Category Archives: life

astronomy, astronomy media, astronomy news, Hugo Chavez, life, Mars

Stargazing, Martians, and Hugo Chavez

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Musings on a Wednesday Night

There’s never a dull moment in astronomy. If you’re a skywatching addict, then there’s something for you every night to check out. Last Saturday it was the Full Moon, and it was gorgeous!  We didn’t get to see it rise here at the hacienda, but after it cleared the mountain in back of us, the Moon looked great.  Tonight is quite clear (and cold), and so maybe later on I’ll step out and check out the starry skies. Right now, Sirius is twinkling low in the southwest and the stars of the Winter Circle are setting soon.  Another sign that spring is here for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, and autumn has arrived for the folks in the Southern Hemisphere.

Mars isn’t in our night-time sky right now. In fact, it appears so close to the Sun that it’s nearly impossible to see without help. But, even though it’s out of sight, Mars is not out of mind.  Even the leader of Venezuela has been talking about the Red Planet this week, tying capitalism to the loss of life on Mars.  I’m not precisely aware of when Mr. Chavez got his degrees in planetary science OR economics and political science, and I’ve not seen evidence of his research contributions to those fields, but I’m reasonably certain that the lack of life on Mars isn’t due to a plot against Marxist-Leninist paradises here on Earth. It’s amusing to read his rhetoric, even as you see it for what it is — getting in a dig at his neighbors to the north. It seemed like an unlikely topic for him to bring up, but then again, any world leader talking about anything to do with the sky (astronomy or planetary science-wise) catches my attention.

No, Martian life — if it existed — probably never got started down the long evolutionary path that we did here on Earth. Conditions on the Red Planet became untenable for that — not due to Adam Smith-style capitalism, which is a human construct that came long after life took root on Earth.  More likely physical conditions were to fault on Mars, entirely NATURAL conditions that existed long before life on Earth was able to do more than look up to the sky in wonder. Changing conditions (atmospheric loss, cooling, geological changes) may well have doomed anything more complex than a Martian microbe to a very uncertain future.

Courtesy MIT/Christine Daniloff.

As it turns out, if a group of scientists at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts are right,  there’s a tantalizing possibility that life on EARTH may have its seeds on Mars, descending from organisms that somehow made their way from Mars to our planet in the very distant past.

It’s not so far-fetched as it might sound at first.  There are some well-established ideas about Mars that lend themselves to this story and make it a plausible avenue of research into the origins of life on Earth.

First, early in solar system history, the climates on Mars and the Earth were much more similar than they are now. Life that arose and flourished on one planet could presumably have survived on the other — if it could get from one place to the other. Second, an estimated one billion tons of rock have traveled from Mars to Earth since the two planets formed. That material was blasted loose by asteroid impacts and sent on its way between planets. Eventually, the “stuff” from Mars hit EArth.  Third, microbes have been shown to be capable of surviving the initial shock of such an impact.  So, if there WAS life on Mars (in handy microbe form, which is an easy way to transport living material), and it somehow caught a ride on an outbound rock, then given a good set of orbital conditions, there would have been NOTHING stopping that rock and its life-load from getting here eventually. When you look at the orbital dynamics of our two planets, it turns out that the chances are a hundred times better for rocks to travel from Mars to Earth.

I know that sounds surprising, but life is amazingly resilient, and in fact, there is evidence such microbes could also survive the thousands of years of transit through space before arriving at another planet.

So if life got started on Mars first, and it got blasted off the planet in a meteorite impact, then some hardy microbes could have been carried here to Earth. And, if that’s true, then Ray Bradbury’s final scene in “Martian Chronicles” is more prophetic than he may have thought when he wrote it back in 1950.   But, instead of finding those humanoid Martians staring at their own faces in a canal on Mars, all we have to do is look in the mirror in our homes here on Earth.

Of course, there’s a lot of work to do to prove this hypothesis, but I find it kind of poetic and interesting.  We — you, me, Mr. Chavez — all the people on Earth — really COULD be Martians, and here all along we’ve been yearning to explore that RedPlanet so far away. And, we’re using technology that is the fruit of the capitalism that Mr. Chavez regularly decries on TV, radio, and the Internet — ironically enough, media methods that also depend more on capitalist investment than he might feel comfortable with.

But there you go. Astronomy and planetary science lead one down some interesting paths, and not always scientific ones.  I think it’s rather interesting that even though his politics aren’t the same as mine, Mr. Chavez has an awareness of Mars and its past and future.  I wonder if he stargazes, too?

astrobiology, exoplanets, exploration, extrasolar planets, GJ 1214b, life, mono lake, NASA

Arsenic-Eating Life and New Planets

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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.

Arsenic-processing bacteria like those growing in Mono Lake, California. Courtesy NASA.

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.

Artist's conception of the super-Earth planet GJ 1214b. Courtesy ESO.

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!