How the Cold War Created Astrobiology - Issue 32: Space
▻http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/how-the-cold-war-created-astrobiology-rp
Astronomy and biology have been circling each other with timid infatuation since the first time a human thought about the possibility of other worlds and other suns. But the melding of the two into the modern field of astrobiology really began on Oct. 4, 1957, when a 23-inch aluminum sphere called Sputnik 1 lofted into low Earth orbit from the desert steppe of the Kazakh Republic. Over the following weeks its gently beeping radio signal heralded a new and very uncertain world. Three months later it came tumbling back through the atmosphere, and humanity’s small evolutionary bump was set on a trajectory never before seen in 4 billion years of terrestrial history. At the time of the ascent of Sputnik, a 32-year-old American called Joshua Lederberg was working in Australia as a visiting (...)