Posted on by Paul Patton

Defining Life II: Metabolism and Evolution as clues to Extraterrestrial Life

The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018 may be the first to be capable of detecting biomarker gasses in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. When an exoplanet passes between its star and Earth, an event called a transit, light that has passed through the planet’s atmosphere can be detected from a vantage point near Earth. When light passes through the exoplanet’s atmosphere, some wavelengths are absorbed and others transmitted. By analyzing the transmitted light spectrum, astronomers can learn the composition of the planet’s atmosphere. Astrobiologists hope to find biomarker gasses indicating the metabolic waste products of life. The oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere is a waste product of photosynthesis in plants and bacteria. The Webb telescope may be capable of conducting this test for planets larger than Earth (super-earths) transiting small stars. Space telescopes capable of conducting such research on a larger scale have been delayed by budget cuts. Credit: NASA

In the movie “Avatar”, we could tell at a glance that the alien moon Pandora was teeming with alien life. Here on Earth though, the most abundant life is not the plants and animals that we are familiar with. The most abundant life is simple and microscopic. There are 50 million bacterial organisms in a single gram of soil, and the world wide bacterial biomass exceeds that of all plants and animals. Microbes can grow in extreme environments of temperature, salinity, acidity, radiation, and pressure. The most likely form in which we will encounter life elsewhere in our solar system is microbial.

Astrobiologists need strategies for inferring the presence of alien microbial life or its fossilized remains. They need strategies for inferring the presence of alien life on the distant planets of other stars, which are too far away to explore with spacecraft in the foreseeable future. To do these things, they long for a definition of life, that would make it possible to reliably distinguish life from non-life.

Unfortunately, as we saw in the first installment of this series, despite enormous growth in our knowledge of living things, philosophers and scientists have been unable to produce such a definition. Astrobiologists get by as best they can with definitions that are partial, and that have exceptions. Their search is geared to the features of life on Earth, the only life we currently know.

In the first installment, we saw how the composition of terrestrial life influences the search for extraterrestrial life. Astrobiologists search for environments that once contained or currently contain liquid water, and that contain complex molecules based on carbon. Many scientists, however, view the essential features of life as having to do with its capacities instead of its composition.

In 1994, a NASA committee adopted a definition of life as a “self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”, based on a suggestion by Carl Sagan. This definition contains two features, metabolism and evolution, that are typically mentioned in definitions of life.

Metabolism is the set of chemical processes by which living things actively use energy to maintain themselves, grow, and develop. According to the second law of thermodynamics, a system that doesn’t interact with its external environment will become more disorganized and uniform with time. Living things build and maintain their improbable, highly organized state because they harness sources of energy in their external environment to power their metabolism.

Plants and some bacteria use the energy of sunlight to manufacture larger organic molecules out of simpler subunits. These molecules store chemical energy that can later be extracted by other chemical reactions to power their metabolism. Animals and some bacteria consume plants or other animals as food. They break down complex organic molecules in their food into simpler ones, to extract their stored chemical energy. Some bacteria can use the energy contained in chemicals derived from non-living sources in the process of chemosynthesis.

In a 2014 article in Astrobiology, Lucas John Mix, a Harvard evolutionary biologist, referred to the metabolic definition of life as Haldane Life after the pioneering physiologist J. B. S. Haldane. The Haldane life definition has its problems. Tornadoes and vorticies like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot use environmental energy to sustain their orderly structure, but aren’t alive. Fire uses energy from its environment to sustain itself and grow, but isn’t alive either.

Despite its shortcomings, astrobiologists have used Haldane definition to devise experiments. The Viking Mars landers made the only attempt so far to directly test for extraterrestrial life, by detecting the supposed metabolic activities of Martian microbes. They assumed that Martian metabolism is chemically similar to its terrestrial counterpart.

One experiment sought to detect the metabolic breakdown of nutrients into simpler molecules to extract their energy. A second aimed to detect oxygen as a waste product of photosynthesis. A third tried to show the manufacture of complex organic molecules out of simpler subunits, which also occurs during photosynthesis. All three experiments seemed to give positive results, but many researchers believe that the detailed findings can be explained without biology, by chemical oxidizing agents in the soil.

Viking Lander
In 1976, two Viking spacecraft landed on Mars. The image is of a model of the Viking lander, along with astronomer and pioneering astrobiologist Carl Sagan. Each lander was equipped with life detection experiments designed to detect life based on its metabolic activities. These activities were assumed to be chemically similar to those of Earthly organisms. The three experiments included: 1) The labeled release experiment, in which radioactively labeled organic nutrients were added to Martian soil. If organisms were present, it was assumed that their metabolism would involve breaking down the nutrients for their energy content and releasing labeled carbon dioxide as a waste product. 2) The gas exchange experiment, in which Martian soil was provided with nutrients and light and monitored for the release of oxygen. On Earth, organisms that capture the energy of sunlight through the process of photosynthesis, like plants and some bacteria, release oxygen as a waste product. 3) The pyrolytic release experiment, in which Martian soil was placed in a chamber with radioactively labeled carbon dioxide. If there were organisms in the soil that photosynthesized like those on Earth, their metabolic processes would take up the gas and use the energy of sunlight to manufacture more complex organic molecules. Radioactive carbon would be given off when those more complex molecules were broken down by heating the sample. All three experiments produced what seemed like positive results. However, most scientists rejected this interpretation because the details of many of the results could be explained by supposing that there were chemical oxidizing agents in the soil instead of life, and because Viking failed to detect organic materials in Martian soil. This interpretation, especially for the labeled release experiment, remains controversial to this day and may need to be revisited based on recent findings.
Credits: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech

Some of the Viking results remain controversial to this day. At the time, many researchers felt that the failure to find organic materials in Martian soil ruled out a biological interpretation of the metabolic results. The more recent finding that Martian soil actually does contain organic molecules that might have been destroyed by perchlorates during the Viking analysis, and that liquid water was once abundant on the surface of Mars lend new plausibility to the claim that Viking may have actually succeeded in detecting life. By themselves, though, the Viking results didn’t prove that life exists on Mars nor rule it out.

The metabolic activities of life may also leave their mark on the composition of planetary atmospheres. In 2003, the European Mars Express spacecraft detected traces of methane in the Martian atmosphere. In December 2014, a team of NASA scientists reported that the Curiosity Mars rover had confirmed this finding by detected atmospheric methane from the Martian surface.

Most of the methane in Earth’s atmosphere is released by living organisms or their remains. Subterranean bacterial ecosystems that use chemosynthesis as a source of energy are common, and they produce methane as a metabolic waste product. Unfortunately, there are also non-biological geochemical processes that can produce methane. So, once more, Martian methane is frustratingly ambiguous as a sign of life.

Extrasolar planets orbiting other stars are far too distant to visit with spacecraft in the foreseeable future. Astrobiologists still hope to use the Haldane definition to search for life on them. With near future space telescopes, astronomers hope to learn the composition of the atmospheres of these planets by analyzing the spectrum of light wavelengths reflected or transmitted by their atmospheres. The James Webb Space Telescope scheduled for launch in 2018, will be the first to be useful in this project. Astrobiologists want to search for atmospheric biomarkers; gases that are metabolic waste products of living organisms.

Once more, this quest is guided by the only example of a life-bearing planet we currently have; Earth. About 21% of our home planet’s atmosphere is oxygen. This is surprising because oxygen is a highly reactive gas that tends to enter into chemical combinations with other substances. Free oxygen should quickly vanish from our air. It remains present because the loss is constantly being replaced by plants and bacteria that release it as a metabolic waste product of photosynthesis.

Traces of methane are present in Earth’s atmosphere because of chemosynthetic bacteria. Since methane and oxygen react with one another, neither would stay around for long unless living organisms were constantly replenishing the supply. Earth’s atmosphere also contains traces of other gases that are metabolic byproducts.

In general, living things use energy to maintain Earth’s atmosphere in a state far from the thermodynamic equilibrium it would reach without life. Astrobiologists would suspect any planet with an atmosphere in a similar state of harboring life. But, as for the other cases, it would be hard to completely rule out non-biological possibilities.

Besides metabolism, the NASA committee identified evolution as a fundamental ability of living things. For an evolutionary process to occur there must be a group of systems, where each one is capable of reliably reproducing itself. Despite the general reliability of reproduction, there must also be occasional random copying errors in the reproductive process so that the systems come to have differing traits. Finally, the systems must differ in their ability to survive and reproduce based on the benefits or liabilities of their distinctive traits in their environment. When this process is repeated over and over again down the generations, the traits of the systems will become better adapted to their environment. Very complex traits can sometimes evolve in a step-by-step fashion.

Mix named this the Darwin life definition, after the nineteenth century naturalist Charles Darwin, who formulated the theory of evolution. Like the Haldane definition, the Darwin life definition has important shortcomings. It has trouble including everything that we might think of as alive. Mules, for example, can’t reproduce, and so, by this definition, don’t count as being alive.

Despite such shortcomings, the Darwin life definition is critically important, both for scientists studying the origin of life and astrobiologists. The modern version of Darwin’s theory can explain how diverse and complex forms of life can evolve from some initial simple form. A theory of the origin of life is needed to explain how the initial simple form acquired the capacity to evolve in the first place.

The chemical systems or life forms found on other planets or moons in our solar system might be so simple that they are close to the boundary between life and non-life that the Darwin definition establishes. The definition might turn out to be vital to astrobiologists trying to decide whether a chemical system they have found really qualifies as a life form. Biologists still don’t know how life originated. If astrobiologists can find systems near the Darwin boundary, their findings may be pivotally important to understanding the origin of life.

Can astrobiologists use the Darwin definition to find and study extraterrestrial life? It’s unlikely that a visiting spacecraft could detect to process of evolution itself. But, it might be capable of detecting the molecular structures that living organisms need in order to take part in an evolutionary process. Philosopher Mark Bedau has proposed that a minimal system capable of undergoing evolution would need to have three things: 1) a chemical metabolic process, 2) a container, like a cell membrane, to establish the boundaries of the system, and 3) a chemical “program” capable of directing the metabolic activities.

Here on Earth, the chemical program is based on the genetic molecule DNA. Many origin-of-life theorists think that the genetic molecule of the earliest terrestrial life forms may have been the simpler molecule ribonucleic acid (RNA). The genetic program is important to an evolutionary process because it makes the reproductive copying process stable, with only occasional errors.

Both DNA and RNA are biopolymers; long chainlike molecules with many repeating subunits. The specific sequence of nucleotide base subunits in these molecules encodes the genetic information they carry. So that the molecule can encode all possible sequences of genetic information it must be possible for the subunits to occur in any order.

Steven Benner, a computational genomics researcher, believes that we may be able to develop spacecraft experiments to detect alien genetic biopolymers. He notes that DNA and RNA are very unusual biopolymers because changing the sequence in which their subunits occur doesn’t change their chemical properties. It is this unusual property that allows these molecules to be stable carriers of any possible genetic code sequence.

DNA and RNA are both polyelectrolytes; molecules with regularly repeating areas of negative electrical charge. Benner believes that this is what accounts for their remarkable stability. He thinks that any alien genetic biopolymer would also need to be a polyelectrolyte, and that chemical tests could be devised by which a spacecraft might detect such polyelectrolyte molecules. Finding the alien counterpart of DNA is a very exciting prospect, and another piece to the puzzle of identifying alien life.

Structure of DNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the genetic material for all known life on Earth. DNA is a biopolymer consisting of a string of subunits. The subunits consist of nucleotide base pairs containing a purine (adenine A, or guanine G) and a pyrimidine (thymine T, or cytosine C). DNA can contain nucleotide base pairs in any order without its chemical properties changing. This property is rare in biopolymers, and makes it possible for DNA to encode genetic information in the sequence of its base pairs. This stability is due to the fact that each base pair contains phosphate groups (consisting of phosphorus and oxygen atoms) on the outside with a net negative charge. These repeated negative charges make DNA a polyelectrolyte. Computational genomics researcher Steven Benner has hypothesized that alien genetic material will also be a polyelectrolyte biopolymer, and that chemical tests could therefore be devised to detect alien genetic molecules.
Credit: Zephyris

In 1996 President Clinton, made a dramatic announcement of the possible discovery of life on Mars. Clinton’s speech was motivated by the findings of David McKay’s team with the Alan Hills meteorite. In fact, the McKay findings turned out to be just one piece to the larger puzzle of possible Martian life. Unless an alien someday ambles past our waiting cameras, the question of whether or not extraterrestrial life exists is unlikely to be settled by a single experiment or a sudden dramatic breakthrough. Philosophers and scientists don’t have a single, sure-fire definition of life. Astrobiologists consequently don’t have a single sure-fire test that will settle the issue. If simple forms of life do exist on Mars, or elsewhere in the solar system, it now seems likely that that fact will emerge gradually, based on many converging lines of evidence. We won’t really know what we’re looking for until we find it.

References and further reading:

P. S. Anderson (2011) Could Curiosity Determine if Viking Found Life on Mars?, Universe Today.

S. K. Atreya, P. R. Mahaffy, A-S. Wong, (2007), Methane and related trace species on Mars: Origin, loss, implications for life, and habitability, Planetary and Space Science, 55:358-369.

M. A. Bedau (2010), An Aristotelian account of minimal chemical life, Astrobiology, 10(10): 1011-1020.

S. A. Benner (2010), Defining life, Astrobiology, 10(10):1021-1030.

E. Machery (2012), Why I stopped worrying about the definition of life…and why you should as well, Synthese, 185:145-164.

G. M. Marion, C. H. Fritsen, H. Eicken, M. C. Payne, (2003) The search for life on Europa: Limiting environmental factors, potential habitats, and Earth analogs. Astrobiology 3(4):785-811.

L. J. Mix (2015), Defending definitions of life, Astrobiology, 15(1) posted on-line in advance of publication.

P. E. Patton (2014) Moons of Confusion: Why Finding Extraterrestrial Life may be Harder than we Thought, Universe Today.

T. Reyes (2014) NASA’s Curiosity Rover detects Methane, Organics on Mars, Universe Today.

S. Seeger, M. Schrenk, and W. Bains (2012), An astrophysical view of Earth-based biosignature gases. Astrobiology, 12(1): 61-82.

S. Tirard, M. Morange, and A. Lazcano, (2010), The definition of life: A brief history of an elusive scientific endeavor, Astrobiology, 10(10):1003-1009.

C. R. Webster, and numerous other members of the MSL Science team, (2014) Mars methane detection and variability at Gale crater, Science, Science express early content.

Did Viking Mars landers find life’s building blocks? Missing piece inspires new look at puzzle. Science Daily Featured Research Sept. 5, 2010

NASA rover finds active and ancient organic chemistry on Mars, Jet Propulsion laboratory, California Institute of Technology, News, Dec. 16, 2014.

Posted on by Paul Patton

Defining Life I: What are Astrobiologists Looking For?

In December, 2014 researchers in the Mars Science Laboratory Project announced that they had made the first definitive detection of organic materials on the surface of Mars. The sample was taken on May 19, 2013 from a rock that mission controllers named “Cumberland”. The Curiosity Mars rover drilled a hole 1.6 cm wide and 6.6 cm deep in the Martian rock. Powered rock from the hole was delivered to the rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument for analysis. The scientists drew their conclusions only after months of careful analysis. The identity and complexity of the organic substances remains uncertain, because they may have been altered by perchlorates that were also present in the rock, when the material was heated for analysis. The Viking Mars landers of 1976 had earlier failed to detect organic materials on Mars. Credits: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech

How can astrobiologists find extraterrestrial life? In everyday life, we usually don’t have any problem telling that a dog or a rosebush is a living thing and a rock isn’t. In the climatic scene of the movie ‘Europa Report’ we can tell at a glance that the multi-tentacled creature discovered swimming in the ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa is alive, complicated, and quite possibly intelligent.

But unless something swims, walks, crawls, or slithers past the cameras of a watching spacecraft, astrobiologists face a much tougher job. They need to devise tests that will allow them to infer the presence of alien microbial life from spacecraft data. They need to be able to recognize fossil traces of past alien life. They need to be able to determine whether the atmospheres of distant planets circling other stars contain the tell-tale traces of unfamiliar forms of life. They need ways to infer the presence of life from knowledge of its properties. A definition of life would tell them what those properties are, and how to look for them. This is the first of a two part series exploring how our concept of life influences the search for extraterrestrial life.

What is it that sets living things apart? For centuries, philosophers and scientists have sought an answer. The philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) devoted a great deal of effort to dissecting animals and studying living things. He supposed that they had distinctive special capacities that set them apart from things that aren’t alive. Inspired by the mechanical inventions of his times, the Renaissance philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) believed that living things were like clockwork machines, their special capacities deriving from the way their parts were organized.

In 1944, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) wrote What is Life? In it, he proposed that the fundamental phenomena of life, including even how parents pass on their traits to their offspring, could be understood by studying the physics and chemistry of living things. Schrödinger’s book was an inspiration to the science of molecular biology.

Living organisms are made of large complicated molecules with backbones of linked carbon atoms. Molecular biologists were able to explain many of the functions of life in terms of these organic molecules and the chemical reactions they undergo when dissolved in liquid water. In 1955 James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and showed how it could be the storehouse of hereditary information passed from parent to offspring.

While all this research and theorizing has vastly increased our understanding of life, it hasn’t produced a satisfactory definition of life; a definition that would allow us to reliably distinguish things that are alive from things that aren’t. In 2012 the philosopher Edouard Mahery argued that coming up with a single definition of life was both impossible and pointless. Astrobiologists get by as best they can with definitions that are partial, and that have exceptions. Their search is conditioned by our knowledge of the specific features of life on Earth; the only life we currently know.

Here on Earth, living things are distinctive in their chemical composition. Besides carbon, the elements hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur are particularly important to the large organic molecules that make up terrestrial life. Water is a necessary solvent. Since we don’t know for sure what else might be possible, the search for extraterrestrial life typically assumes its chemical composition will be similar to that of life on Earth.

Making use of that assumption, astrobiologists assign a high priority to the search for water on other celestial bodies. Spacecraft evidence has proven that Mars once had bodies of liquid water on its surface. Determining the history and extent of this water is a central goal of Mars exploration. Astrobiologists are excited by evidence of subsurface oceans of water on Jupiter’s moon Europa, Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and perhaps on other moons or dwarf planets. But while the presence of liquid water implies conditions appropriate for Earth-like life, it doesn’t prove that such life exists or has ever existed.

Europa
Jupiter’s icy moon Europa appears to host liquid water, an essential condition for life as we know it on Earth. Its surface is covered with a crust of water ice. The Voyager and Galileo spacecraft have provided evidence that under this icy crust, there is an ocean of saltwater, containing more liquid water than all the oceans of Earth. Europa’s interior is heated by gravitational tidal forces exerted by giant Jupiter. This heat energy may drive volcanism, hydrothermal vents, and the production of chemical energy sources that living things could make use of. Interaction between materials from Europa’s surface and the ocean environment beneath could make available carbon and other chemical elements essential for Earth-like life.
Credits: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, SETI Institute

Organic chemicals are necessary for Earth-like life, but, as for water, their presence doesn’t prove that life exists, because organic materials can also be formed by non-biological processes. In 1976, NASA’s two Viking landers were the first spacecraft to make fully successful landings on Mars. They carried an instrument; called the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer, that tested the soil for organic molecules.

Even without life, scientists expected to find some organic materials in the Martian soil. Organic materials formed by non-biological processes are found in carbonaceous meteorites, and some of these meteorites should have fallen on Mars. They were surprised to find nothing at all. At the time, the failure to find organic molecules was considered a major blow to the possibility of life on Mars.

In 2008, NASA’s Phoenix lander discovered an explanation of why Viking didn’t detect organic molecules. If found that the Martian soil contains perchlorates. Containing oxygen and chlorine, perchlorates are oxidizing agents that can break down organic material. While perchlorates and organic molecules could coexist in Martian soil, scientists determined that heating the soil for the Viking analysis would have caused the perchlorates to destroy any organic material it contained. Martian soil might contain organic materials, after all.

At a news briefing in December 2014, NASA announced that an instrument carried on board the Curiosity Mars rover had succeeded in detected simple organic molecules on Mars for the first time. Researchers believe it is possible that the molecules detected may be breakdown products of more complex organic molecules that were broken down by perchlorates during the process of analysis.

electron micrograph of Mars meteorite
In 1996 a team of scientists lead by Dr. David McKay of NASA’s Johnson Space Center announced possible evidence of life on Mars. The evidence came from their studies of a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica, called Alan Hills 84001. The researchers found chemical and physical traces of possible life including carbonate globules that resemble terrestrial nanobacteria (electron micrograph shown) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. In terrestrial rock, the chemical traces would be considered breakdown products of bacterial life. The findings became the subject of controversy as non-biological explanations for the findings were found. Today, they are no longer regarded as definitive evidence of Martian life.
Credits: NASA Johnson Space Center

The chemical make-up of terrestrial life has also guided the search for traces of life in Martian meteorites. In 1996 a team of investigators lead by David McKay of the Johnson Space Center in Houston reported evidence that a Martian meteorite found at Alan Hills in Antarctica in 1984 contained chemical and physical evidence of past Martian life.

There have since been similar claims about other Martian meteorites. But, non-biological explanations for many of the findings have been proposed, and the whole subject has remained embroiled in controversy. Meteorites have not so far yielded the kind of evidence needed to prove the existence of extraterrestrial life beyond reasonable doubt.

Following Aristotle, most scientists prefer to define life in terms of its capacities rather than its composition. In the second installment, we will explore how our understanding of life’s capacities has influenced the search for extraterrestrial life.

References and further reading:

N. Atkinson (2009) Perchlorates and Water Make for Potential Habitable Environment on Mars, Universe Today.

S. A. Benner (2010), Defining life, Astrobiology, 10(10):1021-1030.

E. Machery (2012), Why I stopped worrying about the definition of life…and why you should as well, Synthese, 185:145-164.

L. J. Mix (2015), Defending definitions of life, Astrobiology, 15(1) posted on-line in advance of publication.

T. Reyes (2014) NASA’s Curiosity Rover detects Methane, Organics on Mars, Universe Today.

S. Tirard, M. Morange, and A. Lazcano, (2010), The definition of life: A brief history of an elusive scientific endeavor, Astrobiology, 10(10):1003-1009.

Did Viking Mars landers find life’s building blocks? Missing piece inspires new look at puzzle. Science Daily Featured Research Sept. 5, 2010

NASA rover finds active and ancient organic chemistry on Mars, Jet Propulsion laboratory, California Institute of Technology, News, Dec. 16, 2014.

Europa: Ingredients for Life?, National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Posted on by Paul Patton

Communicating Across the Cosmos 4: The Quest for a Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta stone, now displayed at the British Museum in London, was used by Jean-Francois Champollion to decipher Egyptian heiroglyphics, Credit: Hans Hillewaert, British Museum

On television and in the movies, it’s so easy. Aliens almost always speak English (at least in America they do). If it’s explained at all, we are typically told that they learned it by intercepting communications with our astronauts, or tapping into our television broadcasts. A universal translator device instantly abolishes communication difficulties. Hollywood aliens are, of course, human beings in costumes (these days augmented by computer graphics). They are equipped, as are we all, with a human brain, a human larynx, and human vocal cords; all singular products of the distinctive evolutionary history of our species.

Real extraterrestrials, if they exist, will be the product of a different evolutionary history, played out on another world.

They will know no human language, and be unfamiliar with the typical activities of human beings. Here on Earth no archeologist has ever deciphered an ancient script without knowing the language it corresponds to, even though such scripts deal with recognizable human activities. How could we ever devise a message that aliens could understand? Could we ever understand a message they sent to us? Communicating with alien minds may be one of the most daunting challenges the human intellect has ever faced.

In mid-November, the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California sponsored an academic conference on the problem interstellar communication ‘Communicating across the Cosmos’. The conference drew 17 speakers from a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, archeology, mathematics, cognitive science, radio astronomy, and art. In this final installment, we will search for clues to a solution to the daunting problem of making ourselves understood to an extraterrestrial civilization.

Conference presenter and archeologist Paul Wason believes that the history of archeology provides an important lesson for how we might devise a message that can be deciphered by extraterrestrials. In the early 19th century the French archeologist Jean-Francois Champollion solved one of the great riddles of his field by deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. The critical clue was provided by an artifact discovered in 1799 in an Egyptian town that Europeans called Rosetta. It became known as the Rosetta stone.

The stone contained the same inscription in three different scripts. One of them was Egyptian hieroglyphics, and another was Greek, which Champollion knew how to read. Champollion used the Greek to decipher the hieroglyphics. Could we use the same strategy to create a cosmic Rosetta stone? Like Wason, Carl Sagan also grasped the importance of the Rosetta stone, and discussed it extensively in his 1980’s book and television series Cosmos. To create a cosmic Rosetta stone, we would need a language to stand in the role of Greek. It would need to be known both to us, and to the aliens. Could there possibly be such a thing?

Many mathematicians and physical scientists involved in SETI believe that mathematical and physical concepts could play the needed role. According to mathematician and conference speaker Carl DeVito, the natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3 …) are useful to humans in dealing with the cyclical processes that are a everywhere in nature, and probably arise universally in the minds of intelligent beings. Astronomers have strong evidence that the laws of physics and chemistry worked out in laboratories here on Earth hold everywhere in the universe. That being the case, they hope that humans and aliens share a common understanding of basic concepts in these fields. If this is so, then such concepts might play the same role that Greek did for Champollion. SETI pioneers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, along with their collaborators, employed a rudimentary version of this strategy when they constructed the message encoded on the phonographic record launched into space in 1977 aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. These spacecraft hurtled into interstellar space following the completion of their missions to explore the outer solar system.

An image encoded on the phonographic record carried aboard Voyager 1 and 2, intended to communicate how humans symbolize basic mathematical concepts. The left side depicts how humans, in western culture, represent the natural numbers using binary code and Arabic numerals. The vertical lines indicate binary ‘1’, and the horizontal lines binary ‘0’. On the right, additional numerals are given, and the use of scientific notation, and the operations of addition, multiplication, and division are depicted.
An image encoded on the phonographic record carried aboard Voyager 1 and 2, intended to communicate how humans symbolize basic mathematical concepts. The left side depicts how humans, in western culture, represent the natural numbers using binary code and Arabic numerals. The vertical lines indicate binary ‘1’, and the horizontal lines binary ‘0’. On the right, additional numerals are given, and the use of scientific notation, and the operations of addition, multiplication, and division are depicted. Credit: Frank Drake
An image encoded on the Voyager record intended to communicate standards of time, mass, and length to an extraterrestrial viewer, using basic concepts in physics encoded symbolically. In the upper right corner, each circle symbolizes a hydrogen atom. The diagram as a whole symbolizes a transition of the spin state of the electron. This transition involves the emission of a microwave radio wave of wavelength 21 centimeters, which is symbolized on the right side of the diagram. Radio emissions produced by this transition occurring in clouds of hydrogen gas in interstellar space are well known to radio astronomers. The wavelength is used as the standard of length (1 L). The time that this transition takes to occur is used as the unit of time (1t) and the mass of a hydrogen atom (1 M) is used as the standard of mass. Various units of measurement used by humans are then defined in terms of these standards. The units are then used throughout the pictorial portion of the message to indicate masses, lengths and times.
An image encoded on the Voyager record intended to communicate standards of time, mass, and length to an extraterrestrial viewer, using basic concepts in physics encoded symbolically. In the upper right corner, each circle symbolizes a hydrogen atom. The diagram as a whole symbolizes a transition of the spin state of the electron. This transition involves the emission of a microwave radio wave of wavelength 21 centimeters, which is symbolized on the right side of the diagram. Radio emissions produced by this transition occurring in clouds of hydrogen gas in interstellar space are well known to radio astronomers. The wavelength is used as the standard of length (1 L). The time that this transition takes to occur is used as the unit of time (1t) and the mass of a hydrogen atom (1 M) is used as the standard of mass. Various units of measurement used by humans are then defined in terms of these standards. The units are then used throughout the pictorial portion of the message to indicate masses, lengths and times. Credit: Frank Drake

Sagan, Drake, and their collaborators first used symbols in an attempt to communicate how humans represent the natural numbers using binary and base ten numerals. They used another set of symbols to depict some properties of the hydrogen atom, which they used to establish standards of distance and time. The distance and time standards were used repeatedly throughout the digital image portion of the message to specify the sizes and time scales depicted. The Voyager record included a greeting from then President Carter encoded as English text. Sagan, Drake, and their collaborators didn’t even attempt the monumental, and perhaps impossible, task of explaining President Carter’s text statement using their Rosetta stone.

Much like Wason and Sagan, computer scientist and conference presenter Kim Binsted, felt that the solution to interstellar communication lies in constructing a pidgin, a simplified version of a language developed to communicate between groups that share no language in common. She was doubtful though, that a cosmic Rosetta stone based on physics and math would let humans and aliens communicate about anything other than physics and math. It might never, for example, provide a way to convey the President’s good wishes. The hieroglyphics of the Rosetta stone were decipherable, in part, because they described the familiar human activities of an Egyptian pharaoh. Humans are clueless about what sorts of activities aliens typically engage in, and aliens are equally clueless about us. It’s hard to see how a Rosetta stone based on physics could bridge this sort of gap.

Philosophers Nicholas Rescher and Andre Kukla, neither of whom presented at the conference, have raised a more fundamental objection. They question whether extraterrestrials would use the same concepts to understand the physical and chemical world that we do. The concepts that modern western science uses to understand the physical world surely reflect the structure of that world. But they also reflect the history of our culture and the structure of our minds. Since aliens would differ from humans on both counts, it’s at least possible that their physical, and even their mathematical concepts might be different from ours. If that’s so, then physics can’t play the role that Greek did for Champollion. Every path forward is full of unknowns and difficulties, and Kim Binsted doubts a solution is possible.

There is a glimmering of hope for another kind of Rosetta stone based on another sort of “Greek”. Given the central role that visual images played in the Voyager message, it’s surprising that image based communication strategies didn’t receive greater emphasis at the conference. It’s true that here on Earth; animals have evolved a wide variety of non-visual ways to sense their surroundings. Some fishes can sense their environments by generating and detecting electric fields in the water. Many fish can use fields of water flow around their bodies to detect nearby objects. Bats, along with dolphins and whales, have evolved a sonar system, emitting sounds and analyzing their returning echoes. Scorpions can sense ground vibrations, elephants can hear sounds below the range of human hearing, and dogs have a remarkably acute sense of smell, to name just a few examples. Still, almost every Earthly animal has eyes of some sort.

Earthly evolution has invented vision several times, in different animal lineages. Vision is especially important for larger animals that live on land. This is because larger bodies can make larger eyes and larger eyes can give sharper vision and better light gathering abilities. Land environments are typically better lit than aquatic ones. Birds and mammals are the Earthly animals with the biggest and most sophisticated brains, and they also have the most acute vision.

Are alien environments likely to be well lit? Exoplanet hunters have focused their efforts on finding planets like the Earth, rocky terrestrial planets at the right distance from their star for temperatures to be in the range where water is a liquid. They have shown us that such worlds are fairly commonplace in the cosmos. The daytime surfaces of these exoplanets are likely to be flooded with visible light, just as is Earth. This light may be necessary for life on such a world, because most life on Earth depends on the energy of sunlight as trapped by green plants. For large, land dwelling animals in this kind of environment, vision provides more information, at a distance, than any other sense can. Since it evolved numerous times on Earth, it’s likely to do so elsewhere as well.

The eye of a squid is remarkably similar to our own. Squids are part of a group of animals called molluscs, which also includes slugs, snails, and shellfish. Molluscs are very distantly related to the vertebrates (animals with backbones, a group which includes humans). The most recent common ancestor of molluscs and vertebrates was a simple wormlike creature that lived more than 600 million years ago. The two groups have followed an independent course of evolution ever since. The fact that molluscs evolved complex brains and bodies along a different evolutionary path than vertebrates makes them a good model for understanding extraterrestrials. One group of molluscs, the cephalopods, a group which includes squids, octopuses, and cuttlefish, have evolved the largest and most complex brains of any invertebrate. Despite their separate evolutionary origin, the eyes of cephalopods are remarkably similar to vertebrate eyes, a phenomenon known as convergent evolution. Evolution solved similar problems in similar ways. These similarities suggest the possible usefulness of images in interstellar messages.
With a lens at the front and a sheet of light sensing cells at the back, the eye of a squid is remarkably similar to our own. Squids are part of a group of animals called molluscs, which also includes slugs, snails, and shellfish. Molluscs are very distantly related to the vertebrates (animals with backbones, a group which includes humans). The most recent common ancestor of molluscs and vertebrates was a simple worm-like creature that lived more than 600 million years ago. The two groups have followed an independent course of evolution ever since. The fact that molluscs evolved complex brains and bodies along a different evolutionary path than vertebrates makes them a good model for understanding some of the ways in which extraterrestrials, with an entirely separate evolutionary history, might be different from or similar to us. One group of molluscs, the cephalopods, a group which includes squids, octopuses, and cuttlefish, have evolved the largest and most complex brains of any invertebrates. Despite their separate evolutionary origin, the eyes of cephalopods are remarkably similar to vertebrate eyes, a phenomenon known as convergent evolution. Evolution solved similar problems in similar ways. Perhaps, even on another planet, evolution solves similar problems in similar ways. If aliens, like cephalopods, have some visual similarities to us, then visual images may be useful in interstellar messages. Credit: Carl Chun Die Cephaloden

The human visual system gathers information about a three dimensional world of objects and surfaces, partly by using motion cues. We have the ability to represent that world in two dimensions, using images. Kim Binsted worried that an alien visual system might not be capable of making sense of pictures made by humans. This worry was a potent one for the stick figures and line drawings that played such a prominent role in the pioneering interstellar messages of the 70’s. Those kinds of depictions use abstract visual conventions that an alien viewer might find impossible to figure out. Today, though, we needn’t worry about stick figures, because the information revolution gives us the ability to send high definition video. Still, we can’t be sure what an alien visual system would make of imagery encoded with the human visual system in mind.

Video imagery may provide a promising complement or alternative to the abstractions of physics and chemistry as the “Greek” for a cosmic Rosetta stone. If the aliens live on a planet like Earth, with liquid water on its surface, then we will share a mutual familiarity with water’s many manifestations. Just like us, aliens will have seen rain and snow, oceans, rivers, lakes, ponds, clouds, fog, and rainbows. If they have a sense of hearing, over a range of sound frequencies at least somewhat similar to ours, they will have heard waves crashing on beaches, rain hitting the ground, gurgling brooks, and the splash of a pebble dropped into a pond. When the senses work together to confirm one another, the certainty of perceptual recognition is even greater.

An audio-video movie depicting the mutually familiar phenomena of water could be just the bridge we need to cross the gulf of mutual incomprehension. This splashy, gurgling “Greek” could be the key to helping the aliens understand our audio-visual and still images, and ultimately, our symbols. As with the Voyager record, a simpler symbol system would first be needed to communicate to the aliens about how to view and listen to the presentation. That might be a big stumbling block. In the case of Voyager, a stylus head for playing the record was included on the spacecraft, which made it simpler to explain how to play it. A Rosetta stone that led the extraterrestrials to an understanding of our images could provide a means of communication extending well beyond the topics of physics, chemistry, and math. Several conference participants felt that imagery might help to convey things about human altruism, cooperation, morality, and aesthetic sensibilities.

The main message of the ‘Communicating across the Cosmos’ conference is a recognition of just how hard the problem of making ourselves understood to aliens will be. Kim Binsted ended her talk on a faint note of optimism. Even if all else fails, she supposed, there is something we can still communicate to the aliens. She showed a slide of her home doorbell. When it rings, she said, it conveys the message that someone is there, and where they are. It shows intent to communicate, and a benign willingness to reveal one’s presence. Even if it can’t be interpreted, an interstellar message conveys the information that a doorbell conveys. That message, the message that someone is there, would still be of monumental importance.

Even an interstellar message that can't be deciphered still tells us what a doorbell tells us: that someone is there.
Even an interstellar message that can’t be deciphered still tells us what a doorbell tells us: that someone is there. Credit: Jim Kuhn

Previous articles in this series:
Part 1: Shouting into the Darkness
Part 2: Petabytes from the Stars
Part 3: Bridging the Vast Gulf

References and Further Reading:

Communicating across the Cosmos: How can we make ourselves understood by other civilizations in the galaxy (2014), SETI Institute Conference Website.

F. Cain (2013) How Could We Find Aliens? The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), Universe Today.

F. Cain (2013) Where Are All The Aliens? The Fermi Paradox, Universe Today.

A. Kukla (2010) Extraterrestrials: A Philosophical Perspective, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc. Plymouth, UK.

M. F. Land and D-E. Nilsson (2002), Animal Eyes, Oxford University Press.

N. Rescher (1985) Extraterrestrial Science, in Extraterrestrials: Science and Alien Intelligence, Edited by E. Regis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

C. Sagan, F. D. Drake, A. Druyan, T. Ferris, J. Lomberg, L. S. Sagan, (1978) Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York.

C. Sagan (1980) Cosmos, Random House, New York.

J. J. Vitti (2013) Cephalopod cognition in an evolutionary context: Implications for ethology, Biosemiotics, 6:393-401.

Posted on by Paul Patton

Communicating Across the Cosmos, Part 3: Bridging the Vast Gulf

The cover of the phonograph record on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which contains an interstellar message encoded on a phonographic record. The encoded instructions attempt to explain to extraterrestrials how to play the record. Credit: NASA JPL

If extraterrestrial civilizations exist, the nearest is probably at least hundreds or thousands of light years away. Still, the greatest gulf that we will have to bridge to communicate with extraterrestrials is not such distances, but the gulf between human and alien minds.

In mid-November, the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California sponsored an academic conference on interstellar communication, “Communicating across the Cosmos“. The conference drew 17 speakers from a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, archeology, mathematics, cognitive science, radio astronomy, and art. In this installment we will explore some of the formidable difficulties that humans and extraterrestrials might face in constructing mutually comprehensible interstellar messages.

Optical PAyload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS) Flight System, the first laser communication from space. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Optical PAyload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS) Flight System, the first laser communication from space. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

If we knew where they were, and we wanted to, the information revolution has given us the capability to send an extraterrestrial civilization a truly vast amount of information. According to SETI Institute radio astronomer Seth Shostak, with broadband microwave radio we could transmit the Library of Congress, or the contents of the World Wide Web in 3 days; with broadband optical (a laser beam for space transmission) we could transmit this same amount of information in 20 minutes. This transmission would, of course, take decades or centuries to cross the light years and reach its destination. These truly remarkable capabilities give us the ability to send almost any message we want to the extraterrestrials. But transmitting capabilities aren’t the hard part of the problem. If the aliens can’t interpret it, the entire content of the World Wide Web is just a mountain of gibberish.

Many conference participants felt that the problems involved in devising a message that could be understood by a non-human mind were extremely formidable, and quite possibly insurmountable.

Having its own separate origin, extraterrestrial life could be different from Earthly life all the way down to its biochemical foundations. The vast diversity of life on Earth gives us little reason to think that aliens will look like us. Given the different conditions of another planet, and the contingencies of a different history, evolution will have produced a different set of results. For interstellar messaging to be possible at all, these results must include an alien creature capable of language, culture, and tool-making. But if these abilities are founded on a different biology and different perceptual systems, they might differ from their human counterparts in ways that we would find hard to even imagine. Looking to our own possible future development, we can’t even be sure that extraterrestrials will be biological creatures. They might be intelligent machines.

According to cognitive scientist Dominique Lestel, who presented at the conference, understanding extraterrestrials poses an unprecedented set of problems. We face all of the problems that ethologists (scientists who study animal behavior) face when they study perception and signaling in other animal species. These are compounded with all of the problems that ethnologists face when they study other human cultures. Lestel worries that humans might not be smart enough to do it. He wasn’t alone in that opinion.

Explanation of the symbols on the cover of the Voyager record Credit: NASA JPL
Explanation of the symbols on the cover of the Voyager record. Credit: NASA JPL

Linguist and conference presenter Sheri-Wells Jensen said that humans have created more than 7,000 different spoken and signed languages. No one knows whether all human languages sprung from a single instance of the invention of language or whether several human groups invented language independently. Given the ease with which children learn a language, many linguists think that our brain has a specialized language “module” underlying the “universal” grammar of human languages. These special features of the human brain might pose a formidable barrier to learning the language of a creature with a different brain produced by a different evolutionary history. An alien language might make demands on our short term memory or other cognitive abilities that humans would find impossible to meet.

When human beings talk to one another, they rely on a system of mutually understood conventions. Often gestures and body language are essential to conveying meaning. Conference presenter Klara Anna Capova, a cultural anthropologist, noted that interstellar messaging poses unique problems because the conventions to be followed in the message can’t be mutually arranged. We must formulate them ourselves, without knowing anything about the recipients. The intended recipients are distant in both time and space. The finite speed of light ensures that query and response will be separated by decades or centuries. With so little to go on, the message will inevitably reflect our cultural biases and motives. In 1962, the Soviet Union transmitted a message towards the planet Venus. It was in Morse code, and consisted of the Cyrillic characters “Lenin”, “CCCP” (USSR), and “MIR” (the Russian word for “peace”). But the posited Venusians couldn’t possibly have known the conventions of Morse code, the Cyrillic alphabet, human names, countries, or possible relationships between them, no matter how intimately familiar these things would have seemed to the Soviets. Whether they are meant to build national prestige, sell a product, or cause humans to think deeply about their place in the universe, interstellar messages play to a human audience.

Given the long timescales involved in interstellar messaging, many conference participants noted the parallels with archeology. Archeologists have learned quite a lot about past human cultures by studying the artifacts and symbols they have left for us. Still, archeological methodologies have their limits. According to conference presenter and archeologist Paul Wason, these limits have much to teach us about interstellar messaging. Certain meanings are accessible to archeological analysis and others aren’t, because we lack the contextual knowledge needed to interpret them. Neolithic cave paintings speak to modern investigators about the skill and abilities of the painters. But, because we don’t have the needed contextual knowledge, they don’t tell us what the paintings meant to their creators.

To interpret symbols used in the past, we need to know the conventions that related the symbols to the things they symbolized. Linguistic symbols pose special problems. To understand them, we need to know two different sets of conventions. First, we need to know the conventions that relate the script to the words of the spoken language. Second, we need to know how the words of the spoken language relate to the things and situations it refers to. It is a sobering thought for would-be exolinguists that no one has ever succeeded in deciphering an ancient script without knowing the language it was written in.

What does all this tell us about our fledgling attempts to devise messages for aliens? The phonograph record carried on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft includes a moving message from then President Carter, encoded as English text. It reads in part: “We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”

Human archeologists have never deciphered linear A, the writing system of the ancient Minoan civilization, due to its apparent lack of association with any known language. Unfortunately, since extraterrestrials likewise lack contextual knowledge of any human language, it is almost certain that they could never discern the meaning of President Carter’s text. The team that developed the Voyager message, which included astronomers and SETI pioneers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, were well aware of the problem. Carter was, most likely, made aware. Interstellar messages play to a human audience.

An inscription written around the inner surface of a cup in Linear A, a script used by the Minoan civilization that has never been deciphered. Credit: Sir Arthur Evans, Scripta Minoa: The Written Documents of Minoan Crete
An inscription written around the inner surface of a cup in Linear A, a script used by the Minoan civilization that has never been deciphered. Credit: Sir Arthur Evans, Scripta Minoa: The Written Documents of Minoan Crete

Is it possible for us to do better? Some off-beat ideas were proposed. Both astronomer Seth Shostak and designer Marek Kultys thought we might consider sending the sequence of the human genome. This idea was quickly shot down by a comment from the audience. Why send them a key, they said, if the aliens don’t have a lock. The metaphor is apt. DNA can only do its job as a constituent part of a living cell. Reading and implementing the genetic code involves numerous highly specialized enzymes and other cellular parts. Even if alien biochemistry and cell structure are generally similar to their Earthly counterparts, there are many features of Earthly biochemistry that appear to be quirky products of the history of life on Earth. The probability that they would repeat themselves precisely on another world are, for all practical purposes, nil. Without the context of an Earthly cell, the sequence of the human genome would be meaningless gibberish.

In the twenty first century, our ability to transmit and process information has become astounding, but we still don’t know how information conveys meaning. Is there even a glimmering of a hope that we can reach beyond the limitations of our humanity to convey meaning to an alien mind? In the final installment of this report, we’ll consider some possibilities.

Previous articles in this series:
Part 1: Shouting into the Darkness
Part 2: Petabytes from the Stars

References and further reading:

Communicating across the Cosmos, How can we make ourselves understood by other civilizations in the galaxy?, SETI Institute

E. Howell (2014) How Do Aliens Think? We Need to Learn About Their Biology First, Analyst Argues. Universe Today.

J. Minor (2014) Will We Find Alien Life in 20 Years? You can bet on it. Universe Today.

C. Sagan, F. D. Drake, A. Druyan, T. Ferris, J. Lomberg, L. S. Sagan, (1978) Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, New York.

Posted on by Paul Patton

Communicating Across the Cosmos, Part 2: Petabytes from the Stars?

The Allen Telescope Array is the first radio telescope designed specifically for SETI Photo by Colby Gutierrez-Kraybill

Since it was founded in 1984, the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California, has been a principal American venue for scientific efforts to discover evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations. In mid-November, the institute sponsored a conference, “Communicating across the Cosmos”, on the problems of devising and understanding messages from other worlds. The conference drew 17 speakers from numerous disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, archeology, mathematics, cognitive science, philosophy, radio astronomy, and art.

This is the second of four installments of a report on the conference. Today, we’ll look at the SETI Institute’s current efforts to find an extraterrestrial message, and some of their future plans. If they find something, just how much information can we expect to receive? How much can we send?

The idea of using radio to listen for messages from extraterrestrials is as old as radio itself. Radio pioneers Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi both listened for signals from the planet Mars early in the 20th century. The first to listen for messages from the stars was radio astronomer Frank Drake in 1960. Until recently though, SETI projects have been limited and sporadic. That began to change in 2007 when the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array (ATA) started observations.

Consisting of 42 small dishes, the ATA is the first radio telescope in the world designed specifically for SETI. The SETI search is currently managed by Jon Richards, an engineer who is an expert on both the system’s hardware and software. He spoke at the conference about the project. The ATA is currently used for SETI research twelve hours out of each day, from 7 pm to 7 am. During the day, the site is operated by Stanford Research International to perform more conventional astronomical studies. When used for such observations, the dishes can function together as an interferometer, generating images of celestial radio sources. To minimize radio interference from human activities, the telescope is sited a six hour drive north of the SETI Institute at the remote Hat Creek Observatory in the Cascade Mountains of Northern California.

The ATA can detect signals over the range from 1 to 10 GHz. The researchers use several strategies to tell potential ETI signals apart from naturally occurring radio sources in space, and human-made terrestrial interference. Radio emissions from natural sources are smeared over a broad range of frequencies. Artificial signals designed for communication typically pack all of their energy into a very narrow frequency band. To detect such signals, the ATA can resolve frequency differences down to just 1 Hz.

When a radio source is moving with respect to the receiver, it appears to change in frequency. This phenomenon is called the Doppler effect. Because an alien planet and the Earth would be moving in relation to one another, a genuine ETI signal would exhibit the Doppler effect. A source of terrestrial interference that’s fixed to the Earth wouldn’t. If the beam of the telescope is shifted away from the target, a genuine alien signal emanating from a distant point in space would disappear, reappearing when the beam was shifted back. A signal due to local interference wouldn’t.

This illustration of the Doppler effect shows the change of wavelength caused by the motion of the source. Credit: ARM.
This illustration of the Doppler effect shows the change of wavelength caused by the motion of the source. Credit: ARM.

The ATA is designed to perform these tests automatically whenever it detects a potential candidate signal. To make sure, it repeats the second test five times. If a signal passes the tests, the operator is automatically sent an e-mail, and the candidate signal is entered into a database. Periodically, as a test, the telescope is programed to point in the direction of one of the two Voyager spacecraft. Because these spacecraft are hurtling through deep space beyond the orbit of Neptune, their signals mimic the properties expected from an alien transmission. So far, all the e-mails received have been generated by such tests, and by false alarms. The fateful e-mail announcing the successful detection of an extraterrestrial signal has not yet been sent.

Richards explained that the ATA’s most recent project has been to listen to more than one hundred Earth-like planets discovered by the Kepler space telescope between 2009 and 2012. Next year the ATA’s antenna feeds will get an upgrade that will increase their upper frequency limit to 15 GHz and greatly increase their sensitivity. Both ground-based and Kepler studies have identified numerous Earth-like planets at habitable distances from small dim red dwarf stars. A systematic search of these stars is planned next. If the SETI Institute can find the funding they hope eventually to expand the ATA to 350 dishes.

According to astronomer Jill Tartar, the retired director of the SETI Institute’s Center for SETI Research, the institute is hoping to become involved in a much larger international project; the Square Kilometer Array (SKA). When it begins operations in 2020, the SKA is planned to be the world’s largest radio telescope. It will consist of several thousand dishes and other receivers giving it a radio signal collecting area of one square kilometer. The advantage of having more collecting area is that the telescope is sensitive to fainter signals. If funding allows it to be built in the way currently planned, it will be capable of training multiple simultaneous beams at the sky, some of which Tartar said might be used to mount a continuously ongoing SETI search.

The planned Square Kilometer Array will be the world's largest radio telescope when it begins operations in 2018 Swinburne Astronomy Productions for SKA Project Development Office
The planned Square Kilometer Array will be the world’s largest radio telescope when it begins operations in 2018 Swinburne Astronomy Productions for SKA Project Development Office

Suppose we did find something. What sort of reply could we send? How much do we have the technological capability to send, if we wanted to? Back in 1974, in the first demonstration of the capacity for interstellar messaging, the Arecibo radio telescope transmitted a mere 210 bytes, and took 3 minutes to do it. The message consisted of a human stick figure and a few other crude symbols and diagrams. Because this primitive effort is still the most well-known example of interstellar radio messaging, prepare yourself for a stunning surprise. According to SETI Institute radio astronomer Seth Shostak, using broadband microwave radio, we could send them the Library of Congress (consisting of 17 million books) in 3 days, and the contents of the World Wide Web (as of 2008) in a comparable time.

Using the shorter optical wavelengths of a laser beam and optical broadband, we could send either one in 20 minutes. Since the extraterrestrials might tune in at any time, we would need to send the transmission over and over again many times. Although our transmissions could be sent in only days or minutes, they would, of course, still take decades or centuries to traverse the light years. This transmission capability presents a stunning opportunity. We can send anything. We can send everything. Could it really be that someday, beings from Tau Ceti will peruse your Facebook page?

So what can we expect from the aliens? Any message we might receive, Seth Shostak thought, would be of one of two possible sorts. A civilization already aware of our existence, he believed, would send us a huge message, rich in information content. This is because even if technological civilizations are fairly common in the galaxy the nearest one might be tens, hundreds, or thousands of light years away. Radio messages traveling at the speed of light will take that long to cross those distances, and decades or centuries will elapse between query and response. If we are contacted, Shostak really does think that we should send the aliens the entire content of the World Wide Web. Civilizations further away than 70 light years from Earth probably wouldn’t know that we exist, because radio signals from Earth haven’t reached them yet. Shostak didn’t think that civilizations would waste precious transmitting time and energy bombarding planets with petabytes of information if they didn’t already know that there was a technological civilization there. Worlds that weren’t known to harbor a civilization, Shostak speculated, might get put on a long list of potentially habitable planets to which the aliens might periodically send a brief “ping” hoping to get a response.

A petabyte of gibberish contains as much information as a petabyte of our world’s greatest art and literature (or tackiest YouTube videos). A petabyte of our world’s greatest art and literature is gibberish to a being who can’t understand it. We could send the aliens truly stunning amounts of information, but can we find some way to ensure that they will understand its meaning? Could we hope to understand an alien message sent to us, or would all those petabytes be for naught? In the next installment, we’ll learn that we face daunting problems.

Part 1: Shouting Into the Darkness

References and Further Readings:

Communicating Across the Cosmos: How can we make ourselves understood by other civilizations in the galaxy, SETI Institute.

N. Atkinson (2012), SETI: The Search Goes On, Universe Today.

S. J. Dick (1996), The Biological Universe: The Twentieth_Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

S. Hall (2014), Are We Ready for Contact?, Universe Today.

Allen Telescope Array, SETI Institute.

Posted on by Paul Patton

Communicating Across the Cosmos, Part 1: Shouting into the Darkness

The 70 meter Evpatoria Planetary Radar radio telescope in the Crimea was used to transmit 4 interstellar messages in 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2008

Over the last 20 years, astronomers have discovered several thousand planets orbiting other stars. We now know that potentially habitable Earth-like planets are abundant in the cosmos. Such findings lend a new plausibility to the idea that intelligent life might exist on other worlds. Suppose that SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers succeed in their quest to find a message from a distant exoplanet. How much information can we hope to receive or send? Can we hope to decipher its meaning? Can humans compose interstellar messages that are comprehensible to alien minds?

Such concerns were the topic of a two day academic conference on interstellar messages held at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California; ‘Communicating across the Cosmos’. The conference drew 17 speakers from a wide variety of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, archeology, mathematics, cognitive science, philosophy, radio astronomy, and art. This article is the first of a series of installments about the conference. Today, we’ll explore the ways in which our society is already sending messages to extraterrestrial civilizations, both accidentally and on purpose.

Sending radio messages over sizable interstellar distances is feasible with present day technology. According to SETI Institute radio astronomer Seth Shostak, who presented at the conference, we are already — by accident — constantly signaling our presence to any extraterrestrial astronomers that might exist in our neighborhood of the galaxy. Some radio signals intended for domestic uses leak into space. The most powerful come from radars used for military purposes, air traffic control, and weather forecasting. Because these radars sweep across broad swaths of the sky, their signals travel out into space in many directions.

With radio telescopes no more sensitive than those astronomers on Earth use today, extraterrestrials out to distances of tens of light years could detect them and figure out that they were artificial. The Arecibo radar telescope in Puerto Rico is designed specifically to send a narrow beam of radio waves into space, usually to bounce them off celestial bodies and learn about their surfaces. For a receiver within its beam, it could be detected hundreds of light-years away.

FM radio and television broadcasts also leak out into space, but they are weaker and couldn’t be detected more than about one tenth of a light year away with present day human technology. This is quite a bit less than the distance to the nearest star. The size and sensitivity of radio telescopes is progressing rapidly. An alien civilization just a few centuries more advanced than us in radio technology could detect even these weak signals over vast distances in the galaxy. As our signals spread outward at the speed of light, they will reach progressively larger numbers of stars and planets, any one of which might be home to ETI. If they really are out there, they are likely to find us eventually.

Humans have been fascinated with formulating messages for extraterrestrials for a surprisingly long time. Eighteenth and nineteenth century scientists drew up proposals to make huge fire pits or plantings in the shapes of geometric figures that they hoped would be visible in the telescopes of the inhabitants of neighboring worlds. In the early days of radio, attempts were made to contact Mars and Venus.

As prospects for intelligent life within the solar system dimmed, attention turned to the stars. In the early 1970’s the first two spacecraft to escape the sun’s gravitational pull, Pioneer 10 and 11, each carried an engraved plaque designed to tell aliens where Earth is, and what human beings look like. Voyager 1 and 2 carried a more ambitious message of images and sounds encoded on a phonograph record. Both the Pioneer plaques and the Voyager records were devised by teams led by astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, both SETI pioneers. In 1974, the powerful Arecibo radio telescope beamed a brief 3 minute message towards a star cluster 21,000 light years away as part of a dedication ceremony for a major upgrade. The binary coded message was an image, including a stick figure of a human, our solar system, and some chemicals important to earthly life. The distant target was chosen simply because it was overhead at the time of the ceremony.

The plaque affixed to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, the first spacecraft to leave our solar system. In the upper left corner is a diagram depicting the hydrogen atom, the most abundant element in the universe. The diagram symbolizes the transition of the electron from a spin-up to a spin-down state. This transition is responsible for radio emissions at the wavelength of 21 cm by clouds of hydrogen in interstellar space. This phenomenon is familiar to radio astronomers and provides a distance standard for indicating the size of the humans. In the middle left is a representation of position of the sun with respect to the center of the galaxy and 14 pulsars. At the bottom is a map of the solar system indicating the origin of the spacecraft at the sun's third planet. The planets relative distances from the sun are given as binary numbers with the unit being one tenth of Mercury's distance from the sun. At the right is a depiction of a human couple with the man's arm raised in gesture of friendly greeting and the pioneer spacecraft drawn in outline as a backdrop.
The plaque affixed to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, the first spacecraft to leave our solar system. In the upper left corner is a diagram depicting the hydrogen atom, the most abundant element in the universe. The diagram symbolizes the transition of the electron from a spin-up to a spin-down state. This transition is responsible for radio emissions at the wavelength of 21 cm by clouds of hydrogen gas in interstellar space. This phenomenon is very familiar to radio astronomers and provides a distance standard used to indicate the sizes of the human beings. In the middle left is a representation of position of the sun with respect to the center of the galaxy and 14 pulsars. At the bottom is a map of the solar system indicating the origin of the spacecraft as the sun’s third planet. The relative distances of the planets from the sun are indicated as binary numbers with a unit one tenth the distance of Mercury from the sun. At the right is a depiction of a human couple with the man’s arm raised in a gesture of friendly greeting and the pioneer spacecraft drawn in outline as a backdrop NASA Ames Research Center.

Cultural anthropologist and conference speaker Klara Anna Capova said that in recent years, messaging to extraterrestrials has moved beyond science and become a commercial enterprise. In 1999 and 2003, a private company solicited content from the general public and transmitted these ‘Cosmic Call’ messages to several nearby sun-like stars from the 70 meter radio telescope of the Evpatoria Deep Space Center in Crimea, Ukraine.

In 2009, another private company transmitted 25,000 messages, collected via a website, towards the red dwarf star Gliese 581, 20 light years away. In 2008, a Dorito’s commercial was beamed to a sun-like star 42 light years away, and in 2009 Penguin books transmitted 1000 messages as part of a book promotion. In 2010, a greeting, spoken in the fictional Klingon language, was beamed towards the star Arcturus, 37 light years away. The message was sent to promote the opening of what was billed as the first authentic Klingon opera on Earth. As one conference speaker noted, there are no regulations on the transmission or content of such messages.

Actively messaging extraterrestrials is a controversial practice, and the director of the Evpatoria Center, Alexander Zaitsev, has faced criticism from some members of the scientific community for his actions. Traditionally, SETI researchers have simply listened for alien messages. A received message might allow humans to learn something about the nature and motives of its extraterrestrial senders. That might give us a basis for deciding whether or not it was wise and prudent to reply.

Drake’s Arecibo message, by intent, was beamed at a star cluster tens of thousands of light years away and was meant simply to demonstrate the capacity for interstellar messaging. The Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft likewise will not reach the stars for tens of thousands of years. On the other hand, the recent transmissions were directed at nearby stars, from which we might receive a reply in less than a century. At the conference, Seth Shostak advanced what he confessed was a provocative position. He said we shouldn’t worry too much about the recent transmissions, because the much weaker signals that constantly emanate from Earth would be detectable by extraterrestrial civilizations with more advanced radio technology anyway. “That horse”, he said “has already left the barn”.

In the next installment, we will explore the SETI Institute’s current and planned efforts to conduct our human search for extraterrestrial signals. We will consider the limits of our own signaling capacity, and learn that the amount of information we could send the aliens is truly vast.

References and Further Reading:

Communicating across the Cosmos: How can we make ourselves understood by other civilizations in the galaxy (2014), SETI Institute Conference Website

N. Atkinson (2008), Message from Earth beamed to alien world, Universe Today.

F. Cain (2013), How could we find aliens? The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), Universe Today.

M. J. Crowe (1986) The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750-1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds From Kant to Lowell, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

C. Sagan, F. Drake, A. Druyan, T. Ferris, J. Lomberg, L. S. Sagan (1978), Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, Random House, New York, NY.

W. T. Sullivan III; S. Brown, and C. Wetherill, (1978) Eavesdropping: The radio signature of Earth, Science 199(4327): 377-388.

Posted on by Paul Patton

Questioning the Impact Theory: What Really Killed the Dinosaurs?

Which is the main culprit for the terminal Cretaceous extinction: the Chicxulub impact or Deccan Traps volcanism? Upper Image: Donald Davis, NASA JPL Lower Image: USGS

About sixty five and a half million years ago, the Earth suffered its largest known cosmic impact. An asteroid or comet nucleus about 10 km in diameter slammed into what is now the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. It gouged out a crater 180 to 200 km in diameter: nearly twice as large as the prominent crater Copernicus on Earth’s moon. But did this impact really cause the extinction of the dinosaurs and many other forms of life? Many earth scientists are convinced that it did, but some harbor nagging doubts. The doubters have marshaled a growing body of evidence for another culprit; the enormous volcanic eruptions that produced the Deccan Traps formation in India. The skeptics recently presented their case at a meeting of the Geological Society of America in Vancouver, Canada, on October 19.

The dinosaurs are the most well-known victims of the mass extinction event that ended the Cretaceous period. The extinction claimed almost all large vertebrates on land, at sea, or in the air, as well as numerous species of insects, plants, and aquatic invertebrates. At least 75% of all species then existing on Earth vanished in a short span in relation to the geological timescale of millions of years. The disaster is one of five global mass extinction events that paleontologists have identified over the tenure of complex life on Earth.

The hypothesis that the terminal Cretaceous extinction was caused by a cosmic impact has been the most popular explanation of this catastrophe among earth scientists and the public for several decades. It was proposed in 1980 by the father and son team of Luis and Walter Alvarez and their collaborators. The Alvarez team’s main line of evidence that an impact happened was an enrichment of the metal iridium in sediments dating roughly to the end of the Cretaceous. Iridium is rare in Earth’s crust, but common in meteorites. The link between iridium and impacts was first established by studies of the samples returned by the Apollo astronauts from the Moon.

Over the ensuing decades, evidence of an impact accumulated. In 1991, a team of scientists led by Dr. Alan Hildebrand of the Department of Planetary Sciences at Arizona University, published evidence of a gigantic buried impact crater, called Chicxulub, in Mexico. Other investigators found evidence of materials ejected by the impact, including glass spherules in Haiti and Mexico. Supporters of the impact hypothesis believe that vast amounts of dust hurtled into the stratosphere would have plunged the surface of the planet into the darkness and bitter cold of an “impact winter” lasting for at least months, and perhaps decades. Global ecosystems would have collapsed and mass extinction ensued. But, they’ve had a harder time finding evidence for these consequences than for the impact itself.

Doubters of the Alvarez hypothesis don’t question the ‘smoking gun’ evidence that an impact happened near the end of the Cretaceous, but they don’t think it was the main cause of the extinctions. For one thing, inferring the exact time of the impact from its putative geological traces has proved difficult. Dr. Gerta Keller of the Department of Geosciences of Princeton University, a prominent skeptic of the Alvarez hypothesis, has questioned estimates that make the impact and the extinctions simultaneous. Analyzing core samples taken from the Chicxulub crater, and glass spherule containing deposits in northeastern Mexico, she concludes that the Chicxulub impact preceded the mass extinction by 120,000 years and had little consequence for the fossil record of life in the geological formations which she studied. Of the five major mass extinction events in Earth’s history, she noted in a 2011 paper, none other than the terminal Cretaceous event has ever been even approximately associated with an impact. Several other large impact craters besides Chicxulub have been well studied by geologists and none is associated with fossil evidence of extinctions. On the other hand, four of the five major mass extinctions appear to have some connection with volcanic eruptions.

Keller and other Alvarez skeptics look to a major volcanic event that occurred towards the end of the Cretaceous as an alternate primary cause of the extinction. The Deccan Traps formation in central India is a plateau consisting of multiple layers of solidified lava 3500 m thick. Today, it extends over an area larger than all of France. It was once three times that large. It was formed in a series of three volcanic outbursts that may have been among the largest in Earth’s history. At the October conference, Dr. Theirry Adatte of the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University of Lausanne in France presented evidence that the second of these outbursts was by far the largest, and occurred over a period of 250,000 years prior to the end of the Cretaceous. During this period, 80% of the total lava thickness of the Deccan formation was deposited. The eruptions produced lava flows that may be the longest on Earth, extending more than 1500 km.

The blue area indicates the Deccan Traps, a massive remnant of immense volcanic eruptions at the end of the Cretaceous period that may have contributed to the terminal Cretaceous extinction. Credit: CamArchGrad, English Wikipedia Project
The blue area indicates the Deccan Traps, a massive remnant of immense volcanic eruptions at the end of the Cretaceous period that may have contributed to the terminal Cretaceous extinction. Credit: CamArchGrad, English Wikipedia Project

To illustrate the likely environmental consequences of such a super-eruption, Adatte invoked the worst volcanic catastrophe in human history. Over eight months from 1783-84 a major eruption in Laki, Iceland, deposited 14.3 square kilometers of lava and emitted an estimated 122 megatons of toxic sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. About a quarter of the people and half of the livestock in Iceland died. Across Europe the sky was darkened by a pall of haze, and acid rain fell. Europe and America experienced the most severe winter in history and global climate was disrupted for a decade. Millions of people died from the resulting drought and famine. The Laki incident was nonetheless miniscule by comparison with the second Deccan Traps outburst, which produced 1.5 million square kilometers of lava and an estimated 6,500- 17,000 gigatons of sulfur dioxide.

The Deccan Traps eruptions would also have emitted immense quantities of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a heat trapping greenhouse gas responsible for the oven-like temperatures of the planet Venus. It is released by the burning of fossil fuels and plays a major role in human-caused global warming on Earth. Thus Geller surmised that the Deccan Traps eruptions could have produced both periods of intense cold due to sulfur dioxide haze, and intense heat due to carbon dioxide induced global warming.

At the October conference she presented the results of her studies of geological formations in Tunisia that preserved a high resolution record of climate change during the time of the main pulse of Deccan Traps volcanic activity. Her evidence shows that near the onset of the 250,000 year pulse, there was a ‘hyperthermal’ period of rapid warming that increased ocean temperatures by 3-4 degrees Celsius. She claimed that temperatures remained elevated through the pulse culminating with a second ‘hyperthermal’ warming of the oceans by an additional 4-5 degrees Celsius. This second hyperthermal warming occurred within a 10,000 year period of mega-eruptions, which corresponded with the terminal Cretaceous extinction. The Chicxulub impact occurred during the 250,000 year pulse, but well prior to the extinctions and the hyperthermal event.

The debate over the relative importance of the Chicxulub impact and the Deccan Trap volcanoes in producing the terminal Cretaceous extinction isn’t over. In May of this year, a team headed by Dr. Johan Vellekoop at the Department of Earth Sciences at Ulrecht University in the Netherlands published evidence of a geologically brief episode of cooling which they claim as the first direct evidence of an “impact winter”. Whatever the outcome of the debate, it seems clear that the end of the Cretaceous, with its super-volcanoes and giant impacts, was not a good time for life on Earth.

References and Further Reading:
J. Coffey (2009) The Asteroid that Killed the Dinosaurs, Universe Today.

I. O’Neill (2009) (Were the Dinosaurs Really Wiped Out by an Asteroid? Possibly Not (Update), Universe Today.

G. Keller (2012), The Cretaceous-Tertiary Mass Extinction, Chicxulub Impact, and Deccan Volcanism, Earth and Life, J.A. Talent, Editor, Springer Science and Business media.

E. Klemetti (2013) Local and global impacts of the 1783-84 Laki eruption in Iceland, Wired Science Blogs/Eruptions

J. Vellekoop et al. (2014) Rapid short-term cooling following the Chicxulub impact at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 111(2) p. 7537-7541.

Posted on by Paul Patton

Moons of Confusion: Why Finding Extraterrestrial Life may be Harder than we Thought

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in Dec. 2021, will be capable of measuring the spectrum of the atmospheres of Earthlike exoplanets orbiting small stars. Credit: NASA, Northrop Grumman

Astronomers and planetary scientists thought they knew how to find evidence of life on planets beyond our Solar System. But, a new study indicates that the moons of extrasolar planets may produce “false positives” adding an inconvenient element of uncertainty to the search.

More than 1,800 exoplanets have been confirmed to exist so far, with the count rising rapidly. About 20 of these are deemed potentially habitable. This is because they are only somewhat more massive than Earth, and orbit their parent stars at distances that might allow liquid water to exist.

Astronomers soon hope to be able to determine the composition of the atmospheres of such promising alien worlds. They can do this by analyzing the spectrum of light absorbed by them. For Earth-like worlds circling small stars, this challenging feat can be accomplished using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018.

They thought they knew how to look for the signature of life. There are certain gases which shouldn’t exist together in an atmosphere that is in chemical equilibrium. Earth’s atmosphere contains lots of oxygen and trace amounts of methane. Oxygen shouldn’t exist in a stable atmosphere. As anyone with rust spots on their car knows, it has a strong tendency to combine chemically with many other substances. Methane shouldn’t exist in the presence of oxygen. When mixed, the two gases quickly react to form carbon dioxide and water. Without some process to replace it, methane would be gone from our air in a decade.

On Earth, both oxygen and methane remain present together because the supply is constantly replenished by living things. Bacteria and plants harvest the energy of sunlight in the process of photosynthesis. As part of this process water molecules are broken into hydrogen and oxygen, releasing free oxygen as a waste product. About half of the methane in Earth’s atmosphere comes from bacteria. The rest is from human activities, including the growing of rice, the burning of biomass, and the flatulence produced by the vast herds of cows and other ruminants maintained by our species.

By itself, finding methane in a planet’s atmosphere isn’t surprising. Many purely chemical processes can make it, and it is abundant in the atmospheres of the gas giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and on Saturn’s large moon Titan. Although oxygen alone is sometimes touted as a possible biomarker; its presence, by itself, isn’t rock solid evidence of life either. There are purely chemical processes that might make it on an alien planet, and we don’t yet know how to rule them out. Finding these two gases together, though, seems as close as one could get to “smoking gun” evidence for the activities of life.

A monkey wrench was thrown into this whole argument by an international team of investigators led by Dr. Hanno Rein of the Department of Environmental and Physical Sciences at the University of Toronto in Canada. Their results were published in the May, 2014 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Suppose, they posited, that oxygen is present in the atmosphere of a planet, and methane is present separately in the atmosphere of a moon orbiting the planet. The team used a mathematical model to predict the light spectrum that might be measured by a space telescope near Earth for plausible planet-moon pairs. They found that the resulting spectra closely mimicked that of a single object whose atmosphere contained both gasses.

Unless the planet orbits one of the very nearest stars, they showed it wasn’t possible to distinguish a planet-moon pair from a single object using technology that will be available anytime soon. The team termed their results “inconvenient, but unavoidable…It will be possible to obtain suggestive clues indicative of possible inhabitation, but ruling out alternative explanations of these clues will probably be impossible for the foreseeable future.”

References and further reading:

The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog, Planetary Habitability Laboratory, University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo

Kaltenegger L., Selsis F., Fridlund M. et al. (2010) Deciphering spectral fingerprints of habitable exoplanets. Astrobiology, 10(1) p. 89-102.

Major J. (2013) Earthlike exoplanets are all around us. Universe Today

Rein H., Fujii Y., and Spiegel D. S. (2014) Some inconvenient truths about biosignatures involving two chemical species on Earth-like exoplanets. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(19) p. 6871-6875.

Sagan C., Thompson W. R., Carlson R., Gurnett, D., Hord, C. (1993) A search for life on Earth from the Galileo spacecraft. Nature, 365 p. 715-721.