Has NASA Discovered Evidence for Extraterresterial Life?

chemisttree

All the buzz is that NASA has found out something important.

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010...robiology.html

Greg Bernhardt

Universe Today seems to downgrade the event
http://www.universetoday.com/80817/c...nd-any-aliens/

Exciting none-the-less! Any new findings are welcome findings!

DaveC426913

What do you suppose the nature of the "discovery" is?

Ygggdrasil

Could possibly be publication of a paper based on data from the Kepler Space Telescope's search for Earth-like planets. The research was mentioned at a TED talk a little while ago and caught by some science news websites (http://news.discovery.com/space/kepl...e-planets.html).

[edit: actually after reading the link Greg posted, it seems like the paper is on arsenic biochemistry and implications for the origin of life. Still sounds pretty exciting.]

hamster143

I can't find a single article that is coauthored by more than two of the five participants. Voytek is probably just an administrator. Wolfe-Simon coauthored one article with Elser (about the role of molybdenum in bacteria, not too exciting and apparently unrelated to astrobiology) and one article with Benner (regarding signatures of life based on alternative types of biochemistry). There is another article, mentioned by Universe Today as well, that discusses the possibility of having life forms that use arsenic instead of, or in addition to phosphorus.

The last participant, Pamela Conrad, works at the Virtual Planetary Laboratory. To quote: "The Virtual Planet Laboratory (VPL) is a team of scientists who are using the best supercomputers available to simulate Earth-sized (terrestrial) planets. VPL's goal is to discover the likely range of habitable planets around other stars and to find out how these planets might appear to future planet-finding missions."

Based on this information, I think that we can rule out discovering evidence of extraterrestrial life. There's a good chance that they'll announce finding that allowing for arsenic-based life forms expands the range of habitability.

Ygggdrasil

Here's an interesting article from February 2009 that perhaps gives some insight into Thursday's announcement (http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/2...ere-alien-life):
It seems that researchers may have discovered life on Earth that uses novel biochemistries based on arsenic (certainly a discovery worth publication in Science). If this is the case then this discovery, in some senses, is more exciting than finding evidence of alien life on another planet (at least to a biochemist like me). This is in essence an "alien" life-form, but it lives on Earth and can be more easily studied than some hypothetical life in a far away solar system.

It remains to be seen just how different these arsenic-metabolizing organisms are from other life. Are they merely standard, run-of-the-mill microbes that have adapted to metabolize arsenic, thus providing a proof of principle of arsenic biochemistry (the more likely scenario)? Or might they represent a more ancient form of life that preceded or evolved in parallel with modern organisms (very unlikely, but if this were the case it would be an extremely significant finding)? Of course, this could all be idle speculation and the paper could be on something completely different.

Either way, I'm now eagerly awaiting this week's issue of Science.

bobze

Well the hype has got me all giddy :)

FlexGunship

If nothing else, we will be able to refine the Drake equation by an iota or more.

FlexGunship

I think your conclusion might be premature. I read that to mean that someone has thought of a way that this could be possible. Not that there are actually candidates for life that works this way.

I would put it on par with that movie Evolution where anti-dandruff shampoo with selenium was the arsenic-equivalent for nitrogen based lifeforms.

Mu naught

I hate the way people/the media hype everything up. We're living in the age of exaggeration.

Oxieee

VERY true...more over i do get irritated by the term " might possibly " or " may one day "
where our modern science to confirm and then tell whats what

Redbelly98

When I heard about this upcoming announcement, I tried to think of where on the "spectrum" of searching for alien life this might fit. By "spectrum", I mean where on the following list this news could fall:

1. Finding conditions compatible with supporting life.
2. Finding direct evidence that life once existed.
3. Finding life.
4. Finding intelligent life.

I'm guessing this would have to be at level 1, or (remotely possible) 2. We'll see tomorrow.

Greg Bernhardt

I could be wrong, but I would find it hard to believe there wouldn't be a leak if it was either 3 or 4. That kind of news would get around very quickly and difficult to contain.

hamster143

There's also level 0 - speculating about conditions that could be compatible with supporting life. Since none of the participants of the conference strike me as the kind that would be able to find anything physical (they are all theorists), we should be closer to level 0 than to level 2.

Phyisab****

I saw this on CNN and thought "holy crap!" But after reading and thinking, I'm going with level 0.

DaveC426913

Level 5. We the scientists are the aliens, and are now your overlords. This meeting is to lay out the new Rules for Approved Human Activities.

Ygggdrasil

I doubt that a purely theoretical paper speculating about the possible biochemical conditions of extraterrestrial life would make it into Science. There is reason to think that there could be some organisms with novel arsenic biochemistry. For example, in 2008, a team led by the US Geological Survey found organisms that could photosynthesize using arsenic in a lake in California (Kulp et al. Arsenic(III) Fuels Anoxygenic Photosynthesis in Hot Spring Biofilms from Mono Lake, California. Science 321: 967 (2008). doi:10.1126/science.1160799).

My guess would be that the NASA team developed new methods for seeking evidence of arsenic metabolism (methods which could possibly be used in future space probes) and validated these methods by seeking arsenic-metabolizing microbes in Mono lake or other similar areas. Finding and sequencing more arsenic-metabolizing bacteria would be helpful as it would provide more data to help determine whether the ability to metabolize arsenic originated recently or represents a more ancient form of life perhaps present on the early earth.