The Habitability of Planets

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss some of the great unanswered questions in science: how and where did life on Earth begin, what did it need to thrive and could it be found elsewhere? Charles Darwin speculated that we might look for the cradle of life here in ‘some warm little pond’; more recently the focus moved to ocean depths, while new observations in outer space and in laboratories raise fresh questions about the potential for lifeforms to develop and thrive, or ‘habitability’ as it is termed. What was the chemistry needed for life to begin and is it different from the chemistry we have now? With that in mind, what signs of life should we be looking for in the universe to learn if we are alone?

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Jayne Birkby No other episodes
  Associate Professor of Exoplanetary Sciences at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow in Physics at Brasenose College
• Saidul Islam No other episodes
  Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Kings College, London
• Oliver Shorttle No other episodes
  Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Clare College

Reading list

• Venus Revealed: A New Look Below the Clouds of Our Mysterious Twin Planet
  David Grinspoon (Basic Books, 1998) Google Books →
• Alien Earths: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos
  Lisa Kaltenegger (Allen Lane, 2024) Google Books →
• Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth
  Andrew H. Knoll (Princeton University Press, 2004) Google Books →
• How to Build a Habitable Planet: The Story of Earth from the Big Bang to Humankind
  Charles H. Langmuir and Wallace Broecker (Princeton University Press, 2012) Google Books →
• The Little Book of Exoplanets
  Joshua Winn (Princeton University Press, 2023) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m0025vvd

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0025vvd

Auto-category: 576.8 (Origin & evolution of life)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. How and where did life on Earth begin?