Scientists at four of the world’s leading universities have teamed up to investigate the origins of life on Earth – and look for similar biological processes occurring elsewhere in the world.
Cambridge University in the UK, Harvard and Chicago in the US and ETH Zürich in Switzerland announced the formation of the so-called Origins Federation at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.
“I believe that life is embedded in the physical laws of the universe,” said Didier Queloz, leader of the initiative, who has a dual appointment at Cambridge and ETH. He was the first known discoverer of exoplanets – planets orbiting stars other than our sun – in the 1990s.
The long search for extraterrestrial life – whether simple microbes or advanced civilizations – will be supercharged by new interplanetary missions to Mars and Jupiter’s moons and observatories such as the James Webb telescope, the founding scientist said. Complementary research will focus on the still mysterious emergence of life on Earth itself.
“We live in an extraordinary time in history,” Queloz said. Scientists have identified more than 5,000 exoplanets and believe that billions exist in the Milky Way galaxy alone.
“The discovery of many different planets is a big game filler,” Queloz said. “We have discovered many different planetary systems and many of them are different from the solar system.”
My Cambridge colleague, Emily Mitchell, an evolutionary biologist, believes that simple life will spread throughout our galaxy, judging by the speed with which microbes appeared on the young Earth around 4 billion years ago.
Mitchell’s lab is looking for clues about extraterrestrial life from the early biochemical evolution of Earth’s first microbes. “When we start to investigate other planets,” he said, “biosignatures can reveal whether or not the origin of life itself and evolution on Earth is just a happy accident or part of the basic nature of the universe, with all its biology and ecological complexity.
But the discovery of extraterrestrial life is probably not a clear event. “Declaring the detection of life is impossible from a single piece of data,” said Heather Graham, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre.
“If we get really good results from the Mars rover or from the telescope, we have to find other ways to confirm it. We have started to think about life detection and biosignature detection as a suite of data instead of a single data.
Kate Adamala at the University of Minnesota investigates the origins of life by creating simple synthetic cells in her lab. “Chemistry is itching to create life but creating intelligent life is harder,” he said.
“And staying alive as an intelligent life form might be very difficult.” Extraterrestrial civilizations may destroy themselves with advanced technology, he suggests.
Queloz agrees that, while simple life may be widespread throughout the universe, high-tech civilizations may be rare. “When we get more knowledge, it becomes easier to destroy ourselves. Perhaps there is an apocalypse waiting for us,” he said.