Thursday, January 12, 2017

A Much Better Tool for Finding Life on Other Planets

There are 'signature' patterns in amino acids which give an indication of the presence of life but it has, heretofore, been difficult to analyze them to verify their presence.  The Martian rovers did try to accomplish this but the experiments were confounded by other materials.  Researchers now say they can do it a whole lot better, ten thousand times better, to be exact.  (Science Daily:  Looking for life in all the right places, with the right tool)

The researchers created methods based on capillary electrophoresis to process soil or ice samples and detect 17 different amino acids simultaneously.  This particular set of amino acids can be found in large quantities in biological and non-living samples, but in certain patterns, could serve as an indicator of life.  The researchers validated their approach by analyzing samples from California's Mono Lake, an extremely salty body of water acting as a stand-in for briny water on Mars and on some moons.  The methods detected the amino acids with 10,000 times the sensitivity of past approaches and identified three different biosignatures that were present. Willis, a member of the Europa Lander Science Definition Team, says that this type of technology is under consideration for future missions to ocean worlds like Europa and also Enceladus.  The researchers say these are the best techniques yet to find signs of life on other worlds.

- SD


We see all those stars up there and also see finding more life is inevitable but we haven't been clever enough to do it yet.  Europa and Enceladus are two of the most tantalizing targets out there due to an anticipated higher potential for life.

The various space programs are getting so much better at building robot rovers of late so call it a couple of years to add this technology to whatever robo they were going to send to Enceladus or Europa anyway.  Call it ten years flight time (i.e. wild guess) so our life-sniffing robo should be landing or splashing in 2029 on one of those planets or how about both.


There's really not too much sci fi in it unless you go for the monster movie and anger a race of beings who turn out to be more powerful than we ... take it away John Carpenter.

Discovering this external life probably won't do much of anything maybe because the idea has been floating around for so long now.  Religion, except for the most fundamentally fundamental fundamentalists, won't likely be affected much at all.  Society probably won't change either so that doesn't leave much room for sci fi when much of it wants to anticipate some type of sociological evolution or it just winds up being "Popular Mechanics" with spaceships.


We're still hoping they find life on Mars since it's kind of a disappointment to think it was never more than a big, over-glorified rock.  We'll go with Jeff Goldblum from "Jurassic Park" on this since one of his signature lines was, "Life will find a way."

We know on Earth it found a way to live inside rocks and every possible niche we can see.  It seems impossible that would not also have happened countless times elsewhere.

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