{"id":2755,"date":"2009-02-26T01:05:02","date_gmt":"2009-02-26T01:05:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/?p=2755"},"modified":"2011-03-30T13:13:29","modified_gmt":"2011-03-30T12:13:29","slug":"life-talk-to-me-about-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/2009\/02\/26\/life-talk-to-me-about-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Life, Talk To Me About Life"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Search
Search for Life at the Royal Institution (Photo Tim Jones)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I kind of expect to see demonstrations at the Royal Institution, an association with the Christmas Lectures I guess.<\/p>\n

So it was nice to see a few props at Lewis Dartnell’s talk on astro-biology yesterday evening:\u00a0 a Geiger counter, a jar of fluorescent quinine, a piece of Mars.\u00a0\u00a0 A piece of Mars !!! That got a reaction from the audience – along with an intelligent question – “how do you know it’s from Mars?”\u00a0 As it happens, matching isotopes between the 1911 meteorite sample and material tested in-situ by the Viking lander on Mars leave little doubt about its origins.\u00a0 Whether it contains signs of former Martian life, as some claim, is another matter.<\/p>\n

\"Lewis
Lewis Dartnell & Naomi Temple (Royal Institution) with the famous RI bench. (Photo Tim Jones) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The evening’s bottom line was that no extra-terrestrial life has yet been found; but there is particular hope for Mars and\/or Jupiter’s moon Europa.<\/p>\n

Dartnell structured his lecture from the Earth outwards: Earth, solar system, galaxy, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 With ‘Earth’ came a definition of life, and what an excuse that was to show some clips from this amazing Harvard Biovisions simulation of how a cell works; fast forward to 4:00mins for the best bit with vesicles being dragged along by ‘motor proteins’.<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

Moving out from the Earth, we find that the combination of salinity, pH, and temperature on which earth’s more ‘extremophile’ lifeforms thrive: thermophiles, acidophiles, psycrophiles in the lingo, are the exact same as those prevailing on Venus, Mars, and Jupiter’s moons.\u00a0 Further out in the galaxy, there are candidate stars with Jupiter-sized planets at the right sort of solar distance for Earth-like temperature conditions to exist at their supposed moons (HD28185 and Gliese581<\/a> were the examples given).\u00a0 So there’s hope.\u00a0 Information, metabolism, blueprint\u00a0 = Life.<\/p>\n

Dartnell could see Martian material being brought back to earth for analysis at some point, but not for another ten years or so.\u00a0 In the meantime, the European ExoMars<\/a> probe, due for launch in 2011, will drive around the surface, drilling holes and taking samples.\u00a0 It will also illuminate the landscape with ultraviolet light, organic molecules betraying themselves with their fluorescence.<\/p>\n

No discussion on extra-terrestrial life is complete without some sort of Saganish ‘Billions’ illustration of how many stars – and presumably planets – there are in the universe: the implication being that we have a large sample size even if the odds are thin (which they aren’t necessarily). \u00a0 Lewis Dartnell showed it last night.\u00a0 Astronomer Stephen Warren showed it at his inaugural lecture at Imperial College tonight.\u00a0 This is the now iconic Hubble deep field image showing a section of sky equivalent to only 1\/30th the moon’s diameter (Warren reckoned a 1mm square at the end of your arm – sounds about right).\u00a0 And most of the objects\u00a0 here are galaxies.<\/p>\n

\"Hubble
Hubble Deep Field<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The insufficiently humbled can check out higher resolution versions at Hubblesite.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”<\/span><\/p>\n

“Life, don’t talk to me about life….”<\/span><\/p>\n

\ud83d\ude42<\/span><\/p>\n

Postscript<\/p>\n

As a quick aside.\u00a0 Before Lewis Dartnell kicked off, the organisers called for a show of hands of any first time visitors to the Royal Institution, and that turned out to be a fair chunk of audience; less than 50% I reckon, but a good number.\u00a0 With my SciCom hat on, that’s really encouraging – folk taking an interest in science and technology (and they didn’t look like the UFO squad either).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I kind of expect to see demonstrations at the Royal Institution, an association with the Christmas Lectures I guess. So it was nice to see a few props at Lewis Dartnell’s talk on astro-biology yesterday evening:\u00a0 a Geiger counter, a jar of fluorescent quinine, a piece of Mars.\u00a0\u00a0 A piece of Mars !!! That got … Continue reading Life, Talk To Me About Life<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[175,230,12,406,336,17],"tags":[625,624,626,628,627,621,622,623,649,219,1127],"class_list":["post-2755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-events","category-politics","category-science-communication","category-space","category-visits","tag-et","tag-extra-terrestrial","tag-extraterrestrial","tag-extremophile","tag-jupiter","tag-lewis-dartnell","tag-life","tag-mars","tag-naomi-temple","tag-royal-institution","tag-wonders"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkpOr-Ir","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2755"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2934,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2755\/revisions\/2934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}