“To find life in the cosmos, we must think differently about life, because we do not know how to manifest it!” Ramin Skibba
Ramin Skibba Science astrophysicist-driven writer and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in New Scientist, Nature and Hakai magazine, among others.
From bloody jellyfish to rocky suckers, our planet is so vast and diverse that it is difficult to see some organisms alive. The complexity indicates the challenge of seeking life, as we have never seen or judged. We do not know what shape, size, format to visualise.
The biology of other planets can differ significantly from our own because conditions there are different and not what we accustomed. Astrochemist Morgan Cable, who works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said a universe is a vast place and there is likely to be another type of planet somewhere else. Life is possible, and we will find it.
“The question is, will we get it or will they get us first?”
In their search for organisms and broadly limiting it to life similar to what is here on Earth, star experts have come up with the question of whether we should change our focus and seek life through other glasses. NASA’s Viking landing gear investigated soil samples on Mars in 1976 and used it to determine whether the kind of organic nutrients are those of Earth’s microbes. The tests were unsuccessful. Later this year, the “Exo-Mars Trace Gas Orbiter” of the European Space Agency will begin by determining whether methane gas is available in the Mars atmosphere. Which would indicate whether there is earth-like bacterial life on Mars? NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will also scan the planet for carbon-based compounds formed from Mars’s past as well as for current Mars organisms.
But the environment on Mars is not comparable to the Earth, and the exoplanets that have discovered star experts around other stars are even more strange and very different from anything in our solar system. The mysterious strangers make it essential to broaden the quest for life. We need to open our minds to genuinely unknown types of biological, chemical, geological and physical processes. The chemist, Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow, said, “Everybody is looking for” the so-called “bio-indications” for life, but it’s meaningless because we have no other examples of foreign biology, “
To open our minds, we must go back to the basics and consider the fundamental conditions needed for life. Life firstly requires some form of energy, as we will find in volcanic hot water sources or hydrothermal gutters. It appears that any planets or moons that do not have a reliable source of internal heat excluded. Life also needs protection against space radiation, such as an atmospheric ozone layer. The newly discovered Earth-sized worlds, such as those around TRAPPIST-1 and Proxima Centauri, revolve around red dwarf stars, whose powerful flame bursts can destroy a planet’s atmosphere through its peeling effect. The “James Webb Space Telescope” (JWST), which will launch next year, will determine if we should also exclude these worlds in our search for life.
Lastly, everything we know about life indicates that Water is life and that it needs a kind of liquid solvent in which chemical interactions can lead to self-replicating molecules. Water is extremely useful in this regard. It facilitates the making and breaking of chemical compounds, the composition of proteins or other structural molecules, and the feeding and ejection of waste into actual organisms. Therefore, planet scientists are currently focusing on the ‘habitable zone’ around stars, the places where a world can have the right temperature for liquid Water on its surface.
These limitations still leave a confusing variety of possibilities. Maybe other liquids can take the place of Water. Or a less exotic chance is that there is biological life among the ice-covered oceans of other planets. Such an environment can protect a source of energy and liquid Water without leaving any visible sign of life and making it difficult to detect. For planets around other stars, we don’t know enough to say what’s happening there. “It’s hard to think that we can find life on an exoplanet,” Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University, admitted. “But the outer solar system is accessible to us.” Therefore, the quest for exotic life should begin near the home. The moons of Saturn and Jupiter offer an excellent opportunity for an investigation to determine whether life on planets can exist without an atmosphere. Jupiter’s Europe and Saturn and Celadus has both inland oceans and internal heat sources. Celadus has large propelling water vapour gutters on its south pole; Europe also occasionally blows plumes into space. Future space missions will fly through the plumes, take samples and study for possible biochemicals. NASA’s proposed Europa Landing Mission, which will launch in about a decade, can then, with its investigation, establish whether there is life in the surface ocean water or in the Water that has snowed back and is available for chemical analysis.
Meanwhile, another Saturn moon, Titan, can provide us with information on whether life can occur without liquid Water. Titanium sprinkled with methane and ethane from lakes that seasonally filled with hydrocarbon rain. Lunine and his colleagues speculate that growth can happen in this icy environment. Several well-formulated plans and concepts already exist for a landing gear that can investigate Titan’s methane lake, looking for microbial life. However, it finds for such a project have not yet been made available.
However, for the collective group of exoplanets that have no analogue in our solar system, scientists must rely on laboratory experiments and their imagination. “We’re still looking for the basic physical and chemical requirements we anticipate life, and we’re trying to keep the investigation as broad as possible,” Cable said. Exo-planet researchers such as Sara Seager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Victoria Meadows at the University of Washington are modelling diverse types of possible planetary atmospheres and the types of chemical fingerprints that life can cause. Now the onus on NASA and other space agencies is to design instruments that can detect as many lives as possible. Most new telescopes only have access to a limited range of wavelengths. “If you think of the light spectrum like Venetian window blinds, some blinds removed, this is not a good way to determine the composition of the light spectrum,” Lunine said. In response, astronomers led by Seager and Scott Gaudi of Ohio State University suggested NASA deployed a “Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission (HabEx)” in the 2030s or 2040s. It will scan exoplanets over a wide range of optical and near-infrared wavelengths for signs of oxygen and water vapour.
Creating a comprehensive search for the existence of space creatures will not be easy, nor will it be cheap, but it will undoubtedly be innovative. Even if astrobiologists find nothing, that knowledge will tell us how extraordinary life is here on Earth. And any kind of success for us here on Earth will be terrifying. The discovery of bacteria on Mars will tell us that we are not alone. Discovering organisms in Titan’s methane lakes will make an even more astounding impression on us and confirm that our way of existence is not the only way for God-given life. Either way, we, as Earth Residents, will never look at the cosmos in an informal style again.
Mattheus Frederik
