First Contact (28 page)

OPTION 3. Life exists beyond Earth and, in some instances, has become complex and most likely includes what we would consider intelligence.

Not surprisingly, this is what many and probably most scientists involved in astrobiology consider the most likely scenario. An objection often raised to this conclusion is that if extraterrestrial life existed on other planets or moons, we would have already found it. Similarly, people ask, if intelligent alien life exists, why hasn't it come to Earth and made itself known? Variations on these questions were famously posed by nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950: If the perceived probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations is so high, he asked, then why is there no evidence for, or contact with, any life-forms beyond Earth? Fermi's paradox is not an insignificant obstacle. It was posited around the time that UFO reports—perhaps the layman's answer to the paradox—became the rage. Absent a good answer, some people turned to a bad one. But other answers exist, and many again focus on the vastness of time and space.

Humans have had the capacity to actually search for extraterrestrial life in a technologically advanced way for only about fifty years. We on
Earth have produced radio waves and other far-traveling signatures of intelligent activity for less than 150 years. In a universe estimated to be 13.8 billion years old, and which has had stars, solar systems, and trillions of planets for a good portion of that time, 150 years is not even a blink of the eye. What's more, the stars closest to our sun are the Alpha Centauri system, about 4.25 light-years away. That's about 30 trillion miles. No planets have actually been found in Alpha Centauri, but let's assume for a second they exist and house intelligent life. Traveling at the speed of light, a beamed message going back and forth to our solar system would take 8.5 years.

It's true that the biosignatures of atmospheric oxygen and complex hydrocarbons have been around Earth's atmosphere much longer, and technologically advanced civilizations from beyond could have detected them and known what they meant. Logic says that is correct, but doesn't offer much more on the question. But science, and especially astrobiology, is grounded in this different truth: An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence—unless you're looking for living brontosauri or unicorns in the ballfield. It may be meaningful or frustrating to some that extraterrestrial life remains unfound or unconfirmed but, really, the search has just begun. When Fermi posed his paradox, it actually
hadn't
even begun. Step back a bit, and this picture emerges of what has been discovered: The universe is now ruled by what appears to be a singular set of laws of physics and chemistry, organizing principles that led to the formation of single-cell microbes on one planet at least and, through evolution, led to ragweed, cats, and us. The universe is now known to be swimming in carbon, amino acids, nitrogen, hydrocarbons, water, and energy from starlight—the bottom-line essentials for life as we know it. And life on Earth has shown itself to be extraordinarily tenacious and capable of surviving catastrophes from asteroid hits to the glacial times of what is sometimes called Snowball Earth. If life started on any of those countless other planets we know to be out there, why wouldn't it have the same tenacity? The universe, it seems, has the ingredients and structure for quite a cosmic menagerie.

Yes, spacecraft have landed on or flown past most of the planets and some of the moons of our solar system, and no life has yet been confirmed. What's more, we've found that conditions out there can get awfully cold, awfully hot, awfully dry, and awash in killing cosmic radiation. But many planetary scientists hold that the possibility of some current or former life on Mars, Europa, or Enceladus in particular remains very much intact, and our ability to identify and confirm its presence is in its infancy. Any discovery of a second or third genesis in our own pedestrian solar system would pretty much have to mean that life is a commonplace across the universe. So the real long-term action is those exoplanets, the ones we'll be examining with occulters and sunshades and spectrometers on the lookout for signatures of life. Doesn't it seem unlikely that none—zero—of the trillions and trillions of planets now reasonably presumed to exist beyond our solar system have the ingredients and conditions needed to cobble together life, and the stability needed to allow life to evolve and grow more complex? Doesn't it seem more likely that we will, in the near or further future, make our first contact with undoubtedly extraterrestrial life, and that it will be a day our world long remembers as the harbinger of a new frontier in a dramatically changed cosmos?

My indebtedness to the insights, skills, and kindnesses of others in creating this book is perhaps best told through chronology. It was due to a series of hardly inevitable occurrences that the project was started and through the generosity of others' spirit that it grew and thrived.

It was my
Washington Post
colleague Shankar Vedantam who got the ball rolling. He had participated in the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion at Cambridge University, and for several years he suggested I, too, might find it valuable and enjoyable. My resistance broke down in 2007, and I'll be forever grateful to Shankar for his persistence. My month at Cambridge in 2008 was spent listening to talks by prominent and often compelling speakers from many disciplines, and then was followed by my writing and presenting a paper on the topic I had selected—astrobiology and its implications for religion. The Cambridge program was expertly run with great hospitality by Fraser N. Watts, Director of the Psychology and Religion Research Group at Cambridge University and an Anglican priest; Julia Vitullo-Martin, director of the Center for Urban Innovation in New York; and Sir Brian Heap, a research associate at the University of Cambridge. Their help and encouragement was essential, and the fellowship provided an ideology-free setting for learning.

Part of the program involved having one's work published, and, after an expert edit by my
Washington Post
editor Nils Bruzelius, my story about astrobiology did appear in the newspaper. Even before that, however, I was contacted by Washington literary agent Gail Ross, who wanted to know
if I was interested in writing a book based on my Templeton work. I was again hesitant, but, after meeting with her and editorial director Howard Yoon, I saw how my germ of an idea could grow. The talents, insights, and enthusiasm they brought to that initial conversation still make me smile.

My good fortune continued when Priscilla Painton, executive editor of Simon & Schuster, concluded that my book proposal was something that she and her imprint wanted. What followed was two years of highly productive work with an editor who was not only superb at all aspects of editing, but was always available to give direction and advice, and was imaginative, savvy, and fun. Her skills, both personal and professional, were absolutely essential to giving the book its shape and reach. Her assistant, Michael Szczerban, was similarly a talented and professional pleasure to work with.

My travels kept me on the road constantly and required a not-insignificant investment of our family funds, but my wonderful wife, Lynn Litterine, encouraged me all the way. She also listened with care to my adventures and scientific insights (and misunderstandings) and gave much-valued feedback as I described both the science and the scientists I was meeting. A partner could not ask for more. I'm indebted as well to my father, Irving Kaufman, for support that was intellectual, moral, and financial, and wish that my mother, Mabel Kaufman, had been alive to watch the process unfold. Our two sons, David and John Litterine-Kaufman, helped provide the emotional richness that makes a project like this possible. I especially enjoyed talking with John (a veterinarian in training) about science, and David and his wife Elizabeth Nolte were a joy to be with in Istanbul—where they were living for a year and where Lynn and I stopped on my round-the-world reporting run.

Other friends, colleagues, and scientists who helped in many ways not always visible were Kathy Sawyer, Frances Sellers, Nils Bruzelius, Phillip Bennett, Vanessa Gezari, Rob Stein, Adele Nakayama, Yoko Hisakata, Liz Gulliford, Jonathan Trent, Radu Popa, Jonathan Lunine, Farid Salama, John Rummel, Ernan McMullin, Connie Bertka, Gary Rosen, Shawn Doyle,
Amanda Achberger, Derek Litthauer, Seth Shostak, Laura Ventura, Marc and Deborah Taylor, Emily Yoffe, and Peter Perl.

As someone who writes about science but is not trained as a scientist, I had the sometimes daunting task of trying to understand complex issues in a wide range of scientific disciplines and languages. Most of the subjects of
First Contact
agreed to read parts of the book behind me and correct any misunderstandings. Errors that may remain are entirely my own.

I went into my reporting of
First Contact
with more than three decades of journalism and writing experience but limited knowledge of the many scientific disciplines that make up astrobiology. As a result, I was utterly dependent on the time and gracious teaching of the scores of researchers who let me into their labs and into their lives. Almost all were accustomed to speaking about their research primarily with their scientific peers, yet my early lack of knowledge about their fields and their terminology required me to ask many, many questions. I never once felt that the scientists resented my endless inquiries; instead, I found them eager to talk until their work was understood in a way that it could be accurately explained to scientists and nonscientists alike. I will be forever grateful for the education I received.

While I spoke with scores of women and men about their work, I am very much aware of the many other important and talented scientists working in astrobiology whom I did not interview or get to know. This book describes the work of a limited number of researchers, and I am sure all would say they could not have achieved the breakthroughs they did (or will) without the prior work of many others and the current work of many colleagues.

As mentioned in the book's opening chapter, my interest in astrobiology was excited by one of its foremost practitioners—theoretical physicist and exoplanet expert Sara Seager of MIT. Her knowledge and enthusiasm helped both direct and inform me. Edward Weiler, associate administrator
for NASA's Science Directorate, also gave me the broad overview of astrobiology that I needed to get started, and the confidence that the enterprise was headed somewhere very important. Both Mary Voytek, NASA's chief scientist for astrobiology, and Carl Pilcher, the director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, played similar foundational roles, as did Fraser Watts and Lord Martin Rees of Cambridge University. Linda Billings, research professor, School of Media and Public Affairs of George Washington University, was instrumental as well in setting me in the right directions, as was Arthur Charo of the National Research Council. The textbook
Planets and Life: The Emerging Science of Astrobiology
, by Woodruff T. Sullivan III and John A. Baross, provided invaluable background understanding. And of course, every writer about astrobiology is in some way influenced by the late Carl Sagan.

The opening chapter is a compilation and interpretation of the knowledge I gleaned from my scores of interviews, in addition to readings of books and scientific papers listed in the bibliography. But a number of people stand out as especially informative and helpful in identifying major themes: Sara Seager; Steven Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Florida; Carol Cleland of the University of Colorado, Boulder; Tullis Onstott of Princeton University; Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; Steven J. Dick, former official historian for NASA; David McKay of NASA's Johnson Space Center; Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington; Pan Conrad of the Goddard Space Flight Center; and Christopher McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center.

The chapter on extremophiles was anchored in the pioneering work of scientists such as John Baross of the University of Washington and John Priscu of Montana State University, but relied heavily on time spent with Tullis Onstott, Brent Christner of Louisiana State University, Gaetan Borgonie of the University of Ghent, and Lisa Pratt of Indiana University. My journey to the mines of South Africa was accomplished only with the assistance of Esta van Heerden and Derek Litthauer of the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, who both took me along with
them and taught me along the way. Peter Doran of the University of Illinois in Chicago and Bill Stone of Stone Aerospace in Austin, Texas, explained the science and technology involved in the Lake Bonney expedition in Antarctica. In addition, the 2010 American Geophysical Union's Chapman Conference on the Exploration and Study of Antarctic Subglacial Aquatic Environments gave me a three-day tutorial on the improbable yet central world of microbes living in ice.

Exploring the definitions of life was inspired by and aided substantially by the work of Carol Cleland and Christopher Chyba of Princeton University, and especially by the patient teaching of Cleland. In addition, Gilbert Levin, now president of Spherix and formerly a principal investigator for the NASA Viking mission, shared his information and time, as did NASA's Michael Meyer, chief scientist for Mars missions. Penelope Boston of New Mexico Tech, Kimberly Kuhlman of the Planetary Science Institute, and Ferran Garcia-Pichel of Arizona State University explained and showed me the world of desert varnish. Steve Benner and his Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution colleague Matt Carrigan explained synthetic biology and allowed me several days in their lab, and Gerald Joyce and Tracey Lincoln described their groundbreaking work in creating self-replicating RNA at the Scripps Research Institute.

Regarding the Miller-Urey experiment and its decades of influence, I am most indebted to Danny Glavin and Jason Dworkin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center for their generous sharing of time and our trip together to the National Museum of Natural History in Washington to discuss the Murchison meteorite. They also gave me insights into the phenomenon of chirality, as did Sandra Pizzarello of Arizona State University. Jeffrey Bada of the Scripps Oceanographic Institution, Antonio Lazcano of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and Rafael Navarro-González of the university spent substantial time teaching me, as did Pascale Ehrenfreund of the University of Leiden and George Washington University. My journey to Alaska was greatly aided by lightning experts Ronald Thomas of New Mexico Tech and his colleague Sonje Behnke, and volcanologist
Steven McNutt of the Alaska Volcano Observatory. McNutt arranged for our remarkable trip to the mouth of the Mount Redoubt volcano.