Is an alien invasion possible, as in the 3-body problem? An expert will answer us!

Launching March 21 on Netflix, the sci-fi series The 3-Body Problem—from Game of Thrones creators Alexander Wu—features a team of scientists who must face a major threat: an alien invasion 400 years from now, and in the meantime, real-life hacking and sabotage of our technology. .

A beloved subject of science fiction, extraterrestrial invasion is the object of much imagination and sometimes much fear. So AlloCiné talked to Hervé Cotin, an astrochemist from LISA (University Laboratory of Atmospheric Systems) and UPEC (Paris-Est Créteil University). In the video above, he provides his analysis of the three-body problem.

This meeting is also an opportunity to discover a little known to the general public, but still fascinating discipline, exobiology.

What is Exobiology?

Herve Cotin gives us a detailed answer:Exobiology is an interdisciplinary field that deals with the question of life in the universe. On the one hand, we certainly think about extraterrestrial life, but to scientifically look for life elsewhere than on Earth and to know where it might have originated, we must ask ourselves about the origin of life on Earth. So exobiology means looking for life elsewhere and understanding how life originated on Earth.

And so, for that, we need chemists who will try to understand the chemistry of the origin of life, biologists who will take over. We need geologists to try to understand what primitive Earth was like and to try to characterize other planets.

And then, we also need astrophysicists to do the observations, engineers to build the instruments. This is why it is an interdisciplinary field because we need many different skills. And no one can say: “I am an exobiologist”, because you have to be a specialist in many fields. So I’ll say I’m a chemist and part of my research is in exobiology.“

The 3-Body Problem is currently available on Netflix.