Fresh off Artemis II’s historic trip around the moon, space is having a moment. But you do not have to leave Earth, or even Kentucky, to feel a little closer to the cosmos. At Bernheim Forest and Arboretum, known for its towering trees and sweeping landscapes, visitors can step away from city lights and look up through a different lens during the forest’s nighttime sky programs.
Dan Price is a NASA solar system ambassador, a volunteer naturalist at Bernheim and a longtime astronomy educator who has led outreach programs in Kentucky and beyond.
LPM’s Ayisha Jaffer spoke with Price about astronomy outreach, dark skies in Kentucky, bird migration and what science can, and cannot, tell us about life beyond Earth.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity
Ayisha Jaffer: What is a solar system ambassador?
Dan Price: We’re a group of citizen scientists who have a strong interest in the space program, and NASA in particular.
AJ: You’re also a volunteer naturalist at Bernheim Forest and Arboretum. How did these two roles converge in the work you do with the public?
DP: Being a NASA solar system ambassador gives a little bit of weight to my presence. People come to see the NASA part of it.
AJ: Light pollution affects everything from astronomy to wildlife. Why does preserving dark skies matter for science and for the natural world?
DP: In addition to being a solar system ambassador, I’m also the secretary of the board of directors of the Louisville Audubon Society, and we have a program called Lights Out Louisville. We want to reduce light pollution. Somewhere between 1 and 5 billion birds die every year from window strikes caused by artificial lights at night. So it’s not just these tall skyscrapers. They account for less than 2% of bird deaths. In fact, it’s mostly residential buildings, or shorter buildings, 1 to 4 stories high, that account for most of these deaths.
To answer the question of how it impacts science as well, we have a perfect example of that on a mountain called Cerro Paranal in Chile, home of the Very Large Telescope. It was also going to be a neighbor to a project that was lighting up the night sky to produce natural gas, and would have destroyed the night sky for that Very Large Telescope, negatively impacting its ability to not only collect information about the history of the universe, but also to detect threats that are headed our way.
AJ: I know Bernheim is not an official dark-sky park, but I’m curious about what makes Bernheim such a special place for your night programming and for observing the night sky?
DP: It’s a special place just because it’s Bernheim, and it has the volunteer base and the programming structure to allow those sorts of things to happen. It’s the people at Bernheim and the programming that we have in place that make it a special place.
AJ: You recently hosted a talk at the Louisville free public library called “Aliens, Are They Real?” It explored the possibility of life beyond Earth. So from a scientific perspective, what do we actually know right now about the potential for life elsewhere in the universe?
DP: With our telescopes, we’ve been able to take a pretty good survey of planets, at least in the local galaxy, and we’ve been able to determine that there are about 250 million Earth-like planets around sunlike stars in our galaxy alone. And remember, our galaxy is one among billions, so you’d think the chances are pretty high, right? It seems obvious that life should exist somewhere. But in what form is it?
Just microbes for the vast majority of the history of life on Earth, that was the case. It was only single-celled organisms. It was one singular, lucky accident that spawned multicellular life on Earth, and it took billions of years for that to happen. So what are the odds of that happening on another world beyond that?
If we do ever find intelligent life in the universe, what kind of relationship is that going to be? One thing I know with a large degree of certainty is that the speed of light is the speed limit of the universe, meaning that even if we found life on the nearest star to us, just to send a signal would take four years to get there. And then for them to reply would take four years for that return signal. And we’ll almost certainly never be able to travel to another star.
Proxima Centauri is about four light-years away. The fastest spacecraft we have right now is the Parker Solar Probe. It goes about 500,000 miles an hour. At its fastest, it would take over 6,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri. A half a million miles an hour seems pretty fast, but it’s nothing compared to the scale of the universe.
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