For example, frozen microscopic animals were recently discovered to survive 24,000 years in the Siberian permafrost, and microbial life was found to persist 100 million years underneath the seafloor. The adaptation of life to extreme environments could take exotic forms, as exemplified by extremophiles on Earth. In other research with Lingam, we showed that the number of life-bearing objects could exceed the number of rocky planets in the habitable zone around stars by many orders of magnitude.
Habitable conditions could exist in the oceans that lie under thick icy surfaces, not only within moons such as Saturn’s Enceladus and Jupiter’s Europa but also inside free-floating objects in interstellar space. Such experimentation must be performed in isolated environments so that mishaps with life as we don’t know it will not endanger the life we know.Īlthough the surfaces of planets and asteroids can be explored remotely for biological signatures, extraterrestrial life might be most abundant under the surface.
Creating artificial variants of life in our labs brings the risk of causing an environmental disaster, as imagined in the story of Frankenstein. In following this approach, we should be as careful as we are in tapping nuclear energy. By identifying suitable environmental conditions from our lab experiments, we can later search for real systems where they are realized in the sky, just as in the case of neutron stars. Any success with a single recipe may suggest variations that would produce a diversity of outcomes, to be assembled into our recipe book for synthetic life. One of my Harvard colleagues, the Nobel laureate Jack Szostak, is getting close to creating synthetic life in his lab. And, as I noted in a paper with Manasvi Lingam, this experimentation may use fluids other than water, which is considered essential for life as we know it. To write a rich recipe book, we need to experiment with many types of chemicals. The situation is similar to composing a recipe book with prescriptions for baking different types of cakes. By creating synthetic life in various ways from a soup of chemicals in the lab, we might be able to imagine new environments where life might occur differently than on Earth. The search for extraterrestrial life can follow a similar approach. The moral of this story is that physicists were able to imagine something new in the universe at large and search for it in the sky by following insights gained from lab experiments on Earth. It is now thought that such collisions produce the precious gold that is forged into wedding bands. Relatively recently, the LIGO experiment detected gravitational-wave signals from collisions between neutron stars at cosmological distances. Astronomers realized subsequently that there are, in fact, some 100 million neutron stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone-and a billion times more in the observable universe. For example, around the same time the neutron was discovered in the lab of James Chadwick in 1932, Lev Landau suggested that there might be stars made of neutrons.
It involves conducting laboratory experiments that reveal the underlying laws of physics, which in turn apply to the entire universe. In physics, an analogous path was already established a century ago and turned out to be successful in many contexts. But is there a path for expanding our imagination to life as we don’t know it? For that reason, in our search for extraterrestrial life, we are usually looking for life as we know it. When trying to imagine something we’ve never seen, we often default to something we have seen. The shrimp’s eyes look like two Ping Pong balls connected with cords to its head. What would their infrared-sensitive eyes look like?” The brightest student in class responded within seconds with an image of the mantis shrimp, which possesses infrared vision. As a challenge to the students, I asked: “Suppose there are creatures crawling on the surface of Proxima b. Adrenalinecaged Fandoms: 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTSĪfter their best friends get in a fatal car accident, Jeongguk and Taehyung are left to take care of their goddaughter, Jihyun, but there’s only two problems with that-one, they hate each other, and two, they don’t know the first thing about raising a baby.In my freshman seminar at Harvard University in spring 2021, I mentioned that the nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, emits mostly infrared radiation and has a planet, Proxima b, in the habitable zone around it.