Concluding Remarks, or Pilgrim's Progress: The Road Ahead

Abstract

This has been a wonderful conference, in a beautiful setting, with many of the world's planet-seekers on hand to present their ideas, at a time when we stand technically almost ready to embark on designing space missions to search for Earth-like planets and signs of life on them. In these remarks, I wish to simply list the ‘big questions’ that face us today, and offer some personal comments on how we might address these questions.

For a bit of inspiration from the past, I will close with a parallel that might be drawn between the journey that we all wish to embark upon, to search for extrasolar planets and to characterize them, and the one described by John Bunyan in his 1678 allegory, Pilgrim's Progress.

A remarkable aspect of this conference has been the agreement on our common goal, to detect and characterize extrasolar planets. While it is true that various of us suscribe to different theories of how planetary systems are formed, or how to best build the telescopes that can investigate these planetary systems, nevertheless we do all believe that the next great frontier in astrophysics is the study of extrasolar planets, and in particular Earth-like planets.

The topic of this conference can be phrased in terms of the following ‘big questions’. Are there Earth-like planets around nearby stars? Are these planets habitable? Do they show signs of life?

These questions generate many sub-questions that we need to answer. In the following I list the questions as I see them today. I will phrase them in terms that can be easily understood by most of the public. Doubtless you will have other questions, but this is a start.