The Big Picture: Astrobiology

From SPACE.com:

The young field of Astrobiology still has vocal critics. New academic disciplines often get cool receptions. Women's Studies and Quantum Mechanics were considered either frivolous or fictional by many when they first appeared in university catalogs. In the late 1930s, the manuscript that Grote Reber wrote describing low-frequency emission from the Milky Way — a pioneering work that broke open the field of radio astronomy — was uniformly rejected by reviewers for the Astrophysical Journal. Fortunately, the editor decided to publish Reber's paper anyway. Astrobiology feels their pain. The field is young enough to still have vocal critics; in particular, those who think that "astrobiology" is nothing more than a hope that life will someday be discovered beyond Earth.

Read the whole article