Space Aliens on Distant Planets—They've Got Your Attention?!

As we come across many milestones in science, another quiet one has recently snuck in too. As of February this year, we have officially exceeded a thousand extra-solar planets & counting. This inevitably begs the question of life. And an inquiry into life on other planets often brings with it many fallacies (many-times perpetrated by science dweebs themselves), as much as by little green UFO enthusiasts. Many of these fallacies stem directly from an anthromorphocentric view and an inability to ever escape from it, when forming scientific queries. While/Whether the scientists working on these projects might choose to simplify their language (if they're even aware of it) in order to popularize their understanding, they do a great disservice to understanding the subject & approach for generations by stymieing the pursuit of science. 


Out there in space. The Voyager probes swiftly drift & silently wander the highways of the cosmos - as the furthest man-made objects ever sent out there. Voyager 2 still sends faint happy postcards from it's 36-years & 6-months' (as of Feb 2014) sojourn in deep space. Both probes carry those famous gold plated records, put together by Carl Sagan and colleagues. I don't think he was expecting aliens to turn it up on their turntable to hear Chuck Berry's  "Johnny B. Goode", understand the greetings from the people of Earth, or deduce the whale sound to be not a bad singer with a deep voice. Sagan understood its' meaning as a symbolic time capsule. He would have been pleased at the myriad worlds that have since come in his wake. And he would have been sorely disappointed at the non-science that has since come to plague the establishment, like a stubborn virus flu from outer movie space. The lack of grasp of metaphor, symbol or enquiry. The lack of basic science. 

Lack of methane doesn't mean Mars never supported life. Plenty of Earth organisms don't produce the gas. - The Curiosity Rover officially tweets

 That's a good start; in understanding that alien life will not conform to our narrow understanding of it. Since local life clearly doesn't. You could easily find any number of researchers tripping over themselves across the globe in various centres spewing stock mock-Confucian phrases like, 'This is too warm, that is too cold, this is too hot, the other one's not in the right place..' Very much like a bratty astro-Goldilocks in a space-tale with bears. Those 'bears' defy us in open space, with the first known animals to survive it - the tardigrades. Those darling micro-bearers of extreme living, recover upon re-hydration, after having taken to the vacuum & radiation of space (on the FOTON-M3 mission) for 10 days.  They can do dormancy for 10 years. They can survive the temperature of boiling water and a thousand times normal atmospheric pressure & radiation. And you can cool them down to -273 °C - which you will notice is almost absolute zero. 

Why?

Because life defies our expectations. Time and again. In hydro thermal vents where temperatures exceed that of boiling water. In the deepest spot on earth - The Mariana Trench (which showed signs of thriving life in 2013). So one can't say no to Europa, or other worlds with depth and liquidity. There is fungi (Neocallimastix) that won't do oxygen (anaerobic organisms). Even more spectacularly, exposure to space, seems to accelerate the growth of certain microbes (including the formation of novel structures not seen on Earth); instead of impeding them. The Guinness Book Of World Records' spot however goes to the aptly named radiation-resistant poly-extremophile Deinococcus Radiodurans. Life on Mars, more than just a charming David Bowie ditty, has always been a rock-star poster-child in the hunt for extra-terrestrial lifeforms. The planet named after the Roman god of war has been the source of many heated, contentious claims for life - 2 of which are well-known from the modern era of space exploration. The LR experiment performed by Viking 2 when it landed in 76' on a red planet that may've been once running blue. Opinion has recently swung again that the experiment detected something (interesting), after ice was discovered near the surface of where the Vikings landed. The Viking programme itself was our first startling confirmation of the impact of water on Mars. Its' images of deep valleys and groovy riverbeds are now taken for granted, not just for those of us exposed to Google Mars. The very red we associate with Mars {rust/hematite/iron(III) oxide} is one running line of evidence that water ran rampant on it in the recent past. 

The other claim is ALH 84001 - the Martian meteorite. Its' claims to famous evidence of ancient alien life, known only to a handful at the time, made the big jump to public conscience when it hit the news on August 6, 1996. It's a fallacy to assume that we are a rare life form and Earth is the optimal place where it took off - that we live in the best of all possible worlds. We then point to the ocean and all the vegetation that makes our planet a verdant, wondrous blue-green marble, rolling in suspension across a canvas of squid-ink space-darkness, past other dead worlds; and make it a point to say: See, rare Earth. In doing so, our best minds totally forget that that very marble in cyan is not incidental to life but was (and is) shaped by the lifeforms on it, from cyanobacterium to poisonous oxygen to plants and photosynthesis, for a very long time. Ancient cyanobacteria like Chroococcidiopsis withstand harsh environments, temperatures and radiation. We are still nonplussed in our attempts at answering the riddle of early origins of life here; together with it's continued survival in the same. It turns up in all the places we were adamant that it was too hot, cold, limited, sterile, poisonous and dead. Even meteorite explosions and mass extinctions don't get rid of it. We've had so many extremophiles that far from being odd exceptions, we've since ceded them kingdoms and a domain. And that's only the range of environments and circumstances on Earth. Life in all it's infinite variety seems to mirror the range of environments it is found in, taking shape as the necessary acidophiles, alkaliphiles, piezophiles (high pressure), xerophiles (very dry environs), with clinical, ruthless efficiency. 

There is a planet of diamond and another with 4 suns. These are the many labs in which we have good opportunity in the decades ahead to pursue this ruthless efficiency. A thousand new worlds (albeit many not in our idea of habitable zones - whence their ready visibility) is opportunity for us to re-examine the idea & definition of life in the cosmos. It gives us pause to start looking for metabolic processes that replicate by replicating the very instructions for that process, with stable chemical reactions. But we won't get there with silly assumptions about the process. No more informed than a naive, spoilt Goldilocks, looking for porridge and warm beds. One notorious example of this is the infamous "Drake equation". (In recent times, the pendulum on it has swung the other direction again, with commentators now opining that the equation was meant to stimulate discussion more than being a serious consideration of an equation). The equation that purports to give an estimate for the number of advanced civilizations we can radio in our galaxy has terms, uncertain parameters and assumptions that are so flawed that it can give any number of a wide range of answers. Including possibly the chances of finding porridge in many places.

Behold also the far-famed Fermi paradox which is basically- if there are so many of them, how come I haven't heard from them yet? Such a line presupposes that life would want to or need to make contact and if it does, it will in a way we can hear about it. That we will get their Johnny Betelgeuse B. Good. The simple answer to it is really probably this: The Universe is large, very large. The lifetime of the kind of species that the paradox presupposes is limited. Hence the paucity. Thus the only way to come by the even more limited contact event is to look at a large enough number of worlds. Since intelligent life is difficult to find here on the reality show that is earth itself, I'm not surprised with its' scarcity across the Universe. The building blocks that make up our body and world of heavier elements were all forged in the furnaces of dying stars and stellar collisions. Our orange Sun with a 15 million degrees Celsius squishy centre does not have the enough pressure to fuse and produce most of the 92 and more elements we find on Earth. The brilliant explanation for how they came about is one of the rare cases of a brilliant application of the anthropic principle to the Universe. [the 1957 B2FH paper by Fred Hoyle and Co.] Here we see, our place in space, as stardust put in proper perspective. 

So let's put our closing, ironic, anthropic spin on that stellar anthropia itself. 3 helium-4 nuclei becoming carbon at a particular narrow resonance in the nuclear process makes us carbon-based lifeforms. That nuclear reaction did not just pop up in the afterbirth of a single dying star. It happened across the Universe with many stars (and we can calculate the statistical incidence of stardeaths) initiating nuclear reactions, with many cascading resonances. The chance of the patent to metabolize between one heavy element to another, from those universal reactions, being granted to a single factory on Earth, is indeed very odd. The reasonable need to even this occurrence of an odd chance leads us inevitably to the implication ... of other factories. Out there. 

Probably not in our lifetime. Probably not with our understanding of life. 

This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. - The Voyager and Pioneer probes carry these messages on them. Etched with an extremely pure sample of uranium-238 [with a half-life of 4.468 billion years]. Enough time.

  On November 4 2013, astronomers reported, based on Kepler space mission data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of sun-like stars and red dwarf stars within the Milky Way Galaxy.

 The Curiosity rover discovered fine-grained sedimentary rocks, which are inferred to represent an ancient lake and preserve evidence of an environment that would have been suited to support a Martian biosphere founded on chemolithoautotrophy - Science Magazine article on the Gale Crater's 100 thousand-year old extinct lake.

 Phoenix's preliminary data revealed that Mars soil contains perchlorate, and thus may not be as life-friendly as thought earlier. - On the 2008 Phoenix mission's search for life on Mars.

External Links and Articles:

• NASA's Kepler Mission & Exoplanets
• On exoplanet habitability
• On how exoplanets are hunted
• A good interview on Titan, how worlds co-evolve with their life-forms and why we don't have to look for another Earth when looking for life-forms
• Of Drake equations, rare Earths & perfect laboratories
• Mars: Curiosity finds freshwater lake 2 months ago
• On NASA's 1976 Viking 2 lander
• Lifeforms: Dive into the deepest point on Earth's surface and discover microbes that don't just exist, but thrive ahead of other elevated regions.
• In the shock-waves of supernovas: Bacteria, even our common garden variety E. Coli has been discovered to be able to survive & multiply under huge gravitational pressures, that are some 400,000 times that of Earth's gravity; Environments that interestingly, are what you would find on massive stars. {Hoyle and Wickramasinghe would be elated.}
• On Pseudomonas aeruginosa: Where spaceflight promotes microbial growth.
• The discovery of a whole new genus that has only been seen in 2 of the most sterile environs on Earth - The carefully screened clean-rooms of NASA & of the European Space Agency (ESA).
  “The surface environment on Mars is superlow pressure, no water, high [in] ultraviolet flux and high [in] cosmic radiation. In other words, a terrible place for life, even microbes that like clean rooms.” Parag Vaishampayan, NASA JPL.
• Elements: Why the heavy parts of us are stardust