Is there life beyond earth? This is the question Nathalie Cabrol asks herself. In the United States, a 60-year-old French astrobiologist who worked for NASA directs the Carl Sagan Institute, the world’s leading research center on life in the universe. To understand Mars, this unorthodox explorer, who married a man thirty-four years her senior, became an extreme diver. Today, he wants to use space technologies to better understand climate risk.
I wouldn’t have gotten here if…
…if I hadn’t had, when I was very young, a passion for the sky and exploration. It is a force that constantly pushes me. Since I was an only child, instead of playing with brothers and sisters, I looked up at the stars, I explored the small universe around me, the lawn behind my parents’ apartment in Rueil-Malmaison, near Paris, Lake Saint-Coucoufa. . I was drawing. I asked myself many questions. I was very introverted, maybe with Asperger’s syndrome.
Where does this hypothesis come from?
of specific indications. I’ve always read words from right to left in my head, I like to find anagrams, I’m ambiguous and I like to write symmetrically with both hands at the same time… In the number tables, I can immediately find the one I’m looking for. Fifteen years ago, I finally took the test. The average score is 15, and the Asperger’s score is 32. I was at 26. So not yet to the point where it causes problems, but on a level that might explain my difficulty fitting into groups, which is my tendency to be passionate about things. Only I am interested, in combining elements that others do not combine, or inverting numbers and letters… In my work, this is an asset. Over time, I thought it might have subsided. But I took the exam again a year ago, and I was 29 years old. It was like there were two women inside me. A professional who heads the world’s first research center for life in the universe and feels very comfortable talking about space, and a little girl who shuts down when things aren’t going well. Not long ago, I had to get into an elevator with twenty strangers, and the little girl I was with hid behind the only person she knew…
How did this shy kid become an intrepid explorer?
I could not have made it here without my mother. She piqued my curiosity while reading little prince, l’Enid, l’odyssey… And that was my armor, my fortress. In my youth, she fought all the battles for me. She worked a lot as an x-ray technician, and never took care of me, but I knew she would always be there morning and night, no matter what. She believed in me, and she gave me complete faith in others.
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