Floating in a most peculiar way

Chapter 23: Waterbear

page 322 A greater and more durable [human] presence in space. John Fallows looks at a future mining the Moon and living on Mars. John Quiggin has fun with the arithmetic of interstellar travel.

page 322: Tardigrades in space. Not only the adults but waterbear eggs can survive in space.

page 325: no [animal] apart from Waterbears.  But scientists have found a way of giving insects a coat of armour that may allow them to survive the vacuum of space

page 325: life elsewhere in the solar system.  And other solar systems? Well, not only do we live on an unusual planet but we also live in an unusual solar system.

See also Stranger things in heaven and earth.

Hurricane at Saturn's north pole

This is the twenty-fourth in a new series of notes and comments on chapters in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. It appears around the time of the US publication, and adds to an earlier series that appeared around UK publication.

Stranger things in heaven and earth

Petroglyphs etched into desert varnish, Utah

I've written about Weird Life by David Toomey for the May edition of The Literary Review, and have put a version online here.

Two posts on this blog in March touch on Toomey's work and some of the issues it raises. They are Cloud beings and In the long term.

Lee Billings invites us to broaden our ideas of what Earth-like planets could be like.

A cold origin

Brinicles, filmed forming in situ for the first time in 2011, were presented as fingers of death. But Julyan Cartwright and others observe that they create chemical gradients, electric potentials and membranes – that, is all the conditions necessary for the formation of life.

Brinicles, says a post via MIT Technology review, could be ubiquitous on ocean bearing planets and moons such as Europa, where they might play equally interesting roles.

Halorubrum lacusprofundi

...[The] microbes were isolated from Deep Lake, a very salty lake in Antarctica. The changes found in proteins from these organisms allow them to work in both cold and salty conditions, when temperatures may be well below the freezing point of pure water...

"In such cold temperatures, the packing of atoms in proteins must be loosened slightly, allowing them to be more flexible and functional when ordinary proteins would be locked into inactive conformations...The surface of these proteins also have modifications that loosen the binding of the surrounding water molecules."

"These kinds of adaptations are likely to allow microorganisms like Halorubrum lacusprofundi to survive not only in Antarctica, but elsewhere in the universe..."

-- Strategies for Mars Survival

In the long term

 

In his True History, the rhetorician and satirist Lucian of Samosata imagined the sun itself might be inhabited. About 1700 years later William Herschel hypothesized that the part of the sun we see from Earth is something like our aurora borealis and that beneath it was a layer of dense clouds that shielded denizens of the surface from our sight. Herschel's son John suspected that the ephemeral formations we call solar flares might themselves be living creatures.  In 1999, building on Freeman Dyson's 1979 paper Time without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe, Greg Adams and Fred Laughlin envisaged life on white dwarfs:

White dwarfs are unimaginably dense -- 10¹⁴ [a hundred trillion] grams per cubic centimeter -- but their atmosphere [may] allow [for] mobility. Those atmospheres contain oxygen and carbon, and although they are quite cold, they are warm enough that they would allow those chemicals to interact in interesting ways. White dwarf atmospheres gain what heat they have by collisions with particles of dark matter, a process that will continue until the dark matter is exhausted, when the universe is 10²⁵  years of age. Over such as span -- 100 billion times as long as it took for life to appear on Earth -- even slow-moving molecules have time to join in every conceivable pattern, including those necessary for life. The longevity of a stable environment...implies that life in white dwarf atmospheres is more than possible; it is likely...[It] would also be life quite unlike our own...metabolisms and rates of consciousness would be very slow. An intelligent creature living in a white dwarf atmosphere might take a thousand years to complete a single thought.

-- from Weird Life by David Toomey

Borges includes Thermal Beings in his Book of Imaginary Beings. These are imagined to have existed in an earlier era.

See also White Dwarfs Hold Key to Finding Secret to Extraterrestrial Life

Cloud beings

Ideas of cloud-borne Venusians are not new. As far back as 1967, when there was evidence for substantial amounts of water vapor in the planet's clouds, Carl Saga and Yale biophysicist Harold Morowitz hypothesized organisms the size of Ping-Pong balls, with skins a single molecule thick. Such organisms, so the thinking went, might have originated on the surface some time in the distant past when conditions were more temperate an, as the surface heated up, migrated to the skies. Like jellyfish in terrestrial oceans, they would maintain their buoyancy with float bladders -- filled,  in the Venusian case, with hydrogen. The idea was criticized because although Morowitz and Sagan had suggested ways the cloud-borne might be cloud (sexual land asexual reproduction), they had not shown how they might have evolve, and no one could imagine an evolutionary path by which a Venusian surface dwelling organism might develop a float bladder. Sagan, though, was undeterred. He didn't abandon the cloud-borne life; he just suggested another place to look for it...

-- from Weird Life by David Toomey

See also Libertine Bubbles

Far life

Lichens and algae could be the first life forms we find on Earth-like exoplanets, by looking for their light signatures in a planet's distinctive colouring.

-- original article, report

Just visiting

The recognition of these hazards may help us understand deeper mysteries about Life in the Universe. Many explanations have been offered as to why we find no evidence for the existence of advanced extraterrestrial life in the nearby Universe.  Perhaps we are too uninteresting to be worth contacting; perhaps life requires extremely improbable events to sustain it. More likely, I feel, is that life never survives for long periods. Asteroidal impacts, passing comets, bursts of gamma radiation, all these external hazards are common occurrences. We are shielded from many of them by the planet Jupiter and our large Moon. Without these gravitational shields we would have suffered a string of catastrophic impacts that would have continually reset the evolutionary clock. Couple with the threat to life offered by internal hazards like war, disease and environmental disaster, we begin to see that it is perhaps not entirely surprising that no one is 'out there' in our part of the Universe. The cosmic environment stretches far wider than Darwin ever imagined.

-- from 'Cosmic Environmentalism' in The Artful Universe (Expanded) by John Barrow

'Reverse panspermia'

Speculative, but fun:

A handful of rocks [from Earth] could even have made it to planets around other stars. Once such could be Gliese 581, a red dwarf 20 light years away with a super-Earth orbiting at the outer edge of its habitable zone, where water could be liquid. Hana and colleagues calculated that about 1000 rocks from the Chicxulub impact could have reached that far in about a million years, meaning any life that made it would have had 64 million years to develop - or die off.

-- from How Earthly life could populate space by panspermia.

'...not as we know it...'

Another strange discovery is a previously unknown Deinococcus — a group of bacteria known as the world's toughest — capable of tolerating γ-ray exposures 5,000 times greater than those survived by any other known organism, despite living 15 metres beneath the permafrost. These levels of radiation have never existed on Earth, so the source of the bacterium's resistance is a mystery. Theories put forth so far include that the microbe had an extraterrestrial origin...[and] at this point, no theory has been discarded.

-- from Antarctic microbes live life to the extreme

Ice worms of Europa and beyond

Dirk Schulze-Makuch suggests that a top predator in the oceans of Europa could be fearsome creature with mass of 1 gram. And the surface lakes of Titan could be home to hydrocarbon-guzzling microbes the size boulders.

But you'd have to go far beyond our solar system to find something you could actually talk to. What might it look like? Putting reasonable supposition together, says Stephen Battersby

the daring astrobiologist might be prepared to make a very small bet that SETI-type aliens will be social multicellular predators with eyes, sexes, and sticky-out bits of some sort.

P.S. 25 Jan Is there anybody out there?, asks the Royal Society.

Little green men

A sustainability solution to the Fermi paradox?

Vatican suggests limits to corporate expansion strategy

If other intelligent beings exist, it's not certain that they need redemption.

-- Father Jose Gabriel Funes, the chief papal astronomer.

(see also Just wondering and Whereof can one not speak)

Beyond the probable

I would say the strategy in looking for life in the universe [should be] to look for what's detectable, not what's probable. We have a tendency among the theorists in this field to guess what's probable. In fact our guesses are likely to be wrong. We never had as much imagination as nature.

-- Freeman Dyson, who imagines parabolic flowers spreading across the solar system.

For this is no Height in which there are not flowers.

-- Christopher Smart.

Evolution is cleverer than you are.

-- Orgel's second rule.

Life tuned differently

"You have no idea what life would be like in a universe with different constants," [says Fred Adams]...[He] reckons his results, which will be published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, suggest that the "specialness" of our universe could well be an illusion. And this is only the very beginning of what can be probed to undermine the idea that our universe is fine-tuned for life. There are plenty more constants and processes that can be tinkered with, he says.

-- from In the multiverse, stars burn black, a report on work that indicates that very different life forms to the ones we know might be better suited to some other universes in which the range of possible values for three constants involved in the formation of stars are different.