W hat's the most incredible headline you could expect to read in a newspaper? For me, it would have to be something like: "We are not alone: Life found on other planets."
Few other news stories could have such an impact. While this week's column doesn't have that headline (and won't be quite so important!), it's worth considering that the chances of discovering extraterrestrial life do not now belong to the realms of science fiction. The Vatican, for one, has prepared itself for that possibility.
The story begins in 1969, in a small village not far from Melbourne, in Australia. One evening in September that year, people in Murchison saw a fireball tearing through the sky. It broke into three fragments and slammed into the ground. It was a meteorite, like the thousands that constantly fall into our atmosphere from space.