The question of life elsewhere in the Universe is an old one. This
brief unit introduces this course, reviews the units that we will use
in our exploration, and then reviews our notions about other worlds and
the possibility of life on those worlds. This latter topic establishes
the cultural context of the question of life in the universe,
but it does not really set the stage for the scientific inquiry into
this question. We will begin the scientific exploration in the next
unit.
Lectures
The lecture notes below are in Adobe PDF format, and the accompanying
audio files are in MP3 format.