Astrobiologist

If you’ve ever looked up at the stars and found yourself wondering if life exists out there in the cosmos, you’re already thinking like an Astrobiologist. Albert Einstein once said, “The Universe is stranger than we can imagine,” and he probably didn’t mean there are little green men dancing in the craters of Mars. Astrobiologists imagine what might be out there hidden in the stars, and better yet, they seek to discover it.

If you’re an Astrobiologist, the idea of life existing in our universe fascinates you. How did life on Earth begin, and are there other planets like ours millions of light years away yet to be found? Your search for the answers to these big questions begins with studying the tiniest of microbes.

In order to find out if life can exist in other worlds, you spend a lot of time in laboratories on your home planet, testing and recording the lifecycle of bacteria that can survive in harsh conditions, and even looking at fossils of the earliest life forms and trying to deduce how they arrived on Earth.

The chemistry and weather systems of planets close to ours, like Mars for example, are other areas where you search for an answer. At first, the high-powered telescopes available through observatories will be enough for you, but in order to gain more evidence, you might find yourself working with NASA or a space program to send probes to explore distant planets.

There’s a good chance you won’t be finding any aliens that stand on two feet, communicate psychically, and travel by mother ship, although it’s always a possibility. If you found even a one-celled organism in the final frontier, you’d forever change the Universe as we know it.