Scientists Study Places Where Life Thrives…

and where it May Someday Exist

Judging by the uproar over the past few days in the blog-o-sphere and comment-o-sphere, you’d think that NASA was announcing that life had been discovered on Mars or Titan or any number of other unlikely places.  What I’ve seen in idle speculation and comments on blogs, FaceBook, and even on some news sites,  leads me to wonder if there’s any intelligent life left on the Web. I mean, come on.  There’s been some pretty irresponsible commentary by all kinds of people (including journalists, bloggers, and some scientists) and it’s really taking away from the wonderfulness of the actual discoveries.  Well, let’s take a look at the REAL stories and see what all the fuss is about.

The first, being talked about today, is the finding that some bacteria that live in Mono Lake in California appear to eat and apparently thrive on arsenic — a chemical that is usually toxic to life.  This finding is based on laboratory studies of these bacteria. In such a setting, not only can these buggers eat the stuff, but they appear to have evolved enough to be able to chemically alter it and incorporate it into their DNA. The lead researcher, Dr. Felisa Wolfe-Simon at the U.S. Geological Survey, put it pretty well: “”We know that some microbes can breathe arsenic, but what we’ve found is a microbe doing something new — building parts of itself out of arsenic,” she said. “If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected, what else can life do that we haven’t seen yet?”

Bugs eating arsenic?  That result is going to have a huge impact on other areas of research into life and its processes, including the study of Earth’s evolution, organic chemistry, biogeochemical cycles, disease mitigation and Earth system research.  To put it simply, this has implications for understanding the chemical environments that life can exist and thrive in.  Essentially, this NASA-funded research is changing our very basic knowledge about what kinds of life forms we have on this planet, and where they can exist and thrive.

Now, this is a far cry from breathless claims that NASA was going to announce life on Mars and all the other shouting that we’ve been seeing on the Web and in the press the past couple of days. Those are the usual claims, and I find them wearisome when they come without any proof or understanding of the actual science being reported.

On the other hand, this report is REAL science being shared by real scientists who have been out the field doing what science does best: examining, studying, and understanding what’s right in front of us. It’s exciting. It’s different. And, it’s going to spur other scientists to study the results and extend them into other areas.  But it’s not little green life forms holding up their middle fingers and saying, “Take me to your arsenic.” Quite the opposite: the little life forms seem to have found their arsenic and said, “We’re happy here, thank you very much.”

You can also read more about this fascinating biological discovery at Science’s web site, the journal that is publishing the story of the arsenic-loving critters.

The second discovery this week that has implications for life is the revelation by astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile of a super-Earth exoplanet (i.e. a semi-Earthlike planet bigger than Earth) that has what appears to be a water-rich atmosphere.   This water could be in the form of steam, or wet clouds or hazes.  GJ 1214b has a radius of about 2.6 times that of the Earth and is about 6.5 times as massive. Its host star is a small faint star about 40 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Ophiuchus. You can read more details here.

Of course, as soon as news of this discovery came out, I began to see speculation about life being discovered on that planet.  Not just in news sites, but all around the web-o-sphere and by commentators who should have known better.  I hate to be a wet blanket (so to speak), but the presence of water does NOT equal the presence of life. It DOES mean, however, that the environment on that planet could be conducive to the formation of life that depends on water.  And, that’s pretty darned cool.  Still, no actual discovery of life has happened there… yet.

I think that this tells us, more than ever, that the conditions for life do exist “out there” and that the formation of planets where life could form and exist is not limited to our own solar system.  It’s not surprising to find these planets — eventually we were bound to. Coupled with the astrobiology discovery announced today, it tells ME that this universe is complex, fascinating, and always ready to hand us a surprise or two!