BU’s Life Beyond Earth class posits that millions of humans must someday inhabit space colonies in our galaxy. Photo by NASA via Unsplash

Astronomy

Astronomy Class Ponders Life Beyond Earth

Course explores everything from human colonies in space to UFOs

Students in a belowground classroom recently pondered how to get humanity above ground—way, way above, into space—to perpetuate the species.

This session of Life Beyond Earth came on the cusp of February’s arctic blast, when oven-roasted Venus would have seemed preferable to Boston. Yet it wasn’t the cold, but rather humanity’s survival that led Thomas Bania, professor of astronomy at the College of Arts & Sciences, to inform the 30-plus students in the basement classroom of this fact: reputable scientists—including Bania and the late Carl Sagan—and deep-pocketed owners of space companies, such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, agree that millions of us will have to move elsewhere in the galaxy someday.

Space travel may seem odd to this college generation; no human has walked the moon in 50 years. “I back then expected to be on Mars myself by now,” Bania, who’s taught his course the last 35 of those years, told his students. Nevertheless, the class’ takeaway, he tells BU Today, is that “it is a matter of the survival of the human species that we, as soon as possible, get a significant fraction of our population living in closed-cycle communities off-planet. ’Cause there are just too many ways to screw up our Earth.” 

Those potential screwups come both from nature—a killer asteroid slamming Earth—and humans ourselves (unsustainable surges in population, pollution, and resource depletion). Efficiency also matters, he told the class. Advanced civilizations need energy, and solar energy would be more efficiently tapped via solar panels in space than here on Earth, where the sun doesn’t always shine.

Life Beyond Earth turns Terriers’ gaze to the beginning of the universe to help them imagine the distant future. “It’s a course that actually covers everything in science,” Bania says, “starting with the Big Bang to the evolution of life on Earth to the evolution of technology. And then it speculates on what humankind could be doing 5,000 years from now. If we start now, we could populate the galaxy.”

The final project is one he’s assigned for years: imagine yourself part of a wealthy consortium seeking a space colony that could support millions of people. Now design it, within parameters, including the universal laws of science. Colonies, the written assignment says, “will need to provide artificially all the resources found on Earth if the colonists are to have a high-level technological civilization. Besides meeting the physical needs of the inhabitants, these colonies must be able to support large populations if life aboard is to be rich and fulfilling in human terms.”

The class also covers the enduring fascination with UFOs. Astronomers universally assent to the certainty of life on other planets, Bania says, “so then the question is, where are they?” as famed physicist Enrico Fermi put it.

Bania covers about 50 possible answers in classroom lectures titled as responses to Fermi: 

“They Are Here” (those UFOs really are extraterrestrial visitors); “They Were Here” (the notion, from the 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods, that visitors from other worlds gifted ancient civilizations with marvels like Stonehenge); “They Are Somewhere” (a slew of possibilities, including that beings from other worlds have better things to do than communicate with humankind); and “They Are Nowhere” (again, multiple theories, including that the conditions necessary for life are remarkably rare in the galaxy).

“I try to get [students] to develop a sniff test for pseudoscience,” Bania says. He reminds them of Sagan’s dictum: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The US government’s Project Blue Book, which probed almost 13,000 sightings before shutting down in 1969, found terrestrial explanations for all but 701—and witnesses to that fraction offered only poor, vague information about what they’d seen, Bania told students. Most sightings have turned out to be objects ranging from Canada geese to Japanese squid boats, which tricked human eyes—even those of military pilots, Bania says—because of light reflection, meteorological effects, and other natural phenomena.

(For the impishly inclined, he also offers what is likely BU’s only tutorial in how to make a UFO. As a boy, Bania and his Explorer Scout troop tethered plastic garment bags with fishing line to cans of Sterno, the substance used to heat buffet food. These DIY hot-air balloons, lofted and swaying in the night breeze, were “responsible for basically all the UFO reports in Bergen County, New Jersey, in the mid-60s,” he confesses.)

Requiring knowledge of high school algebra and geometry, Life Beyond Earth attracts both technically savvy types and nonscience seniors who “ducked the science requirement for their entire BU career,” Bania says. “I don’t expect any of them to grow up to be scientists. [But] I want them to appreciate science and to be able to read the New York Times weekly science text and actually have some understanding of what’s going on.”

Before taking the course—which fulfills some requirements under the Hub, BU’s general education curriculum—Spirit Veron (COM’26) had been intrigued by unexplained UFO sightings. But after a lecture on that topic, she says, “Explaining the science behind it…helps me understand a little bit why people think that UFOs exist. They might not know all the science that we learned here today.”

“Astronomy is something that I never really got to talk about in high school,” says Erin Mosier (COM’26). “Focusing on something that is more of a theoretical, philosophical [take] about the universe, I thought, would be super interesting. So far, it’s how I kind of expected—really interesting.”

As for space colonies, Veron says, the threat of climate change opens her to the possibility: “It could definitely happen, but I don’t know if I’ll be here to witness it.”