Does deep ocean research have useful guidance for finding life in the deep beyond?

This is a really great discussion of space and the search for life.

It is a lively lecture led by Clara Sousa-Silva, a fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. She and her colleagies look for signs of life on other planets "using astronomical tools to detect faint signals emitted by potential alien biospheres." 

You must be sure to watch the whole show, even though I start here, as part as our archiving efforts, at the end, where Moon Traveller reporter Jack Vaughan asks a question. A YouTube transcript of this interchange is included.

Next question facebook uh from jack.

deep ocean research is sometimes seen as

a template for looking for life beyond

earth

does that resonate in any way in

relation to your own research?

Yes absolutely i think just thinking

beyond kind of surface dwelling life

is a really useful exercise i think one

of the reasons i

like the the venus story so much despite

all its controversy is that

i'm hoping you will really change

people's minds on what it means to be

habitable

you know venus on the surface is

unequivocally

not habitable i will go out and say and

bet

all of my savings which admittedly are

not very large that

we will never find life on the surface

of venus because

complexity gets destroyed there but the

clouds

are potentially habitable and the same

applies to thinking of things like

subterranean oceans on icy moons in the

solar system

could also have life and thinking of

not so much a planet as habitable but a

planet as having

habitable pockets might be a really good

way of thinking of life

we are just privileged and blinded by a

privilege because we're so lucky to have

habitable oceans and surface and clouds

and so we forget that other planets are

not quite habitable all the way through

and and looking for life in oceans is an

excellent idea

the only problem is how do you know it's

there

because you still need to look for gases

that are released to

spectroscopically detect them so it

becomes much harder to do

and there i have colleagues who work on

this sort of interaction between

the the surface and oceans and

atmospheres so we can try and figure out

um

biosignatures by proxy for example or

in places like the moon uh enceladus we

could try and look for

the actual bursts of the geysers that

come out and try to

figure out what's coming out of those

and figure out what's going on

underneath

based on what we see getting spurted out

so

figuring out these proxies is also a

really interesting aspect of

astrobiology

okay the next question from youtube jim

are there any opportunities for citizen

scientists to get involved with

detecting

or categorizing bio signatures

yes in principle and people have done

similar things with like zooniverse and

they've also done it with

i think genetic code and it's a lovely

idea and citizen scientists in general

are great contributors to astronomy

and other fields but the problem with

this is creating that interface

and i barely have time to do my normal

research

i i don't think i have the resources to

you know create a website like the

universe that could do this

and also i do my best to make my you

know quantum chemistry research seem

exciting

by pointing out that these are

biosignatures and that's why i'm looking

for them

but ultimately it is quite difficult

quantum

physics that gets quite boring quite

quickly

and so people i worry will become bored

but people have asked me this before so

i'm starting to think that maybe i

should create a platform where people

can try and do

molecular signatures for all the

possible biosignatures that

could be useful in characterizing

exoplanets i just don't have the coding

chops

to do it but if anyone in this audience

wants to help i would love to have a

collaborator

all right um the next question

what's your gut feeling about how rare

or how prevalent

life is in the universe

excellent question um gut feelings are

bad for astronomy

but i'll do i'll do my best i basically

think that

any hypothesis that begins and ends with

we are special

is doomed to fail you know the

molecular cloud that formed the solar

system wasn't really that special

the sun i love it but it's also not

quite that special

and earth has many special things about

it but it's not like our

the molecules and elements that form it

are particularly special

and so to then think that life itself

only originated here and nowhere else in

the universe we're in a special corner

that the universe

um somehow sprinkled with fairy dust

that that feels to me like a doomed idea

but my most exciting thought about this

is the thought that we are not special

that there's nothing special about us

that we are

so mediocre so easy to come by that

actually the universe is just riddled

with life

whether that life's intelligent or not

those are different odds much

different odds but life itself i believe

is absolutely inevitable given the right

circumstances

and i don't think our circumstances are

so special that it won't happen

elsewhere

and so venus is exciting of course

because it's next door

but i very much predict that life is

common

and we are not special but that means

we're also not alone