While the United States and NASA have pioneered many lines of astrobiological study, we are hardly alone – as is only proper for an effort to address such enormous and universal questions. Is it possible, likely even, that life exists elsewhere based on elements other than carbon and a system different than DNA? Could such life even exist here on Earth, but is as yet undetected?.Is it possible to learn from chemicals and minerals on the surface of planets whether microbes might live there, including beneath the planet’s surface?.How do water and essential organic compounds arrive on planets and moons, and how do they interact with the planets and moons they land on?.What led to the proliferation of new life forms on Earth?.What were the steps that led inanimate materials – rocks, sediments, organic compounds, water – to come together and build living organisms, with replicating genes, cell walls, and the ability to reproduce?.But NASA also has an astrobiology “strategy” describing where the agency sees promising lines of research – from the highly specific to the wide and broad - that the agency might support. Scientists across the country and around the world are diving into origin-of-life and life-beyond-Earth issues and developing exciting and cutting-edge work. Is the discovery of ET life similarly awaiting our coming of scientific age?Īstrobiology research is taking place because its time has come. Our experience with finding distant planets also makes you wonder: Will the search for the current or past presence of extraterrestrial life someday be viewed as a parallel to the earlier search for exoplanets? Men and women of science, as well as the lay public, intuitively assumed planets existed beyond our solar system, but these planets were identified only when our technology and thinking had sufficiently advanced. As with so many NASA missions, the broad and intense drive to find and understand habitable zone planets and moons both greatly enhances astrobiology and is informed by astrobiology. The search for exoplanets was born in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics, but it has always been intertwined with astrobiology as well. With advances in the instruments and knowledge that make possible the exoplanet hunt, the focus has been increasing refined to identify planets lying in habitable zones – at distances from their host stars that would allow water to remain at least periodically liquid on a planet’s surface. By now more than 5,000 exoplanets have been officially identified – via NASA missions such as the Kepler Space Telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Space Telescope ( TESS), the Hubble Space Telescope as well as ground-based observations - and billions more await discovery. Since ancient times, natural philosophers, then scientists, and untold interested others predicted, assumed even, that many other planets orbited their stars. Other scientific teams would have to measure the Mars sample themselves, with different methods, and confirm the initial finding to graduate to level six.Īccording to NASA, in this Mars molecule example, additional evidence from a different part of the red planet may be necessary to bring it up to level seven - where it's probably life.Įach new level of confidence could mean a new public announcement.Consider, too, the revolution in understanding that has taken place since the mid-1990s regarding planets and moons in solar systems well beyond ours. By ruling out non-biological sources of the molecule, or by confirming that it came from an environment suitable for life, scientists could move it further up the scale. The evidence would graduate to level two once scientists confirm there was no contamination in the sample, or the instruments involved, that could have influenced their findings. It often indicates a user profile.Īn illustration of the CoLD scale for determining confidence in a detection of alien life.įor example, a level one detection might be the discovery of a molecule that could be related to life inside a Perseverance Mars sample. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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