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Scientists are bringing the search for life beyond the bounds of our blue, green planet right into UCLA’s backyard today.

Schoenberg Music Hall will resonate with the voices of inquisitive community members as UCLA welcomes scientists from all over the country for the 16th annual Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life Symposium.

This year’s topic is “Astrobiology: Life Among the Stars,” featuring six panelists who will talk about the ways scientists search for planets that might be (or might once have been) capable of supporting life, said Edward Wright, a UCLA professor of astronomy and co-organizer of the event.

The symposium is designed to attract students of all disciplines and members of the general public, especially those interested in astronomy from a philosophical point of view, said panelist Lynne Hillenbrand, assistant professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology.

“It’s a very timely set of questions and inquiries,” Hillenbrand said. “Everyone has a desire at some level ... to understand the questions about the origins of life.”

The event was organized by UCLA’s Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life, a division of the UC-wide Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics which promotes interdisciplinary learning by bringing together scholars from different disciplines.

“We worry about the origin and evolution of almost everything ... the universe, the solar system, the environment ... ,” said William Schopf, UCLA professor of paleobiology and director of the center.

The combination of approaches to finding the origin of life allows people to get a much fuller understanding of what we know about planets besides Earth, said Jon Jenkins, co-investigator on the NASA Ames’ Kepler Discovery Mission at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute.

“It’s always good to have people tackling the problem from different perspectives,” said panelist David Stevenson, a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology.

Former NASA administrator Daniel Goldin and Charles Elachi, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will also speak at the symposium.

“Some of the most interesting science that gets done happens between the boundaries ... the places where biology and physics rub up against one another,” said Steven Squyres, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University who will present the latest results from the Mars Explorer Rover Mission.

Squyres said he wants to convey the sense of adventure he felt as principal investigator of a mission whose 90-day foray onto the Martian surface in January 2004 has expanded into a quest of more than a year long.

“It’s been a hell of an adventure,” Squyres said.

Mars’ surface is now too cold and too dry to support life, Squyres said. But one of the two rovers has found rocks marked with ripples on their surfaces, indicating that at one point these Martian rocks were drenched with water.

Other panelists will talk about the search for habitable planets even farther from home – those beyond the bounds of our solar system.

Jenkins explained how scientists can look for the tell-tale signs of an Earth-like atmosphere from hundreds of light years away by looking at the planet’s reflected light, which tells them what chemicals make up its atmosphere.

The question of whether life exists on other planets is, at this point, “entirely speculation,” Jenkins said.

He explained the conditions that allowed us to come about seem to have required a series of extraordinary circumstances.

“I would bet – not my 401K – but I would bet on the existence of life on other planetary galaxies,” Jenkins said.

Squyres said he tries to keep an open mind about the question of whether we are alone in the universe.

“One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a scientist is to have a belief about the answer to a question like that,” Squyres said. “It can bias your judgement.”

Hillenbrand said scientists are a long way away from finding intelligent life on other planets. But although it is improbable that we will find a signal from life on other planets, Hillenbrand said it is good for someone to be asking these questions.