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Astrobiology

2019 Breakthrough Discuss Conference: Migration of Life in the Universe

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 11, 2019
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2019 Breakthrough Discuss Conference: Migration of Life in the Universe

The 2019 Breakthrough Discuss Conference: “Migration of Life in the Universe” is being held on 11-12 April. A live webcast starts at 800 am PDT/1100 am EDT at http://www.youtube.com/breakthroughprize. Details on the event can be found here. Live tweeting will be done at @Astrobiology

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

11 responses to “2019 Breakthrough Discuss Conference: Migration of Life in the Universe”

  1. Michael Spencer says:
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    Imagine some sort of life found on Mars— and by “some sort,” suppose universal agreement, even if it’s totally weird.

    (this is an imaginary game, after all).

    Remember that material regularly moves between the two planets. With the two instances in hand, are we observing a second genesis? Or a branch in the Tree of Life, one side Terran, the other Martian? Moving forward, what might be found on Europa or Ganymede?

    Now imagine a scene some centuries hence, standing on an alien world and under an alien sun. Extending the game, imagine another observation of life, possibly quite unusual.

    Estimable thinkers have postulated an exchange of materials, even at interstellar distances- a lot can happen in 13+ billion years. Are we seeing a second or third genesis, or not?

    Which proceeded which? Is one derivative?

    Are We Alone? Can we ever know? The answer likely lives in just how different the instances are. Certainly provides fodder for the faith-based types, maybe for millennia.

    • Bob Mahoney says:
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      Fodder for all rationale creatures. Why the highlighted specification regarding ‘faith-based types?’ Perhaps your intention lies in your definition of fodder?

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        Yes, maybe. I was thinking that while the science may never be resolve(able), some will see the matter already closed; that would be faith-based.

        I take faith to mean acceptance as fact with no actual evidence.

    • fcrary says:
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      Speculation on that subject has been going on for a long time. Giordano Bruno was not, as some have claimed, burned at the stake in 1600 for advocating Copernican cosmology. He went two steps further. First, he speculated about life on other planets or around stars, since the was no longer any reason to think the Earth was unique. Second, he started discussing the theological implications of extra terrestrial life. Actually, even that is an oversimplification. But the Church wasn’t too upset about disagreements over astronomy. But when those debates drifted into theology, they got very, very upset about people contradicting official doctrine.

    • ThomasLMatula says:
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      Given the state of the field of molecular biology it will be fairly easy to tell by the DNA if it is related to life on Earth and if so how long ago was the separation. Given the relative gravity fields I suspect if there was a connection it would be from Mars to Earth simply because it would take less energy to be blown free of the Martian surface. But dating the radiation of species should give an indication if the original ancestor was on Mars or Earth. Yes, in paleontology today fossils from the field are rapidly being demoted to simply confirming what DNA analysis is showing in terms of answering the big questions about the emergence of living organisms.

      And actually you wouldn’t even need any specimens of Martian life. On Earth species surveys are now being done by simply testing lake/river/ocean water for DNA. It’s been found to be a quick way to determine which species a present and their relative abundance. If the Europa Clipper has the right instrument it may be able to tell us all about life on Europe simply by testing a water sample from one of the geysers.

      Incidentally we know by DNA analysis that all life on Earth was very likely the result of a single event, so if there was a transfer from Mars it only happened once, around 3.5 billion years ago.

      • fcrary says:
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        I’m afraid Europa Clipper won’t be able to do that. Even if it flew through a plume, the instruments will only give the abundance of relatively small molecules as a function of mass. (By relatively simple, I mean under 1000 AMU or so, which is about 14 benzine rings. That’s complex by some standards, by not even close to RNA.) A lander could do more, but then you have to worry about the surface age (and how far down to dig) because the radiation environment will break down organics fairly quickly.

        On the bright side, they don’t really need to fly through a plume to get that. MASPEX can measure material sputtered off a passive surface by energetic particles (although the chemistry will probably me modified in the process) and SUDA can get mass spectra of dust particles ejected off the surface by micrometeor impacts. That’s deliberate. The plumes (if they exist, and I’ve started referring to myself as a plume denier at conferences…) are too sporadic target during a flyby.

        Oh, and it’s just a personal gripe, but they aren’t geysers, or at least we don’t know if they are. Geyser implies something very specific about the subsurface water table, heat source and plumbing. Geyser is just a word the media relations people like, because plume is something people might not immediately and intuitively understand, and fumaroles is even worse.

        • ThomasLMatula says:
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          Pity, but if plumes are that irregular, or don’t exist, it would be better to survey the surface. It would be best to get some kind of sample from the subsurface ocean itself, but that is probably a long long way off.

          • fcrary says:
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            The initial Europa lander studies came out as very expensive, and the more recent ones still don’t give me a warm, comfortable feeling. It’s a nasty radiation environment, so the lander won’t last long, and real, definitive, life detection experiments are difficult. Fitting something to sequence DNA into a few hundred kilo lander isn’t easy.

            The plan, at present and for a mission which isn’t in the President’s proposed budget, is for samples from one trench with a depth of at least 10 cm. That might or might not be deep enough to collect material unaffected by radiation. That’s as good an estimate as existing data permits. But I also no the existing data is pretty limited so that 10 cm is pretty uncertain. I’d hate to fly a mission like that and find out that, no, there isn’t anything of biological significance left within 15 cm of the surface. And collecting from one trench, rather than the originally planned several trenches, makes me nervous. Real planets aren’t uniform, and I can imagine a spot that’s just perfect being 0.5 meters from a spot that’s pretty useless to sample. Of course, they’d try to pick the right place to sample, but given the lifetime of the lander, they’d have to make that decision in a hurry.

            As far as getting to the ocean is concerned, the ice shell on Europa is probably a few kilometers think on average. That’s about the thickness of the East Antarctic ice sheet. People have drilled down to subglacial lakes like Vostok in East Antarctica. But it wasn’t easy, took a lot of gear, and took people on site to kick things when they jammed. The HP3 experiment on InSight is currently stuck 0.3 meters down, compared to the planned final depth of 5 meters. So I’m a little pessimistic about robotic drilling down to a few kilometers through a real world’s ice sheet.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            Of course there is another option. Enceladus in the Saturn system. From what I understand the radiation environment there is less harsh. And it would take a lot less energy to land on it since it is much smaller than Europa.

          • fcrary says:
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            Enceladus versus Europa is something planetary scientists argue about over beers. Personally, I’m for Enceladus. As you note, the radiation environment isn’t as bad. It’s still about as bad as the Earth’s Van Allen belts, so it’s a relative thing, but that’s manageable.

            But I think the big difference is we know there is a plume of gas and dust emitted from the south pole. And we know the sources and that they are always active. We might argue about whether the flux varies by a factor of two or three, but it doesn’t drop to zero. That means you can target them for a plume-crossing flyby years in advance and be near certain you’ll fly a plume. And we know from Cassini that you can get good composition from in situ measurements of the gas and dust. Good enough to infer things like the pH of the source water.

            With Europa, we’ve got a few detections of a plume (and pretty iffy ones in my opinion) out of dozens of observations. And the source isn’t in the same place every time. That’s not something you can target a spacecraft to, although you might manage something by releasing a single-encounter CubeSat. But I can’t see fitting a good astrobiology package into a CubeSat.

  2. Michael Spencer says:
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    another thought experiment: does anyone think Mr. Bezos will receive the rapture that has greeted Mr. Musk?

    Part of the enthusiasm has to do with being first, of course. What can Mr. Bezos do first, after all? Mr. Jobs famously, and similarly, invoked the distortion of reality when introducing new products (and the world is much poorer in his absence). Mr. Musk, same. When I see him at IAC or wherever, I just want to believe him even though I know his timelines are not to be trusted.

    But part of the enthusiasm is engendered by Mr. Musk: his awkward, stuttering presentation, his forthrightness, his frequent inability to find the camera, and his clear love of what he is doing, all adding up to a kind of charisma not seen before. Does Mr. Bezos have any of this? And will this shift hurt the industry?