Addendum on Scaling Up Origins of Life Research

The Potential Ambiguities of Exoplanet Atmospheric Spectroscopy

Previously in Why We Need Big Science to Answer One of the Ultimate Questions I discussed a large-scale scientific research program to study the origins of life. Recently I had my attention drawn to several interesting papers that led me to think more about a comprehensive origins of life scientific research program.

There is a lot more that could be said about biosignatures and exoplanet atmospheric spectroscopy, which latter we can expect to have within the next few decades. Being able to determine the atmospheres of exoplanets will be an exciting time, but also a confusing time. As we can see from the case of oxygen, it can be produced by biotic or abiotic processes, so while the finding of oxygen in an exoplanet atmosphere would be exciting, and would probably be hyped by the popular press, scientists would already be well aware that this is not a smoking gun for life.

This would be like running a scaled up version of the Miller-Urey experiment — again, several different variations on the basic theme — with each experiment populated with one of the variants of artificial “early” life that we have created (either by manufacturing them as artificial life or by back breeding contemporary life to approximate them). We then let these experiments run for a good long time until a relatively stable ecosystem emerges from these presumptive elements of an early biota. At this point we can determine the characteristic gases, and the combinations and proportion of these gases, in the respective atmospheres of these several experiments.

In a sense, an experiment like this would be like skipping a step between the Miller-Urey experiment and experiments with (artificially produced) proto-bionts. Certainly, if we were to conduct scaled up versions of the Miller-Urey experiment and we could bring the development of these experiments all the way to the point of abiotically generating life, then we would simply want to continue this experiment. However, if it proves to take too much time to get from abiotic precursors to self-replicating macro-molecules, we could begin with the simplest self-replicating macro-molecules and skip the step of forming self-replicating macro-molecules.

If both the initial atmospheric content and the artificial proto-biont (or, as it is sometimes called, eobiont) are treated as variables, I expect that there will still be many possible experimental permutations to be run, even when narrowly constrained by viability. Again, multiple experiments will reveal that some of these combinations are not viable, so these experiments would fail early on, and we would come to focus on the viable combinations of atmospheres and eobionts.

If a scientific research program of this kind were to be carried out on a grand scale , and over an extended period of time, we would have a pretty good empirical basis for determining the kind of life that can be revealed by exoplanet atmospheric spectroscopy. Long, long before we reach any of these other worlds with their other life, we will know a good deal about their natural history. It will be gratifying to see the details up close, but mostly we will not be surprised when we travel to alien worlds. We will have been studying them for decades, if not for hundreds of years, before we get to see them for ourselves.

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