Finding life we can imagine

Although the surfaces of planets and asteroids can be explored remotely for biological signatures , extraterrestrial life might be most abundant under the surface. 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.

The adaptation of life to extreme environments could take exotic forms, as exemplified by extremophiles on Earth. For example, frozen microscopic animals were recently discovered to survive 24, years in the Siberian permafrost, and microbial life was found to persist million years beneath the seafloor. These microbes were born during the warm Cretaceous period when dinosaurs dominated the Earth. In the solar system, the closest conditions to Earth were realized on its nearest neighbors, Venus and Mars.

NASA recently selected two new missions to study Venus, and its Perseverance rover is searching for traces of life on Mars. My student Amir Siraj and I wrote a paper showing that the transfer of life could have been mediated by planet-grazing asteroids. My most vivid childhood memory is of dinner conversations in which the adults in the room pretended to know much more than they actually did.

And if I asked a question to which these pretenders had no ready answer, they would dismiss it as irrelevant. Science offers the privilege of maintaining our childhood curiosity.

The advance of scientific knowledge through experimentation cannot be stopped. This will be a humbling experience. But even if we will not discover this supreme intelligence in our laboratories, its by-products may just show up in our sky as mail posted from faraway neighborhoods in the Milky Way.

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. And also, 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 One of my Harvard colleagues, the Nobel laureate Jack Szostak, is getting close to creating synthetic life in his laboratory.

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