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Jordan Heath Rawlings
Sometime this year. I have no idea when you will see a report or even a couple reports a few months apart about us discovering a planet that looks like it might have the right conditions for life. Life. This happens kind of regularly now as we go further and learn more about the universe. And when we say that might have the right conditions for life, we’re almost always talking about like our sort of life. Water, oxygen, bacteria, all the stuff that keeps humans alive. And it is natural that we try to see what we can find for us to see if there might be another planet for when we wreck this one, or if there’s other life similar to us that could evolve into us out there for us to meet. Now, here’s where it gets a little trippy. We have no idea what the right conditions for life really are. We know what humans need and the other things that live on Earth, and that’s about it. And we don’t even know where to begin looking for conditions that could support other kinds of life. And actually, we can’t even agree on what life is in the context of finding it out there in the Universe. We can’t all agree on what would actually count as aliens if we found them. So this means we might be looking in all the wrong places for all the wrong things, which would obviously hurt our chances at making a planet altering discovery. But on the other hand, that means that we might still find life in places that we could have never imagined, in places that might be close enough for us to get to and we might really be able to figure out if we’re alone out here. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. And yes, this is one of those episodes. Sarah Scholes is a Colorado based science writer, a contributing writer at Wired Science who writes for many other publications, including in this case, for Scientific American. Hello, Sarah.
Sarah Scholes
Hi. Thanks for having me.
Jordan
You’re welcome. I’m going to say right off the top for people listening, this is going to get a little bit geeky, but we’re also going to take it to a very accessible place. So bear with us when we talk about DNA and RNA and all that crazy stuff. Sarah, this is a whole new way of looking at aliens. Yeah, it is. It’s kind of mind blowing to delve into it at all and hopefully geeky only in the best way. Why don’t we start with the person who kind of got this whole ball rolling, maybe who is Sarah Stewart Johnson and how did she come to be searching for aliens in this way?
Sarah Scholes
Yes, Sarah Stewart Johnson is a professor at Georgetown University. She teaches in the astronomy department, and a lot of her job is searching for aliens. But she kind of started thinking about it when she was a sophomore in college, and she went on a trip to this big volcano in Hawaii called Monicaia. She was on a trip, I think, with a geology class, just kind of meandering around the top of this volcano, turned over a stone with her boot, and underneath she saw this fern. And she kind of had a revelation about the idea that everywhere on Earth that life can be life is, no matter how hard the circumstances. And maybe that’s true other places in the universe. And there’s just a lot of hot real estate for aliens to live, even if it seems really inaccessible and bad real estate to us.
Jordan
So typically, how have we and by we, I mean, I guess the mainstream scientists who do this job. How have we considered hunting for extraterrestrial life? Like, what do we typically do? And how does that approach that you just mentioned differ?
Sarah Scholes
Yeah, so astronomers have this analogy that they like to trot out when they’re talking about this, which is if you lose your keys on the street while you’re walking home, the first place you might look for them is under a lamp post because there is light and you will be able to see them. But it’s just kind of the place that makes the most sense, even if it might not be where your keys are. The extraterrestrial version of that is we only have one example in the universe of life that we know for sure exists, and that’s earthly life. And so it makes sense that if you went out into the universe looking for other life, you would begin looking under that metaphorical lamp post, looking for life like Earth, which means looking for things like oxygen.
Jordan
Do you look at other planets and see oxygen in their atmospheres? Do you see evidence that maybe some microbes are eating something and then using it for energy? Or do you see methane and just all these signs of life on Earth?
Sarah Scholes
We kind of go out into the universe and look for them out there. But Sarah Stewart Johnson’s approach differs in that she started off thinking maybe the aliens don’t live under the lamp post. Maybe we don’t know anything about their metabolism or their breathing, and we should be a little bit more agnostic about the kinds of signs we’re looking for.
Jordan
Once you consider the problem that way, how much more complex does it get?
Sarah Scholes
I think this is an appropriate use of the word infinitely, infinitely more complex. Because once you close off the idea that we know anything about the life that we’re looking for, you kind of could be looking for anything else. So, yeah, it’s a much harder problem than looking for little bacteria.
Jordan
Let’s talk about the people that do the work and how they do it. What is the laboratory for?
Sarah Scholes
Agnostic bio-signatures. Yeah, it is a virtual laboratory of a bunch of scientists from a bunch of different backgrounds, computer science, biology, physics, astronomy, who all got together kind of under the guidance of Sarah Stewart Johnson, to look for signatures of alien life out in the universe that maybe aren’t like life on Earth.
Jordan
And so it’s an initiative funded by NASA to think about, like, if you don’t know anything about what this life is, how would you even begin to start going about finding it?
Sarah Scholes
And so that’s their easy task.
Jordan
Yeah, it sounds like an easy job to me. So that’s what they’re up to. This is another weird question, but when we say that they’re out there looking for any forms of life, how do we define that?
Sarah Scholes
If we’re looking beyond what we would normally consider the things that go along with life, then for the purposes of this conversation, this is going to sound like we’re both stoned, but what is life?
Jordan
Yeah, what is life? What is the meaning of life? We can get very deep here. I don’t know if you’re going to like this answer or not, but scientists have been arguing about what life is for many years and up to the present day. Of course they have. Yeah, they all get stoned to argue about it. There are more than 100 definitions that have been published in Modern Times and papers of what life is. And there was one scientist who tried to bring those all together into, like, what do they have in common, what can we fundamentally say life is?
Sarah Scholes
And he determined it was, I think, self replication with variations. So that basically means something that can make more of itself, that’s not exactly a clone of itself, which is not a super satisfying definition, really. But, yeah, that’s where we’re at. That’s kind of basically what NASA’s definition of life is also, and it doesn’t give you a whole lot of places to start, really, with what you’re looking for. It doesn’t. And that’s my next question, which is, like, how do we know that when we find it, how do we identify it if it could look so different from what we expect? Yeah, I think that that is going to be a hard problem. And I don’t just think that the scientists who study this agree with me. They have these criteria for what maybe make something that’s alive, different from something that’s just physics or geology. And those include things like life is not at equilibrium with its environment, which basically means that you yourself and a bacterium and a zebra are all different from the environment around you. And so they think maybe you could go out into the universe and look for things that are different from their general environment. You can look for molecules that are very complex because it takes a lot of energy and time and inputs to make a complex molecule. And nature doesn’t make things that complex on its own. So if you go out there and you see the molecular equivalent of a 747 is how some of the scientists put it to me, then you know that maybe it’s alive. And so things like that that kind of get away from any specific chemistry. But to really answer your question, I think the scientists in general are in agreement that if they find something that fits those criteria that could be alive, they probably won’t be able to put out a press release about it right away. It will take years and years of confirmation and checking things out, and it won’t be quite as exciting as it would be in a movie.
Jordan
What does the Laboratory for Agnostic Bio-signatures actually do, physically or otherwise?
Sarah Scholes
I’m just trying to get a sense of how the work works. Yeah, so one thing that they are planning that got a little bit delayed due to the pandemic, but they will be doing is going to a 10,000 foot deep mine called the Kid Creek Mine that has these very unique molecular compounds. And they’re going to try to see if they can differentiate the weird crystals that form in this mind just due to geology versus the weird crystals that form in this mind from some kind of very small animal making them. And they’re also doing things like collecting old meteorite samples or samples of very old life on Earth and seeing if their methods can differentiate from something that just formed because rocks or something that formed because, like an ancient bacteria made it. And so they’re testing their methods out kind of in the harshest, most rare sorts of environments on Earth and seeing if they can tell the difference between something that’s alive and not alive with the ultimate goal that they could build instruments that they could put on spaceships to send to, like, Mars or Europa or someplace else and essentially do the same thing way out there. When we talk about going to Mars or Europa or other places, these are generally places that we think we kind of understand whether or not they have life.
Jordan
Do you know what I mean? And do we basically have to search the entire universe over again if we’re thinking of life this way?
Sarah Scholes
Yeah, you and I don’t have to, but the astronomers have set themselves up for that job. We’re off the hook. But, yeah, we can kind of get started by scientists have very powerful telescopes now where they can look at a planet far away and begin to start to tell things about what its atmosphere is like. And if they know about its size, they can tell like, is it the right size and the right distance from its sun to be maybe a little bit like Earth. And so they can kind of get a starting point. But, yeah, essentially you would have to search the whole universe to understand the scope and spectrum of life out there, if there is, in fact any what kind of reaction does this stuff get from people? Again, probably mostly scientists who have spent their careers searching for more traditional sorts of life.
Jordan
So searching for those planets that you mentioned that have the right levels of oxygen or could potentially have water or whatever, and now there’s a new school of thought that says that’s not even going to come close to finding anything. How does that interplay work?
Sarah Scholes
Yeah, I mean, there are criticisms of the approach that the Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures is taking, including the fact that we don’t understand how life started on this planet, like how we went from a planet of geology and physics and chemistry to a planet of biology. And if we don’t understand that from the planet that we’re literally standing or sitting on, how could we possibly understand how it could happen someplace else? And how could we possibly understand how it begin to happen differently? And so there’s the argument that we should stick a little closer to the things that we actually don’t know about our own planet. And then there’s the argument that if there are other planets that seem to be like Earth, which there do seem to be to some degree, then the elements that they have and the conditions that they have are not going to be that different from what is here. And so if life formed there, it probably also wouldn’t be that different. And so there’s not a real reason to look for these wild kinds of life. But I think in general, everybody is happy to have more different approaches. I mean, we haven’t found the aliens yet, and so I think any new ideas for how to do it are generally welcomed. And I think that people don’t want to throw out looking for oxygen. They would like to still keep looking for oxygen and things like that. They would just like to add these new things to the toolkit.
Jordan
Well, let me ask you then, personally, because you’re a science writer, your job is to convey this kind of stuff simply to an audience that, let’s face it, is pretty fascinated by the idea that we’re not alone out here and that we should search for and find aliens. How do you try to convey this approach to the masses and I use that term nicely, but how do you convey this approach nicely as opposed to what people who traditionally watch Sci-Fi movies and are intrigued by what could be out there would think of us meeting aliens?
Sarah Scholes
I actually think that this approach to looking for aliens is more user friendly.
Jordan
How so?
Sarah Scholes
It essentially says we don’t know anything about what aliens are like. They could be anything. And even the astronomers who work on this day today can’t imagine what that really means. And so in that they’re not very different from any of the rest of us who don’t do this for a living, where we’re all just kind of groping in the dark, and everything is up to imagination. And so I feel like it’s the most creative of the searches for aliens. And anything that you imagine sitting on your couch late at night that an alien might be, this approach says, hey, could be. And so I think it’s a little more inclusive of the average person’s curiosity.
Jordan
So what comes next for the Lad and for this approach in general? You mentioned they’re looking at remote locations in Earth, hoping to be able to do that in space. I think we kind of touched on this already, but, like, what kind of time frame are are we looking at here?
Sarah Scholes
Even if they do find something for us to know, oh, it’s alive. The approaches on Earth are happening now and in the near future. Spacecraft take a long time to make, so that’s probably we’re talking maybe five to 20 year time horizon. And then, you know, if they go there and say, five or ten years and find something, I probably shouldn’t put a number to it, but I will I would say, you know, probably at least five years to be able to say, yes, this is alive. And that will probably require additional missions, which is not bad, building more spaceships, sending them back to wherever you found the sample, and maybe bringing some back this way so that we can study them even more closely. And, yeah, that’s not a very satisfying answer, I think, for a lot of people, especially compared to searching for intelligent extraterrestrials like Et phone home and you catch ET’s phone call or something, you definitely know that Et. Is real and et. Is an alien, and just this chemical approach is just a little slower, and then we have to learn how to talk with it.
Jordan
Exactly. We’ll make that your job. Sarah Scholes, writing and scientific American. That was the big story. I hope your head is spinning right now. Mine was after that interview. You can find more from us, naturally, at The Big Storypodcast CA. You can talk to us on Twitter at the bigstory FPN. You can email us hello at The Big Story podcast, CA, and you can call us 416-935-5935 and leave us a message. Play us the X Files theme song. I don’t know. Do what you want to do. This podcast is available in every podcast player and in some podcast players that we may not know exist yet. It’ll still be there. You can also ask your smart speaker to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. Thank you for indulging my alien curiosity. Have a wonderful weekend, and we’ll talk Monday.
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