Life on Other Planets: What is Life and What Does It Need? Against a background of deep space, we see in this illustration a green and brown, rocky planet In the lower right foreground, its star – a red dwarf – in the distance to the planet’s upper left. That side of the planet is brightly illuminated while the rest is slightly shadowed. Other planets in this system can be seen at various points to the planet’s far left, lower near left, and upper near-right.
Illustration of how a distant, rocky, life-bearing world, orbiting a red dwarf star, might look to an approaching observer. Illustration: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lizbeth B. De La Torre One day, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, a faraway planet could yield hints that it might host some form of life – but surrender its secrets reluctantly. Our space telescopes might detect a mixture of gases in its atmosphere that resembles our own. Computer models would offer predictions about the planet’s life-bearing potential. Experts would debate whether the evidence made a strong case for the presence of life, or try to find still more evidence to support such a groundbreaking interpretation. “We are in the beginning of a golden era right now,” said Ravi Kopparapu, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who studies habitable planets. “For the first time in the history of civilization we might be able to answer the question: Is there life beyond Earth?” For exoplanets – planets around other stars – that era opens with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Instruments aboard the spacecraft are detecting the composition of atmospheres on exoplanets. As the power of telescopes increases in the years ahead, future advanced instruments could capture possible signs of life – “biosignatures” – from a planet light-years away. Within our solar system, the Perseverance rover on Mars is gathering rock samples for eventual return to Earth, so scientists can probe them for signs of life. And the coming Europa Clipper mission will visit an icy moon of Jupiter. Its goal: to determine whether conditions on that moon would allow life to thrive in its global ocean, buried beneath a global ice shell. But any hints of life beyond Earth would come with another big question: How certain could any scientific conclusions really be? “The challenge is deciding what is life – when to say, ‘I found it,’” said Laurie Barge of the Origins and Habitability Lab at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. With so much unknown about what even constitutes a “sign of life,” astrobiologists are working on a new framework to understand the strength of the evidence. A sample framework, proposed in 2021, includes a scale ranging from 1 to 7, with hints of other life at level 1, to increasingly substantial evidence, all the way to certainty of life elsewhere at level 7. This framework, which is being discussed and revised, acknowledges that scientific exploration in the search for life is a twisted, winding road, rather than a straightforward path. And identifying definitive signs remains difficult enough for “life as we know it.” Even more uncertain would be finding evidence of life as we don’t know it, made of unfamiliar molecular combinations or based on a solvent other than water. Still, as the search for life begins in earnest, among the planets in our own solar system as well as far distant systems known only by their light, NASA scientists and their partners around the world have some ideas that serve as starting points. Life That Evolves First, there’s NASA’s less-than-formal, non-binding but still helpful working definition of life: “A self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” Charles Darwin famously described evolution by natural selection, with characteristics preserved across generations leading to changes in organisms over time. Derived in the 1990s by a NASA exobiology working group, the definition is not used to design missions or research projects. It does help to set expectations, and to focus debate on the critical issues around another thorny question: When does non-life become life? “Biology is chemistry with history,” says Gerald Joyce, one of the members of the working group that helped create the NASA definition and now a research professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. That means history recorded by the chemistry itself – in our case, inscribed in our DNA, which encodes genetic data that can be translated into the structures and physical processes that make up our bodies. The DNA record must be robust, complex, self-replicating and open-ended, Joyce suggests, to endure and adapt over billions of years. “That would be a smoking gun: evidence for information having been recorded in molecules,” Joyce said. Such a molecule from another world in our solar system, whether DNA, RNA or something else, might turn up in a sample from Mars, say from the Mars sample-return mission now being planned by NASA. Or it might be found among the “ocean worlds” in the outer solar system – Jupiter’s moon, Europa, Saturn’s Enceladus or one of the other moons of gas giants that hide vast oceans beneath shells of ice. We can’t obtain samples of such information-bearing molecules from planets beyond our solar system, since they are so far away that it would take tens of thousands of years to travel there even in the fastest spaceships ever built. Instead, we’ll have to rely on remote detection of potential biosignatures, measuring the types and quantities of gases in exoplanet atmospheres to try to determine whether they were generated by life-forms. That likely will require deeper knowledge of what life needs to get its start – and to persist long enough to be detected. A Place Where Life Emerges There is no true consensus on a list of requirements for life, whether in our solar system or the stars beyond. But Joyce, who researches life’s origin and development, suggests a few likely “must-haves.” Topping the list is liquid water. Despite a broad spectrum of environmental conditions inhabited by living things on Earth, all life on the planet seems to require it. Liquid water provides a medium for the chemical components of life to persist over time and come together for reactions, in a way that air or the surface of a rock don’t do as well. Spectroscopy_of_exoplanet Starlight passing through an exoplanet atmosphere can be spread into a spectrum by instruments on space telescopes, revealing which molecules are present on the exoplanet. Infographic: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lizbeth B. De La Torre Also essential: an energy source, both for chemical reactions that produce structures and to create “order” against the universal tendency toward “disorder” – also known as entropy. An imbalance in atmospheric gases also might offer a tell-tale sign of the presence of life. “In Earth’s atmosphere, oxygen and methane are highly reactive with each other,” Kopparapu said. Left to themselves, they would quickly cancel each other out. “They should not be seen together,” he said. “So why are we seeing methane, why are we seeing oxygen? Something must be constantly replenishing these compounds.” On Earth, that “something” is life, pumping more of each into the atmosphere and keeping it out of balance. Such an imbalance, in these compounds or others, could be detected on a distant exoplanet, suggesting the presence of a living biosphere. But scientists also will have to rule out geological processes like volcanic or hydrothermal activity that could generate molecules that we might otherwise associate with life. Careful laboratory work and precision modeling of possible exoplanet atmospheres will be needed to tell the difference. Going Through Changes Barge also places high on the list the idea of “gradients,” or changes that occur over time and distance, like wet to dry, hot to cold, and many other possible environments. Gradients create places for energy to go, changing along the way and generating molecules or chemical systems that later might be incorporated into life-forms. Plate tectonics on Earth, and the cycling of gases like carbon dioxide – buried beneath Earth’s crust by subduction, perhaps, or released back into the atmosphere by volcanoes – represent one kind of gradient. Barge’s specialty, the chemistry of hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor billions of years ago, is another. It’s one possible pathway to have created a kind of primitive metabolism – the translation of organic compounds into energy – as a potential precursor to true life-forms. “What gradients existed before life?” she asks. “If life depends so much on gradients, could the origin of life also have benefited from these gradients?” Clearer mapping of possible pathways to life ultimately could inform the design of future space telescopes, tasked with parsing the gases in the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets. “If we want to be sure it’s coming from biology, we have to not only look for gases; we have to look at how it’s being emitted from the planet, if it’s emitted in the right quantities, in the right way,” Kopparapu said. “With uture telescopes, we’ll be more confident because they’ll be designed to look for life on other planets.” UNDER HINDUISM The Vedas describe that our universe is divided into 14 planetary systems. Each planetary system is composed of innumerable planets, stars, and other structures. We live somewhere in Bhu-Mandala, the 8th planetary system, but because we live in Kali-yuga, the last of the sequence of four eras when human beings degrade into a base level of consciousness, we have access to only part of it, in the form of the gross dimension we live in. The Vedas explain that in the past human beings had access to other parts of Bhu-Mandala and some could even visit the higher planetary systems of Bhuvarloka, Swargaloka, Maharloka, and even Satyaloka, which is currently impossible for us. The Puranas call the Milky Way, the giant path of stars we see when we look to the sky, Sisumara. This Sisumara includes the planetary system of Swargaloka and extends all the way close to Dhruvaloka, the Polestar. It’s described that Yogis can follow this path after abandoning their mortal bodies to attain the higher planetary systems. Above Dhruvaloka there are the planetary systems of Maharloka, Janaloka, Tapoloka, and Satyaloka, each one exponentially more distant than the previous. After these higher planetary systems, there are the coverings of the universe, which also include different structures composed of elemental matter. The first cover is ten times larger than the universe itself, and each of the other six coverings is ten times larger than the previous. The universe described in the Puranas is thus practically unlimited, and that’s just one amongst trillions of universes that form the cosmic manifestation. Nowadays there is great interest in space exploration, but in reality, this is not a very effective way to travel. A small crew may be able to make a dangerous and uncomfortable trip to the Moon or Mars at an exorbitant cost, but it will be ultimately unfruitful. Without access to higher dimensions, they will just find sand and rocks anywhere they go. These excursions will also be restricted to the vicinity of our planet since any trip outside of the confinements of our solar system would take much longer than a human life. Even if it would be somehow attempted, it would be useless from our point of view, because we would not be there to see the results. Instead, the Vedas explain that the process of having access to the other planetary systems is by purifying our consciousness and transferring ourselves to an appropriate body at the planetary system of our choice at the time of death. In this way, not only does it become possible to reach higher planetary systems beyond the confinements of our galaxy, but it becomes possible for us to receive an appropriate body in which we can comfortably live and interact with the inhabitants there. K RAJARAM IRS 30925 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. 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