What is life? This is the typical big question scientists have been trying to answer for millenniums. But this time, the big question is: Where is life?
Colorado State University’s Santangelo Lab, housed in the Molecular and Radiological Biosciences building, was awarded a $1.3 million grant in partnership with researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and Rice University. This grant aims to discover a way to detect extraterrestrial life and the signs to look for that would imply there are life forms outside of Earth.
When thinking about this idea, the Fermi paradox is applicable. This paradox is the idea that there is a high likelihood of extraterrestrial life, yet no evidence has been found.
“Astrobiology research is taking place because its time has come,” NASA’s astrobiology webpage reads. “Scientists across the country and around the world are diving into origin-of-life and life-beyond-Earth issues and developing exciting and cutting-edge work. But NASA also has an astrobiology ‘strategy’ describing where the agency sees promising lines of research — from the highly specific to the wide and broad — that the agency might support.”
After realizing that there is not yet a way to detect life in space, NASA decided to invest in scientists to determine methods that can be used to identify extraterrestrial life. Postdoctoral researcher Seré Williams is focusing on creating samples to answer this very question.
“I’m going to be creating samples that are samples of lipids and samples of amino acids and samples of full complex proteins and samples of lipids that have been turned into what we call micelles — so like a lipid vesicle,” Williams said.
Once these samples have been created, Williams plans to test them against five different methods. This process will be used to discover which combination of methods will be most reliable in detecting life.
“It’s, like, actually a whole composed thing,” Williams said. “We are going to take five methods, and they’re all generally spectroscopic methods. … The idea is to take these samples and a combination of these samples and run them through these five methods to be able to use, you know, from one and then up to five, like a combinatorial approach of potentially five methods to say every time there is life or not life in this sample. And so the samples are, you know, going to be composed of both actual cells but then also things that look like cells that aren’t living at all.”
The samples that will be used are not coming from space, as they are very difficult to obtain. A sample from space would have to come from an asteroid or other space object. For example, there was abundant ammonia and nitrogen-rich soluble organic matter in samples from an asteroid. Scientists detected multiple amino acids that are part of the building blocks of life on that planet, which is similar to what this program is aiming to look for.
CSU’s lab does not research astrobiology but rather DNA.
“We do have grants from NASA, but they’re about DNA repair,” Williams said. “So when an organism is replicating, it wants to make sure that its DNA is replicated accurately. If there are too many errors, it will mutate and then not survive.”
While there is currently no concrete evidence for life in space, NASA’s goal is to have a definitive answer to this question.
“The size of space is incomprehensible, and the speed of light in a vacuum is the fastest speed at which information or matter can travel, according to our current understanding of physics, and it still takes, like, five hours, five and a half hours, for light from the sun to even reach Pluto,” Williams said.
Just as the vastness of space leaves us questioning the existence of life beyond Earth, the uncertainty of human existence and purpose is a central theme in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “To be, or not to be.”
H.A.M.L.E.T. is the research study’s acronym for Holistic Astrobiological Metric for Life on Extraterrestrial Targets.
“Hamlet was the guy who said ‘To be, or not to be,’ which is exactly what this project is answering,” Williams said.
Reach Riley Paling at science@collegian.com or on Twitter @rileypaling.
