This is the subject at the heart of the science fiction series “The 3-Body Problem” launched on Netflix last March. Should we fear an alien invasion in the near future? We have the answer.
Launched on March 21 on Netflix, the science fiction series The 3-Body Problem – by the creators of Game of Thrones in collaboration with Alexander Woo – features a group of scientists who must face a major threat: a alien invasion in 400 years and in the meantime, real hacking and sabotage of our technology.
A favorite subject of science fiction, the extraterrestrial invasion is the object of many fantasies and sometimes even many fears. So AlloCiné spoke with Hervé Cottin, astrochemist at LISA (Inter-university Laboratory of Atmospheric Systems) and UPEC (Paris-Est Créteil University). In the video above, he delivers his analysis of The Three-Body Problem.
This meeting is also an opportunity to discover a discipline little known to the general public but nevertheless fascinating, exobiology.
What is exobiology?
Hervé Cottin gives us a detailed answer: “Exobiology is an interdisciplinary field that addresses the question of life in the universe. On the one hand, we will of course think of extraterrestrial life, but to scientifically search for life elsewhere than on Earth and to know where it could have appeared, we must ask ourselves the question of the appearance of life on Earth. So, exobiology is both looking for life elsewhere and understanding how life appeared on Earth.
And so, for that, we need chemists who will try to understand the chemistry of the origins of life, biologists who will take over. We need geologists who will try to understand what the primitive Earth was like and try to characterize the other planets.
And then, we also need astrophysicists who will make observations, engineers who will build instruments. It is therefore an interdisciplinary field, because we need a lot of diverse skills. And no one can say: “I am an exobiologist” because you would have to be a specialist in many fields. And so, I will say that I am a chemist and that part of my research applies to exobiology.“
The 3-Body Problem is currently available on Netflix.