VATICAN CITY — A week­long con­fer­ence on Vat­i­can grounds with respected sci­en­tists was con­vened by the Vatican’s Pon­tif­i­cal Acad­emy of Sci­ences, chaired by its reli­gious leader Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, from 6 to 10 Novem­ber 2009 con­cern­ing Astro­bi­ol­ogy the study of life’s rela­tion­ship to the rest of the cos­mos. The sci­en­tists dis­cussed the detec­tion and impli­ca­tions of extrater­res­trial life.

A major dri­ving force behind the con­fer­ence was the Direc­tor of the Vat­i­can Obser­va­tory, the Jesuit priest Father Jose Gabriel Funes. In May 2008, Funes gave an inter­view to the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano news­pa­per say­ing that, “the exis­tence of intel­li­gent extrater­res­tri­als posed no prob­lems to Catholic the­ol­ogy”. ‘Just as a mul­ti­plic­ity of crea­tures exists on Earth, so there could be other beings, also intel­li­gent, cre­ated by God,’ says Father Jose Funes, a Jesuit astronomer at the Vat­i­can Obser­va­tory. Together with Funes’ 2008 inter­view and sub­se­quent pub­lic com­ments by him, the con­fer­ence demon­strates a wel­come open­ness by the Vat­i­can on the pos­si­bil­ity and impli­ca­tions of extrater­res­trial life. The Vat­i­can also worked with Pres­i­dent Rea­gan to bring the down fall of Soviet Com­mu­nism and is work­ing to open the dis­cus­sion on extrater­res­trial life and UFOs in our skies. The Vat­i­can is play­ing a lead­ing role in prepar­ing the world for extrater­res­trial dis­clo­sure. The Vat­i­can Library is full of UFO case his­to­ries from reli­able mem­bers and priests.

In Gen­e­sis 1 the Bible states, “In the begin­ning God cre­ated the heav­ens and the earth. God made two great lights—the greater light to gov­ern the day and the lesser light to gov­ern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light to the earth. Then God said, “Let us make man in our image”.

This belief is often in con­flict with mod­ern Sci­ence so the study week had an ambi­tious agenda: to bring together lead­ing sci­en­tists in diverse fields, to share the lat­est results of their own research. The Vat­i­can pro­gram was orga­nized into eight ses­sions:
Ses­sion 1, on The Ori­gin of Life, con­cerned the dif­fi­cult prob­lem of the mech­a­nisms by which mol­e­cules became orga­nized in such a way as to per­mit life to begin. Life as we know it on Earth is built on a struc­ture of pro­teins and nucleic acid poly­mers which carry the infor­ma­tion to build the pro­teins from their con­stituent amino acids. While com­plex, life is a very spe­cific and selec­tive organic chem­istry: out of the broad range of pos­si­ble organic acids that abi­otic sys­tems can pro­duce, life uti­lizes just a hand­ful; like­wise, life largely uti­lizes just left-handed amino acids and right handed sugars.

Ses­sion 2, Hab­it­abil­ity Through Time, con­cerns water on Earth’s sur­face when the Sun was so faint sug­gests that our atmos­phere must have pro­vided a much stronger green­house effect than, and been quite dif­fer­ent from, that of today. Episodes of severe glacia­tions in the geo­logic record sug­gest that from time to time the atmos­pheric ‘ther­mo­stat’ failed. How life – even at the mol­e­c­u­lar level – and the envi­ron­ment have inter­acted over geo­logic time is the sub­ject of Ses­sion 3, Envi­ron­ment and Genomes. Mol­e­c­u­lar sig­na­tures of the bio­chem­i­cal reac­tions sus­tain­ing life remain in the geo­logic record, giv­ing us hints of the changes over vast peri­ods of time. Lessons from life forms that live in extreme envi­ron­ments, such as sub­ma­rine vents and the Earth’s dri­est deserts, aid the inter­pre­ta­tion of this record. The rel­a­tively sud­den appear­ance of ani­mal life late in the Earth’s his­tory remains a mys­tery whose solu­tion might be found in both the envi­ron­ment of the time and the work­ings of the genome. Earth seems to be unique in our solar sys­tem in terms of its abun­dant life, and yet we can­not be sure that life is not present on Mars or else­where in the solar sys­tem. Ses­sion 4, Detect­ing Life Else­where, explores the prospects and tech­niques for find­ing life else­where in the solar sys­tem. Whether or not life exists else­where within our own solar sys­tem, the vast Milky Way Galaxy of which we are a part con­tains over 100 bil­lion stars. If plan­ets are a com­mon fea­ture of such stars, might life be as well?

Ses­sion 5, Search Strate­gies for Extra­so­lar Plan­ets explains the var­i­ous tech­niques used to find plan­ets around other stars and deter­mine their prop­er­ties. Already, about 380 Extra­so­lar plan­ets are known, and the num­ber of stars searched sug­gests that at least 10% of stars sim­i­lar in prop­er­ties to our own Sun have at least one planet. Ses­sion 6, For­ma­tion of Extra­so­lar Plan­ets, details progress in under­stand­ing how plan­ets form as a part of the process of the for­ma­tion of stars. Two out­stand­ing ques­tions  are what deter­mines when a rocky planet like the Earth will form ver­sus a gas giant like Jupiter, and is the process of planet for­ma­tion mate­ri­ally dif­fer­ent  around stars much smaller than our Sun. Finally, Ses­sion 7, Prop­er­ties of Extra­so­lar Plan­ets, brings to bear com­puter mod­el­ing, astro­nom­i­cal data and a bit of spec­u­la­tion on the ques­tion of the prop­er­ties of extra­so­lar plan­ets, and dis­tances from their par­ent stars. Ulti­mately, much of the fas­ci­na­tion of astro­bi­ol­ogy comes from the ques­tion of whether sen­tient life forms exist on other worlds, and whether forms of life alien to our own in fact coex­ist with us – today – on our own home world.

Ses­sion 8, Intel­li­gence Else­where and Shadow Life, explores both these issues. The search for intel­li­gent life else­where is being con­ducted by lis­ten­ing to the cos­mos with radio tele­scopes in an effort to pick up a sig­nal of inar­guably arti­fi­cial ori­gin. A search for life with bio­chem­istry dif­fer­ent from that of all the known life on Earth – what has been termed ‘shadow life’ – on our own planet is a fas­ci­nat­ing pos­si­bil­ity but one fraught with daunt­ing dif­fi­cul­ties. Astro­bi­ol­ogy is an effort to use a diverse range of sci­en­tific tech­niques, focused on tar­gets from the mol­e­cules in cells to the vast cos­mos around us, to pro­vide a deeper appre­ci­a­tion of humankind’s place in the cos­mos. It is a recog­ni­tion of the remark­able intri­ca­cies of all that is within and around us.

Dr. Paul Davies shown here, who spoke at the con­fer­ence is a the­o­ret­i­cal cos­mol­o­gist and astro­bi­ol­o­gist at Ari­zona State Uni­ver­sity stated, “Alter­na­tive forms of life might be hap­pily co-habiting with us on Earth. If life does form read­ily under Earth-like con­di­tions, shouldn’t it have formed many times over, right here on our home planet?”

“If we find that life has hap­pened in the solar sys­tem twice, from scratch, if we can be sure of that, then it’s going to have hap­pened all around the uni­verse,” Davis said. “The uni­verse is going to be teem­ing with life, and there’s a very good chance that we are not alone.“
We can spec­u­late that other civ­i­liza­tions may exist under the sea or inside the Earth and have cho­sen not to reveal them­selves. Often Chris­tian­ity and sci­ence appear to have an adver­sar­ial rela­tion­ship but per­haps we are look­ing at the same objects and giv­ing them dif­fer­ent names based on our back­grounds. The pope and some of the worlds’ top astronomers believe the two need not be in con­flict. “How can we exclude that life has devel­oped else­where?” asked Vat­i­can astronomer Father Jose Gabriel Funes. He expressed the view that there could be alien intel­li­gences else­where in space. “This is not in con­trast with our faith,” he stated, “because we can’t put lim­its on God’s cre­ative free­dom.” Fumes’ mus­ings had a clear the­o­log­i­cal fla­vor. “Some aliens could even be free from orig­i­nal sin,” he opined.

“The Bible is not a sci­en­tific text­book.” (This is a good thing, since sci­ence text­books change every year. And if God cre­ated every­thing, then He cre­ated the Laws on which we base sci­ence, and, being all-knowing, His Word would be accu­rate on every sub­ject it touches, includ­ing sci­ence). The Vat­i­can astronomer’s com­ments about the pos­si­ble exis­tence of extrater­res­trial life are the inevitable out­comes of allow­ing man’s word pre­em­i­nence over God’s Word, instead of using the Bible as our start­ing point with which to inter­pret the uni­verse. With a recent poll find­ing that just 4 in 10 Amer­i­cans believe in evo­lu­tion, one might be tempted to ask who’s more anti­science: the Vat­i­can or the aver­age Amer­i­can? Sci­en­tists (many of them non­be­liev­ers) offered pre­sen­ta­tions on sub­jects as var­ied as how life might have begun on Earth; what newly found “extremophile” microbes liv­ing in harsh places on our planet tell us pos­si­ble life could be on other plan­ets; and how life forms might be detected in our solar sys­tem, or how their bio-signatures might be found on and around the many dis­tant exoplanets.

Mon­signor Cor­rado Bal­ducci, Chief Exor­cist for the Arch­dio­cese of Rome, the Vatican

UFO:  Some­thing real must exist. In fact, today there is a great amount (still increas­ing) of tes­ti­monies regard­ing the so called fly­ing saucers or space­ships and the extrater­res­tri­als; and among them there are some com­ing from reli­able per­sons, with a cul­ture and ini­tially non believ­ers. There are already hun­dreds of thou­sands of eye wit­nesses in the world that state to have seen UFO’s at least once. There are so many, even in a smaller amount, the tes­ti­monies com­ing from the so called contactees.

If we con­sider this, it seems impos­si­ble to deny at a ratio­nal level that some­thing real does exist! A totally skep­tic behav­ior is not jus­ti­fied at all, because a pri­ori seems to be against to the ele­men­tal pru­dence sug­gested by the good sense.