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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| Okay, BBC again today; I expect everyone has heard the "signs of extraterrestrial life" story by now. For starters, the announcement followed the trajectory I expected: from "we found evidence of the signature of a gas in an exoplanet's atmosphere that, on Earth, is only produced by living organisms" (close to the truth) to "they found evidence of life" to "hey, they found aliens!" ...the news that signs of a gas, which on Earth is produced by simple marine organisms, has been found on a planet called K2-18b. At least the BBC isn't blowing it out of proportion. K12-18b is totally a Star Wars droid name, though. Now, the prospect of really finding alien life - meaning we are not alone in the Universe - is not far away, according to the scientist leading the team that made the detection. Okay, well, he'd know better than I would, but it seems to me that a flicker of light in a spectroscope isn't the same thing as finding alien life. And I really wish they'd worded that better, because in the popular imagination, "alien life" translates right to "little bald dudes with big eyes, death rays, and flying saucers." When what they really mean is "microbes." But all of this prompts even more questions, including, if they do find life on another world, how will this change us as a species? Ah, and now we get into the cutting-edge philosophical question. You know. The one science fiction has been exploring for over a century now. The one we've been mulling over at least since Schiaparelli found illusory channels on Mars, which got translated to English as "canals," so of course everyone thought "Martians." And yet they present it as if it's some sort of strange, new idea. To its credit, the article does talk about the Mars thing. But decades on, what has been described as "the strongest evidence yet" of life on another world has come, not from Mars or Venus, but from a planet hundreds of trillions of miles away orbiting a distant star. I'd be remiss if I didn't note that, speaking of Venus, there was a big announcement a few years ago about finding spectroscopic evidence of life-produced gases in the thick, steamy atmosphere of that planet. Which turned out to be false and was summarily retracted. If we can get false positives from our closest orbital neighbor, I'm just that much more skeptical about finding it on Star Wars Droid Planet dozens of light-years away. Skeptical, I'll emphasize, doesn't mean "in denial." I'd love for it to be a solid discovery. I've said before that I really hope that we find indisputable evidence of extraterrestrial life during my own lifetime. Thing is, though, that it will be, as this article hints, a paradigm shift in our understanding of the Universe, and so the evidence needs to be more than circumstantial. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," and all that. But just because I want it to be true doesn't mean I'm going to fall for hype. As these so-called exoplanets were being discovered, scientists began to develop instruments to analyse the chemical composition of their atmospheres. Their ambition was breathtaking, some would say audacious. The idea was to capture the tiny amount of starlight glancing through the atmospheres of these faraway worlds and study them for chemical fingerprints of molecules, which on Earth can only be produced by living organisms, so-called biosignatures. We don't know everything. This is a good thing, because it fuels exploration. But in this case, it means that just because a gas is only farted out by life here on Earth, that's not necessarily the only way to produce it. So, to me anyway, simply finding a biosignature is promising, but it's not enough for indisputable evidence of ET life. Prof Madhusudan, however, hopes to have enough data within two years to demonstrate categorically that he really has discovered the biosignatures around K2-18b. And I "hope" to have enough money within two years to buy a Central Park West penthouse. But even if he does achieve his aim, this won't lead to mass celebrations about the discovery of life on another world. Instead, it will be the start of another robust scientific debate about whether the biosignature could be produced by non-living means. That's my point: finding these biosignatures is like a big "let's look at this more closely" signal. As the article notes, we've found nearly 6000 exoplanets (not to mention the other seven in our backyard, plus several potentially life-harboring moons). The signs help us decide which ones to focus on for more observations and data. A much more definitive discovery would be to discover life in our own solar system using robotic space craft containing portable laboratories. Any off-world bug could be analysed, possibly even brought back to Earth, providing prima facie evidence to at least significantly limit any scientific push back that may ensue. We've had this, too. I remember a meteorite they found in Antarctica, determined to have been blasted off Mars by some ancient impact there, that contained features associated with life. As with the Venusian atmosphere thing, this turned out to be a false positive. The European Space Agency's (ESA) ExoMars rover, planned for launch in 2028, will drill below the surface of Mars to search for signs of past and possibly present life. Given the extreme conditions on Mars, however, the discovery of fossilised past life is the more likely outcome. And look, let's not underplay that. Even finding fossilized (as we spell it here) former life on Mars would be a Big Fucking Deal. But again, it hasn't happened yet. Nasa is also sending a spacecraft called Dragonfly to land on one of the moons of Saturn, Titan in 2034. It is an exotic world with what are thought to be lakes and clouds made from carbon-rich chemicals which give the planet an eerie orange haze, bringing The Beatles‘ song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds to mind: a world with "marmalade skies". A side note: I've been playing the video game Starfield off and on for the past couple of years. It's not as good as Bethesda's prior offerings (Skyrim and Fallout 4, e.g.), but that's irrelevant. What's relevant is you can, in the game, fly around to other planets, moons, and star systems and find elements to mine to sell or to use in crafting. And one of the elements you can find on Titan is titanium. I don't think there's any scientific basis for that placement; I just find it to be an amusing pun. But I digress. The BBC article then emphasizes (or emphasises) what I consider to be the most important point in all of this: If simple life forms are found to exist that is no guarantee that more complex life forms are out there. Prof Madhusudhan believes that, if confirmed, simple life should be "pretty common" in the galaxy. "But going from that simple life to complex life is a big step, and that is an open question. How that step happens? What are the conditions that govern that? We don't know that. And then going from there to intelligent life is another big step." I've been saying that for years. I do wish he hadn't used the word "intelligent," though. That just begs someone to make the self-contradictory joke about not finding any intelligent life on Earth. So I'll just add that "intelligent" doesn't automatically mean they build telescopes and rockets (or flying saucers); lots of species here on Earth are intelligent without the capability or desire to do that. Dr Robert Massey, who is the deputy executive director of the Royal Astronomical Society, agrees that the emergence of intelligent life on another world is much less likely than simple life. Of course, I could be wrong, but it is nice to have some backup from actual scientists. [Massey quoted here]"When we see the emergence of life on Earth, it was so complex. It took such a long time for multi-cellular life to emerge and then evolve into diverse life forms. "The big question is whether there was something about the Earth that made that evolution possible. Do we need exactly the same conditions, our size, our oceans and land masses for that to happen on other worlds or will that happen regardless?" Not mentioned: as I understand things, the grand evolutionary leap that made what he's calling "complex" life possible was the merging of an archaeum and a bacterium, creating a more energy-efficient cell and leading, eventually, to every life-form we can see on Earth today: fish, trees, cats, and us, for example. The simple cells are called prokaryotes; the more complex ones with the nucleus and organelles and internal structure you might remember from high school biology are called eukaryotes. There is some question about whether that happened only once, or several times, but either way, it took a long damn time to happen. One of the many cool things about finding ET life, even simple life, will be the data it provides to help us understand that remarkable upgrade. As he puts it, centuries ago, we believed we were at the centre of the Universe and with each discovery in astronomy we have found ourselves "more displaced" from that point. "I think the discovery of life elsewhere it would further reduce our specialness," he says. And that's where I diverge from him philosophically. Just being able to ask these questions makes us special. Potentially being able to answer them would only increase our specialness. In my opinion. At the same time, though, I think I understand the underpinning of his assertion: that humans don't get to proclaim that the universe was formed specifically for them. Never before have scientists searched so hard for life on other worlds and never before have they had such incredible tools to do this with. And many working in the field believe that it is a matter of when, rather than if, they discover life on other worlds. I can't argue with that. So, yeah, that's a lot of words, both in the article and here. And I've touched on many of these points in past entries, but this recent discovery prompted me to revisit my arguments. But if you skipped all the text until now, I would ask that you just remember this: finding simple life off-Earth does not mean there are other cultures Out There pointing telescopes back at us or getting ready to invade or whatever. But finding so much as a microbe, or its alien equivalent, would change our perspective in a big way. |
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