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Speaker 3: And seas smologites, here you are. This is a short,
Speaker 3: classroom friendly version of a classic Ologies episode. It's perfect
Speaker 3: for a quick listen or one where there are potentially
Speaker 3: smologites present.
Speaker 5: What a week for this.
Speaker 3: In case you missed it, NASA just released images from
Speaker 3: the James Webb Space Telescope. This is the largest optical
Speaker 3: telescope in space. It launched in late twenty twenty one
Speaker 3: and it cruised into its orbit about a million miles
Speaker 3: away in January. We saw the first images come out
Speaker 3: this week July twenty twenty two, and it was a
Speaker 3: big deal, a bigger deal than any of our brains
Speaker 3: can comprehend, because it produced the deepest and sharpest infrared
Speaker 3: image of the universe ever to date. And NASA says
Speaker 3: thousands of galaxies, including the faintest objects ever observed in
Speaker 3: the infrared, have appeared in Webb's view for the first time.
Speaker 3: And this slice of the vast universe is approximately the
Speaker 3: size of a grain of sand held at arm's length
Speaker 3: by someone on the ground. It is a tiny slice,
Speaker 3: and in that tiny slice. There are thousands of little
Speaker 3: dots in the photo, each one a galaxy, and in
Speaker 3: each galaxy potentially hundreds of billions, maybe trillions of stars.
Speaker 3: There is a lot out there, and how exciting to
Speaker 3: be on Earth as it's discovered. So enjoy this somologies
Speaker 3: episode about what might be out there. Oh hey, it's
Speaker 3: that guy in your video editing class who choose so
Speaker 3: much gum you're actually worried about him. Ali Ward back
Speaker 3: with another episode of Ologies. So this episode, I'm just
Speaker 3: I'm gonna say this up top.
Speaker 5: Just get out of the way. It's out of this world.
Speaker 3: Okay, I said it, It's out of this world.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 3: Astrobiology, let's get to it. Once called exobiology, but let's
Speaker 3: consult the Greek so astro comes from the word for star,
Speaker 3: and biology has its roots in the verb to live.
Speaker 3: So what is out there living on those ding dang stars?
Speaker 3: What's on the planets? That's the big question? Is anything
Speaker 3: alive out there? What are the odds? Is it big?
Speaker 3: Is it small? Is it cooler than us? So to
Speaker 3: get some answers, will consult a professional. So over the
Speaker 3: course of eleven months and twenty seven gentle desperate emails
Speaker 3: for me. This ologist kindly obliged, and the resulting interview
Speaker 3: is I was literally about to say stellar. I'm not
Speaker 3: going to I swear that was an accident, but it
Speaker 3: was a stellar interview.
Speaker 5: He's such a great dude. So he has been a.
Speaker 3: Researcher at the SETI Institute, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Speaker 3: that was founded by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. He's
Speaker 3: a national geographic explorer who has stretched the Arctic and
Speaker 3: down to the depths of the Sea. You may have
Speaker 3: seen him in James Cameron's Aliens of the Deep and
Speaker 3: is currently the Deputy Chief Scientist for Solar System Exploration
Speaker 3: at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. And side note,
Speaker 3: the opinions he expresses therein are his own and not
Speaker 3: those of JPL or NASA, because when you're in charge
Speaker 3: of looking for space aliens for NASA, you got to
Speaker 3: toss out some disclaimers. He stopped by last week after
Speaker 3: work and we settled in for an evening talk about
Speaker 3: Icy Moon's ty, extraterrestrials, subsurface oceans, various voyages made by
Speaker 3: NASA spacecraft, and essentially what is lurking in the great.
Speaker 5: Darkness of the universe.
Speaker 3: So make some space in your brain for the brilliant
Speaker 3: and wonderful astrobiologist, doctor Kevin Peter hadgious.
Speaker 4: Hour.
Speaker 3: Okay, that's what I thought. But just in case it
Speaker 3: was hond and I've never said it aloud, I thought
Speaker 3: i'd ask, now, you are an astrobiologist, correct, what exactly
Speaker 3: does it mean?
Speaker 6: It's a it's a very good question, many different ways
Speaker 6: to answer it, but simply put, astrobiology is the study
Speaker 6: of the living universe. And yeah, that's that's it, in
Speaker 6: a nutshell.
Speaker 3: The study of the living universe. So this is excluding rocks, air.
Speaker 6: Well, keep going, and welcome back to some of that.
Speaker 3: Rocks, air light.
Speaker 5: Cars well.
Speaker 6: So what's important about it being the study of the
Speaker 6: living universe is that oftentimes when people think about astrobiology,
Speaker 6: they say, you know, okay, this is the search for
Speaker 6: life beyond Earth. And that's correct, that's certainly part of astrobiology.
Speaker 6: But what's also very central to astrobiology is the study
Speaker 6: of the origin, evolution, and future of life on Earth.
Speaker 6: Where did we come from, where we going? How did
Speaker 6: life originate? And so when you think about the living universe.
Speaker 6: Of course, right now all we know of is life
Speaker 6: on Earth. We have yet to find even a little
Speaker 6: speck of life beyond Earth. But based on what we
Speaker 6: know from life on Earth, and based on what we
Speaker 6: know about the other major sciences physics, chemistry, geology, we
Speaker 6: can make the prediction that if the conditions are right,
Speaker 6: life should potentially arise beyond Earth. For me, what that
Speaker 6: means is a focus on worlds in our Solar system
Speaker 6: that could harbor life.
Speaker 3: Sorry, just a mouth therem over here.
Speaker 6: I focused most of my time, both from a research
Speaker 6: standpoint and a mission standpoint, on Jupiter's moon Europa and
Speaker 6: to a slightly lesser extent, Saturn's moon Enceladus.
Speaker 3: Why are we looking at moons so much rather than
Speaker 3: the planets?
Speaker 6: Yeah, So this has been one of the big game
Speaker 6: changers in astrobiology, what I like to call sort of
Speaker 6: a new Goldilocks.
Speaker 5: I think I see where this is going.
Speaker 6: So in the early days of astronomy and planetary science
Speaker 6: and astrobiology, back in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, when
Speaker 6: planetary scientists, astronomers, exobiologists thought about what it takes for
Speaker 6: a world to be habitable. That framework was largely based
Speaker 6: on our Earth biases. Wherever we luck can find liquid
Speaker 6: water on Earth, we generally find life. Therefore, you need
Speaker 6: liquid water for life, and in order for a planet
Speaker 6: to harbor liquid water, you've got to have liquid water
Speaker 6: on the surface in contact with a nice atmosphere. And
Speaker 6: for a planet to be able to sustain those kind
Speaker 6: of conditions, you have to be at just the right
Speaker 6: distance from your parent star so that you're not too
Speaker 6: hot or not too cold.
Speaker 4: And it was neither too hot nor too cold, it
Speaker 4: was just right.
Speaker 6: What we've learned in the past few decades, and this
Speaker 6: was largely informed by the Voyager spacecraft and then the
Speaker 6: Galleo spacecraft and then the Cassini spacecraft that went into
Speaker 6: the Outer Solar System, is that these moons of the
Speaker 6: Outer Solar System are presenting us with a new Goldilock scenario.
Speaker 6: It's a Goldilock scenario where the energy to maintain and
Speaker 6: sustain liquid water comes not from the energy of your
Speaker 6: parent star, but rather from the energy of it's the
Speaker 6: tug and pull that these moons experience as they go
Speaker 6: around their gas giants or their ice giants, and so
Speaker 6: the Jovian system. The moons of Jupiter are a great
Speaker 6: example of this. There are four large moons Io, you Rope, Aganamine,
Speaker 6: and Chlisto. Io does not have an ocean. Io doesn't
Speaker 6: really have any water. Io orbits Jupiter, and Io is
Speaker 6: tugged to such a great degree that it is the
Speaker 6: most volcanically active body in our solar system, more volcanically
Speaker 6: active than the Earth. Volcanoes are erupting on Io right now.
Speaker 6: It's just a beautiful, beautiful gem of a world. And
Speaker 6: it really does kind of look like a gemstone when
Speaker 6: you look at pictures.
Speaker 3: It's a lava party happening so far away it is.
Speaker 6: It is break out the popcorn and just wa wash
Speaker 6: so so in this new Goldilocks paradig it's kind of
Speaker 6: like Venus. It's got too much tidal energy. It's too closer.
Speaker 6: It's Venus is too close to warm. Io has got
Speaker 6: too much tidal activity. Let's go to the further furthest
Speaker 6: out of the large moons, Calisto. Now Calisto, we think
Speaker 6: it does have an ocean trapped beneath a very thick
Speaker 6: ice shell. But Calisto has very little tidal energy dissipation
Speaker 6: going on in it. So in that scenario, Callisto's kind
Speaker 6: of like Mars. It's it's maybe doesn't have quite enough
Speaker 6: energy to really make it an ocean that we could
Speaker 6: explore and think could sustain life today. But in the
Speaker 6: middle we've got Europa and Ganymede, and Europa in particular
Speaker 6: we think occupies this new Goldilocks sweet spot where it's
Speaker 6: got just the right amount of tidal energy dissipation. So
Speaker 6: it's to sustain a global salty liquid water ocean that's
Speaker 6: one hundred kilometers or sixty miles in depth.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, yeah, that's the right response.
Speaker 3: How deeper our oceans?
Speaker 6: So it's about ten times as deep as our ocean.
Speaker 3: Oh, the smokes the octopods must have.
Speaker 6: So in the Mariana Trench were about seven miles deep,
Speaker 6: eleven kilometers down, europos ocean ten times as deep.
Speaker 3: So there's plenty of water on Jupiter's moon Europa, both
Speaker 3: in ice and in liquid form, and is deep. Now
Speaker 3: could extraterrestrials be lurking in those deep dark waters?
Speaker 6: The Europe is small, it's about the size of our moon.
Speaker 6: It's Europe is about one seventh of the Earth's gravity.
Speaker 6: So when you do the math the pressure within europas ocean,
Speaker 6: it's comparable to it's a it's a bit more, but
Speaker 6: it's comparable to the pressure found within the deepest trenches
Speaker 6: of our ocean.
Speaker 3: Oh and so.
Speaker 6: When we think about, well, you know, could life survive
Speaker 6: within europas ocean, we can actually do the experiment and
Speaker 6: look at places on planet Earth where the conditions are
Speaker 6: comparable and say, oh wow, life, life found a way
Speaker 6: in that environment that has is similar to Europa's ocean,
Speaker 6: or enceladus is ocean, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 6: Life will find a way if you want so eloquently
Speaker 6: put it, and we can make the sort of biological
Speaker 6: plausibility connection.
Speaker 3: And now Europa is that where we're really looking in
Speaker 3: terms of searching for something alive? Is that really where
Speaker 3: all eyes are kind of on Europa?
Speaker 6: Well, I love to highlight three prime ocean world candidates,
Speaker 6: Europa and Soladus and Titan Titan. When we talk about
Speaker 6: Titan briefly first, and we can come back to it.
Speaker 6: Titan is just an amazing world with its atmosphere and
Speaker 6: liquid methane ethane lakes carving out its icy surface, and
Speaker 6: there's a liquid water ocean beneath its ice crust, and
Speaker 6: from the standpoint of astrobiology, Titan is my favorite place
Speaker 6: to go and look for weird life. And what I
Speaker 6: mean by weird life is life unlike life as we
Speaker 6: know it. Life as we know it is based on
Speaker 6: liquid water as the solvent, the substance in which the
Speaker 6: chemical reactions of life take place, and those chemical reactions
Speaker 6: and the building blocks are of course based on carbon.
Speaker 6: We are a carbon and water based life form. On Titan,
Speaker 6: life would potentially also be carbon based, but the solvent
Speaker 6: might be liquid methane and ethane. In those lakes that
Speaker 6: we see on Titan. Could life? Could the business of
Speaker 6: life get done? Could life originate? Is there a weird
Speaker 6: life form that could arise in those lakes and seas?
Speaker 6: I don't know, but I'd sure love to get there
Speaker 6: and explore. And then Titan could, of course, within its
Speaker 6: liquid water ocean beneath its icy shell, harbor water and
Speaker 6: carbon based life similar to what we know and love
Speaker 6: here on Earth.
Speaker 3: Flammable.
Speaker 6: Can you start tightened on fire? This short answer is no,
Speaker 6: because in order to light something on fire, what do
Speaker 6: you need?
Speaker 3: Oxygen?
Speaker 6: Yes, And so Titan's atmosphere has basically no oxygen, and
Speaker 6: so that actually is one of the limiting factors for
Speaker 6: me when I think about the feasibility of life on Titan.
Speaker 3: Okay, so back to general habitability, Kevin says liquid water
Speaker 3: is one of the keystones. So what else is on
Speaker 3: our intergalactic shopping list?
Speaker 6: The other keystones for life are that you need the
Speaker 6: building blocks, the stuff that life is made of, the
Speaker 6: bricks and mortar. For us, that's carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen,
Speaker 6: a smattering of some fifty four elements from the periodic table.
Speaker 6: Then the third kind of lesser appreciated keystone is life
Speaker 6: needs energy. It needs a power source. It needs something
Speaker 6: that can sustain the growth and reproduction and the maintenance
Speaker 6: of life. Technically, we call that the redox gradients that
Speaker 6: that life harnesses. You bring together a reductant, a compound
Speaker 6: that likes to give up electrons, with an oxidant that
Speaker 6: likes to accept electrons. And for us, we Homo sapiens,
Speaker 6: that redox reaction is eat some carbohydrates, eat some food,
Speaker 6: and breathe in oxygen, and then we do a slow
Speaker 6: burn in our stomachs and biology in us we're glorified
Speaker 6: campfire and so we're doing a slow burn with our
Speaker 6: redox chemistry inside our bodies.
Speaker 3: So next time you're eating fistfuls of cookie, doat just holler,
Speaker 3: I'm redoxing. Microbes however, can vary quite a bit and
Speaker 3: have all kinds of metabolic pathways. So by studying how
Speaker 3: they do it at the bottom of trenches and in
Speaker 3: the Arctic and next to volcanoes, we can try to
Speaker 3: determine how those little bibis on other planets and moons
Speaker 3: might go about their business. Okay, are you ready for
Speaker 3: some Patreon questions?
Speaker 1: Sure?
Speaker 3: Okay, but before we get to listener questions from Patreon,
Speaker 3: a quick word from our sponsors, who have allowed me
Speaker 3: to raise the pay of the folks who helped me
Speaker 3: make ologies. Also let me donate to a cause of
Speaker 3: the ologists choosing this week, Doctor Kevin Peterhand chose to
Speaker 3: support the work of Traveling Telescope and this is a
Speaker 3: cause started by Susan Marrabona and her husband Chu and
Speaker 3: colleagues to share astronomy with school kids and the general
Speaker 3: public in Kenya. So that is Traveling Telescope. And there
Speaker 3: will be a link in the show notes if you
Speaker 3: want to know more.
Speaker 5: About them now.
Speaker 3: An additional donation this week was made to Vermont's Manchester
Speaker 3: Rescue Squad in memory of Peter Hand, Kevin's father, who
Speaker 3: passed away last summer, and the Manchester Rescue Squad provides
Speaker 3: twenty four hour three sixty five paramedic level emergency care.
Speaker 3: We have paid staff and volunteers. They also do CPR
Speaker 3: and first aid classes. So on. Behalf of all the ologites.
Speaker 3: Our heart goes out to the hands. Okay, now, some
Speaker 3: messages from a few sponsors.
Speaker 2: Bionantma got Boga, the hardnir, the Holla, the Hayman ahead,
Speaker 2: call ah ers as Lance La Dani, the tained Nudov
Speaker 2: Shookatarhu la Hula shomparods on us as lanse is phaser
Speaker 2: Latgun's throw, Tasha Tapa sierraanashka aga is FuGO more h
Speaker 2: i a punk i e is called on tudoros or
Speaker 2: raslanse if we real this, na hearn.
Speaker 3: All right? Your questions okay, Patreon questions, We got a
Speaker 3: gozilion I okay, uh, it's kind of a lightning round.
Speaker 3: I categorize them as best I could, Okay, so Jasmine Wells,
Speaker 3: Vincent Maddie Worker and Mike Marlowe all kind of want
Speaker 3: to know, as a firm believer of other forms of life,
Speaker 3: what's the most probable planet for alien life to exist on? Like,
Speaker 3: one of the most likely places.
Speaker 6: Mars is fantastic. Mars is still a wonderful place to
Speaker 6: look for evidence of past life and potentially life that's
Speaker 6: alive today. We'll just have to dig a lot deeper.
Speaker 6: So I put Mars, Europa, Enceladus, and Titan, Okay, And
Speaker 6: when it comes to the search for extant life, I
Speaker 6: really prioritize Europa and Thenceladus for extant life similar to
Speaker 6: life as we know it. And then if we go
Speaker 6: one layer deeper, I prioritize Europa over Enceladus for a
Speaker 6: couple of different reasons. Europa, we have good reason to predict,
Speaker 6: has had an ocean for the history of the Solar System. Yeah,
Speaker 6: so it's an ocean that's been around for a while. Enceladus,
Speaker 6: there's still some question marks. The reason Saturn has rings
Speaker 6: is because some sort of collision, some sort of impact
Speaker 6: event happened in the neighborhood of the moons of Saturn
Speaker 6: in the past tens to hundreds of millions of years ago.
Speaker 3: Okay, So remember Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons. Kevin says
Speaker 3: that Saturn had had some drama.
Speaker 6: So didn't sell this form From that is it's ocean
Speaker 6: relatively young. We don't know.
Speaker 3: Other people had questions about the oceans, trying to settle
Speaker 3: a debate Oceanna Reese as are deep sea creatures aliens?
Speaker 5: I think they are?
Speaker 3: And also are we looking at the deep sea to
Speaker 3: provide any clues of what could exist on other planets?
Speaker 6: Yeah? Great questions. The answer to the first one is
Speaker 6: as alien as they are, and I've gotten to see
Speaker 6: some of them up close, and as astonishing and beautiful
Speaker 6: and bizarre as they are, they are very well connected
Speaker 6: into our tree of life. They are based on DNA
Speaker 6: and RNA and the ATP paradigm with proteins, etc. So yeah,
Speaker 6: they are not different from life as we know it.
Speaker 6: So are we looking in our own oceans to see
Speaker 6: whether or not or search for life elsewhere it can
Speaker 6: be informed by life that works in these deep ocean environments.
Speaker 6: The answer is absolutely, And it's something that I'm very
Speaker 6: passionate about and I've been fortunate to be able to
Speaker 6: take part in some of that exploration and science.
Speaker 3: What about your favorite thing about astrobiology or your job
Speaker 3: the best? You know.
Speaker 6: I've got a lot of great colleagues and we love
Speaker 6: brainstorming about forcing each other to think out of the
Speaker 6: box about how to explore planet Earth and understand life
Speaker 6: on Earth and how to apply that to worlds and
Speaker 6: wonders beyond Earth. So that kind of intellectual popping the
Speaker 6: popcorn is a lot of fun.
Speaker 3: If someone wanted to be an astrobiologist, what would you
Speaker 3: tell them?
Speaker 5: Where do they start?
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's a great question. In the field of biology today,
Speaker 6: there's biologists, chemist, geologists, geochemists, oceanographers. My own background physics
Speaker 6: and astronomy and geological environmental sciences. I also did a
Speaker 6: master's in robotics. It takes all kinds to get this
Speaker 6: sort of Let me use a few buzzwords interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary
Speaker 6: trendsdisciplinary kind of research done. And so what I tell
Speaker 6: students and folks interested is within the framework of sciences
Speaker 6: that feed into astrobology, follow your passion biology, geology, physics, astronomy,
Speaker 6: et cetera, et cetera, chemistry, and enjoy that fundamental research
Speaker 6: and then extend and bridge it into astrobiology.
Speaker 3: It's just the sound of so many people changing their
Speaker 3: majors right now. Thank you first aliens.
Speaker 6: Thanks for having me a here to talk about aliens.
Speaker 3: So ask interesting people intergalactic questions because you never know
Speaker 3: what you might learn. There is a lot out there
Speaker 3: to understand, and smart people love getting asked questions. You
Speaker 3: can check out doctor Kevin Hand's book Alien Oceans, The
Speaker 3: Search for Life in the Depths of Space. He is amazing.
Speaker 3: He is at Alien Oceans on Twitter. I'm at ali
Speaker 3: Ward with one l Ologies is at Ologies on Twitter
Speaker 3: and Instagram too. And we like to keep these episodes short,
Speaker 3: so the full list of credits is in the show notes.
Speaker 3: Special thanks, of course to Zeke Rodriguez Thomas and Mercedes
Speaker 3: Maitland of mind jam Media and Jarret Sleeper of mind
Speaker 3: gam Media for helping edit all these together. And if
Speaker 3: you stick around at the very very end of the episode,
Speaker 3: I give you a little bit of life advice. And
Speaker 3: this week this is a life advice taught to me
Speaker 3: by my so just so last who was a reporter.
Speaker 3: And if someone is telling you a long story and
Speaker 3: you kind of like want them to cut to the chase,
Speaker 3: you can politely prompt them to do that by saying, Wow,
Speaker 3: how did it end? And then that's how you kind
Speaker 3: of get to the conclusion. So that's sometimes helpful. I
Speaker 3: hope that's helpful. My sister told me that a million
Speaker 3: years ago, that I use it all the time. Okay,
Speaker 3: all right, until next time, smologites.
Speaker 6: Bye Byelogies.
Speaker 5: Alogy anologists knowledges. I see aliens.