Jose Garcia writes from the wonderful Meme Therapy, where he’s conducting another brain parade, this one asking science fiction writers and scientists a straightforward question: “Do you think it likely that the first discovery of extraterrestrial life will be made by a rover?” The answers to all of Jose’s brain parade questions are stimulating and reflect a wide variety of perspectives, from Robert Zubrin’s unqualified “No. It will be made by human explorers operating on the surface of Mars,” to writer Peter Watts’ call for widening the search from planets to comets and molecular dust clouds.
Centauri Dreams‘ guess is that extraterrestrial life may well exist deep within the Martian soil, but the first conclusive proof of life beyond Earth will come by rover and in a more exotic place, such as one of the Galilean moons of Jupiter or, if we want to get truly exotic, in the bizarre deep freeze of Titan. Because this is by nature guesswork, I’m just playing a hunch that Mars is going to be a tougher nut to crack in astrobiological terms than we think. Expect the unexpected, since virtually every aspect of space exploration (and especially the hunt for exoplanets) has produced one jaw-dropping surprise after another.
And since we’re shooting the breeze here (and although it has nothing to do with rovers), the real Centauri Dreams hunch is that life is all but ubiquitous in the galaxy, but intelligent life vanishingly rare. I remain a SETI advocate despite this because I hope to be proven wrong.
I’m a bit skeptical about the prospects for life in this solar system. Our assumptions about the universe have a nasty habit of turning out to be wrong. You also have to wonder why we haven’t found more compelling evidence of ET microbes in all the meteorites we’ve been pouring over.
My guess is it will be made by telescopes on earth-like planets in habitable orbits. Kepler will find a few of them and the next generation of ground-based telescopes should be able to get good spectra to see if there’s O2 in the atmosphere or not. Pessimistically we’re talking about 10-15 years.
If we actually mean seeing living critters as opposed to just detecting their influence, it’s anyone’s guess. Still, it’s more likely to be a rover since robots have become smaller and more effective in the last few decades while we humans have stayed pretty much the same.
Actually I like that guess very much. If we do get our space-based assets lined up and can get those spectra, it’s well within the realm of possibility that we’ll find life traces in the distant atmospheres of terrestrial exoplanets before we get a rover to the outer planets of our own system.
I expect that life will be found on Mars by a rover and will be in the form of subsurface bacterial life. Their “deep, hot biosphere” is likely just a “spotty, lukewarm biosphere” now. Earth and Mars have been throwing rocks at each other since the beginning and there were probably bacterial passengers going both ways. Of course, finding depends on looking and a suitably equipped rover will have to be sent.
As for more exotic locales like Titan, I’d expect (hope!) life is there too, but it will likely be quite different and a definitive identification will be much harder to create. How do you prove some sort of liquid ethane based thingy is alive? On Mars, I’d expect the life to be very similar to Earth’s so assays would be easier to generate.
Evidence for extraterrestrial life has already been found, many times. ALH840001 was found to have the fossil tracks of bacterial life, the Wolf Trap experiment on the Viking lander found evidence for life, Spirit and Opportunity have found fossils on Mars, and the green cracks on the surface of Enceladus most likely contain life.
the Wolf Trap experiment on the Viking lander
There was no ‘Wolf Trap’ experiment on the Viking Lander. The life-detection experiments that were there detected a signal, but it differed considerably from what would be expected from life.
Recently, it’s been proposed that electrostatic discharges in the global dust storms on Mars produce hydrogen peroxide and other superoxidizing agents, which may explain the Viking results (including the near-total absence of organic matter in the regolith). If this is the case then surface life is highly unlikely on Mars.
Hi All
Olaf Stapledon described Martian life as cloud-like organisms that floated around the Martian atmosphere. What if the Martians are like that, perhaps dusty plasmas that are energised by the dust-storms that build-up quite strong electric fields… hang on, haven’t we already seen them?
Dust-devils are the Stapledonian Martians. I’m saying this tongue in cheek, but what if there’s life we can’t yet recognise as life? Greg Benford’s recent “The Sunborn” expands on Arthur Clarke’s ‘plasma aliens’ from “Imperial Earth”, giving a believable portrayal of such truly alien lifeforms. Mars’ openness to the interplanetary magnetic fields would make it more useful to such life than our magnetically shrouded world.
Before all the silliness over crop-circle fakery there were reasonably good eye-witness accounts of what seemed to be coherent dusty-plasmas caught in the act of making such circles. It might be just weird meteorology, but there’s an awful lot of electrical energy running around our atmosphere. A plasma biology could conceivably arise in parallel to our own, perhaps evolving communicative intelligence. Michael Persinger’s work on Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation indicates that intense electromagnetic fields can have incredibly real feeling effects on human perceptions. Perhaps the bizarre encounters with ‘UFOs’ that can’t be explained are the magnetic beings trying to communicate?
All unsubstantiated ideas, but my point is that: do we yet know enough about life in all its forms to know it if we find it?
A lot of the isotopic imbalance data used to infer life in Archean rocks can potentially be caused by abiotic processes. Even microfossils can be emulated by geochemistry. So would we know life from nonlife if we found it?
Life on Mars, Europa and Titan will need exotic chemistry to make a living, and there’s an incredible number of lifeforms on Earth that can’t be cultured using very generalised conditions proposed for ‘wolftraps’ and the like. Extremophiles can be very picky about their reproductive environments, more so than a reasonable rover experiment can handle.
So I don’t think a rover can find life, but – witness the periodic cleaning of the MERs – life can very definitely find the rovers.
Adam ;-)
Or, there might not be any life on mars at all. I am not so confident life is abundant in the universe, nor that intelligent life exists at all.
Present company excepted perhaps?
Put me in the camp where simple life may be abundant and technical civs rare to non-existant. I’m even skeptical about simple life on Mars (see latest info on electrical dust storms etc.) even below surface. Europa and others similar lack effective energy sources for life.
Point being that after a half century of space exploration we still lack positive scientific data to base any of our conjectures. So we’re left hypothethizing ‘just so’ stories with more and more improbable basis for exotic life that are not ruled out by observation.
The long stable Earth with its very improbable large satellite and orderly circular orbital planetary companions seems more and more unique the more we know. Quite the reverse of what was common opinion at the start of the space age.