and beyond the Moon.

But although he asserts that the crewed spaceflight programs in the 1960s were all about showcasing Soviet and American space exploits for societal glory, I disagree. In truth, President John F. Kennedy’s call to safely return a man to and from the moon by the end of the that decade was a calculated geopolitical gambit to ensure that the Soviets could not reign terror down on us from above. Even though NASA is a civilian space agency, Congress would have never funded Apollo if American national security had not been at stake.

Fifty years later we are heading back to the Moon in large part because China has the potential to beat our astronauts back to the lunar surface.

What are we anyway?

One of the book’s last points involves a taxi driver who wonders what’s it all about; what actually are we? This prompts Cockell to make some interesting observations on what actually constitutes life as opposed to non-life. That remains a complicated answer.

As Cockell notes, life has a capacity for chaos and immense complexity in the way in which atoms can be arranged to generate a vast diversity of matter that “can do multitudinous things.”

Cockell himself refuses to be drawn into a clear definition of life as we know it today. Instead he cautions that “we should not assume that nature made this thing we call life fundamentally distinct from another thing we call nonlife.”

“If we avoid that mistake, we will find ourselves better equipped to learn from all that we find in the universe…,” Cockell writes.

This opens the door to even more questions. Will we ever come up with a truly satisfactory definition of life and, if not, how can we hope to detect it on some strange new exoplanet?

With this timely new book, Cockell makes us consider a gamut of new possibilities that only boggle the mind.