Juan Perez Mercader
Q: Why does the building look the way it does?
A: The building looks this way because we had an extremely creative architect and when he had an idea of the plan of needs of the building and for the astrobiology we wanted to do here he actually came up with a couple of ideas of how to do it and one of the ideas was to actually generate space that would look a lot like something which is like a spacecraft, that had landed here, after all this was going to be used as a place for studying life in the universe. If there was life in the universe maybe one could fantasize in some way and think there would be a spacecraft landing here, so you see many of the features of something that goes through the atmosphere, like for example the roof is curved, and there is an attack border in some gables of the building, and it looks like a spacecraft is some ways and so that is why it looks the way it looks.
And if you look at it at night you will see that our auditorium looks like the upper teeth of a big monster and the library looks like the lower teeth of the same big monster with a little gap in between and so on and so it's very intentional.
Q: Drake equation, why does astrobiology need different disciplines working together?
Juan Perez Mercader
Life, you see, the only example we know so far is life on Planet Earth. Life on Planet Earth has two huge difficulties or it shows two huge difficulties for the application of the scientific method, One has to do with the following: it has to do with the fact that all life we know on this planet is based on carbon chemistry and only in one phenomenon, the chemistry of carbon. 34:08 We know a huge variety of living things, millions upon millions upon millions upon millions, not billions, but millions upon millions of species and they all share a common characteristic, the chemistry of carbon. Also life is historical, which means that life shows up on Earth today, the way it does because of a series of historical events which cannot be repeated have taken place. For example, 65 million years ago a huge cometary body or asteroid or whatever hit the Earth and gave rise to huge devastation and extinction of species. 240 million years ago, same thing happened, similar thing happened and so on and so forth, and then there have been periods where our planet has gone through heating and cooling and so on and the oceans have changed and so on and so forth and you cannot repeat that in the laboratory. You cannot repeat history and you cannot really understand what life is if you only have one point in the plot of life, in the graph of life. So you need to do two things. One thing is to actually explore planet earth and look for possible exceptions to the chemistry of carbon in life, not that we found any, but let's keep looking, you can never discard things until you have been very exhaustive.
And the second thing to do is to study the history of life, reproduce as much as you could about the history of life. And if you trace back the history of life on this planet you realize the following: you realize you get to a point where all these pieces seem to be emerging from, it's a point about 3.5, 3.8 billion years ago. Now that means life must have emerged at some point in our evolutionary history and we cannot reproduce this in the laboratory, so what we need to understand however, is where did the inventory of chemicals that gave rise to this "emerging", very important word, you say that a phenomenon is an emergent phenomenon when the phenomenon, the total is more than the simple sum of parts, so where did the inventory of chemicals that made life emerge on planet earth come from? Did they get manufactured on our planet or did they get manufactured away from our planet elsewhere in the interstellar medium, or did they get manufactured as the solar system formed.
So you begin to get the impression that in order to understand the history of life, in order to apply science to the history of life, scientific method to the history of life, you need to understand questions about the evolution of the interstellar medium, you need to understand about the evolution about our planetary system, you need to understand questions about the self-organized chemistry that actually gave rise to the first living entities, the emergence of life on this planet.
You need to understand the geology associated with this, you need to understand the adaptation properties of living systems to the various conditions in this planet, you need to understand how ecologies are formed and how ecologies adapt, very important word to different extreme situations and so on and so forth, so that's the fact that these things we need to understand, these things to understand life on this planet, in order to understand life on this planet to be able to compare with life elsewhere and then have a few points if possible in the plot of life because of that you need to have all these types of laboratories and of course you need develop technologies, you need to develop instrumentation that will allow you to explore our planet, and will allow you to explore all the places, all the possible abodes, actual or extinct, abodes for life in the solar system and you need to design those things and of course that's why you need robotic laboratories, telecommunication laboratory, so that you can actually perform experiments, remote experiments and so on. So that's the reason for the variety of laboratories we have here.
Q; Molecular biology, meaning the greenhouse, extremophile and plant, PLANETOLOGY GEOLOGY Pecas experiment
A: The "Molecular Ecology" laboratory is a laboratory where we try to understand how species of bacteria, plants, and so on exchange genes on this planet, and how species adapt to variations in the environment, and how their genes actually get activated or deactivated depending on the processes and the components that there are in the soil, depending on the type of light they receive and so on so forth. So we do experiments there where we use very advanced DNA technologies, and including, of course, DNA array technologies and many other microbiological technologies which are very common in order to understand these processes, lateral gene transfer.
In the laboratory for extremophiles what we do is concentrate on acidophilic extremophiles and in particular acetophilic and iron-churning, iron-eating extremophiles. That's because Mars is the red planet because it has a huge amount of iron and if there is a huge amount of iron on Mars and if there ever was life on Mars, then that life on Mars, or perhaps even today under the surface of Mars, that life on Mars would have used, if there are some generalities about life in the universe, then it would have used iron. So we need to understand the metabolism of iron and we have devoted a particular laboratory to understand these processes because we expect to get hints as to what to look for if we're looking for life on Mars, hints in terms of proteins, hints in terms of materials, that would be perhaps found in fossils and so on.
And in the planetary geology laboratory or in the PECAS, that's part of the multidisciplinary laboratory, actually the transdisciplinary laboratory... and part of the transdisciplinary laboratory work of course, is in prebiotic chemistry experiments and is also a place where we actually try to understand how to develop sensors and how to actually use technologies for dealing, for manipulating one molecule at a time, that we can lay on different sub-strates and we can understand how to use those for detection of living things and it's thrown on some special vacuum chambers where we deal with the materials and where we deposit the materials. In that part of the laboratory of the transdisciplinary laboratory, we also do something that is very important which is to use in a very reduced and very modest volume to use, to simulate the conditions that will take place for example on the surface of Europa, the satellite of Jupiter, or to simulate the conditions that take place on the surface of Mars, the conditions of UV radiation, vacuum, temperature, cycles of temperatures, and so on in a small volume, and understand how living things or things associated with life like some proteins, of course, not living things themselves, but proteins, hopanes or the products react to those conditions and that's what we do in some of the projects which we are carrying out in these labs.
Q: What makes Rio Tinto such a unique environment?
A: You can define a living system by a variety of properties. It's a system that metabolizes, it's a system that reproduces, it's a system that is capable of handling information and it's a system that evolves by adaptation to the environment in which it lives. Those are 4 of the 6, 7 or 8 properties that you can assign to living systems.
Rio Tinto is an extremely interesting place to actually study adaptation. Adaptation of living things to extreme conditions where you would expect other things not to be able to survive, or you would expect regular life on planet Earth not to survive because the conditions of high toxicity for the vast majority of living things on this planet make it into place where only limited amount of biodioversity would be expected. However, once you go there you realize that there is a huge biodiversity, far more than you would have expected, so it is a place where you could understand, you could begin to lay down or to understand what are the mechanisms that allow living things to adapt to such extreme and apparently hostile conditions.
So that's one of the reasons why Rio Tinto is so interesting because that happens there. In addition of course to the fact that life there uses iron as its major source of energy, but also it's accessible and it's a place where you can do 2 types of experiments, experiments with a graduate student that goes there with rubber boots or you can test robots of different kinds, or you can test different types of spectrometry or spectrography, or you can do remote sensing in the area and that's why Rio Tinto is so unique.
There probably are other places in the planet and in fact there are similar places elsewhere, but this is a place where we have access to everything about the place. It's a place which is easily accessible, it's a place that is fascinating, you see it, and once you see it you realize that there is something amazing about the place, it looks devastated, it looks in some places as if it is a huge natural man-made catastrophe. Not at all, it's the brilliance of life and you can see in many places it's the brilliance of life, in some places it's mine tailings... but in many places it's the brilliance of life, and you can see how life can be extraordinarily diverse, and when you see it you only understand the beauty of creation, the beauty of life, and how life is capable of expressing itself under the most extreme circumstances.
Q: Other equally revolutionary ideas?
A: When you look at the properties of living systems on Earth you discover that they have very simple properties, the properties look complicated, but once you begin to study collective properties you begin to realize that there are simple collective properties and in fact you realize that the properties that they display show that there is a huge level of self-organization, and excuse repeating myself, at the different levels, self organization at the molecular level, self organization at the organelle level, at the cell, at the organism, at the ecosystem and so on and so forth. And you realize when you study this in some detail, you do some quantitative work which is taking place for the last century, but it's only beginning to be understood or has begun to be understood in the last 15 years or so, you begin to realize that there is the tell tales of, the quantitative tell tales of self organization which go under the name of "power laws", laws as in laws, that tell you how the system self organizes at the various hierarchical levels in which the full system is organized. TOO COMPLEX And when you compare that with things we know about the universe, for example, the way planetary systems are organized, the way huge clouds of gas are organized in the interstellar space, the way in which open classes of stars are organized, the way in which globular clusters are organized, the way in which galaxies correlate with each other and are organized into classes of galaxies, you realize that they share this phenomenology, so you begin to see that life may be a consequence of the evolution of the universe, the evolution of the universe gives rise when what dominates is gravitation, gravitational force, gives rise to this wonderful structures that we see with Hubble, that we see with our telescopes on the ground, things that we see at night in the beautiful Arizona sky, or in the beautiful African sky or beautiful skies that we see everywhere, where we still not have too much light pollution and those structures are the doings of the evolution of the universe when gravity dominates.
We begin to think and we begin to believe for the time being, believe, that the origin and evolution of life is a consequence of some general principles which are the same principles acting at large scales except that here what dominates is chemistry. The conditions are such that chemical forces begin to actually give rise to more complexity as the evolution of the universe takes place, as time elapses if you will. And we are beginning to find out that the phenomenology at the large scales and the phenomenology in living things is the same, so what I think is going to happen is that we are going to understand as we do more and more very directed experiments to understand these issues we're going to begin to understand how living things relate to each other and how the hierarchy of living organisms is just a consequence of some very basic principles acting on the chemistry of carbon which is after all the one of all the elements in the table of elements, the one that gave rise to the largest amount of complexity. So that's what I think we will discover.
Q: DO you think there's life elsewhere in solar system?
A: I do believe that there must be life in the universe, we have not discovered it yet, except of course... RESTART
I do believe that there must be life in other places in the universe besides our beautiful planet. I believe the universe must be pregnant with life. I've used the word believe, we have not tested that scientifically. However, there are ways in which we can test today by visiting places where the evolution of the solar system and the chemical evolution that must have taken place in some of these bodies could have given rise to life in the past or even life today.
If many of the ideas that we have about the origin of life on earth and its evolution are correct then there's a huge chance that there should be life in some caves in the interior of Mars where there's not absolutely cold and there may be liquid water, so that's a place to look for living things that I believe could be if there are these caves. But today we know that a few billion years ago there must have been huge quantities of liquid water on the surface of Mars, the conditions prevailing then on the Red Planet were quite different from the conditions that we see today as they were different on Planet Earth. So if liquid water was there for long enough, life might have emerged so we could be able to find extinct life there, we could fossils. We need to look for those, we have the obligation to the generations coming behind us to understand what happened there so that we, if possible, are able to prevent the same catastrophes or the same events taking place here and protect our own precious life.
But Mars is not the only place, there are places like Europa, satellites, the frozen satellite of Jupiter, discovered by Galileo a long time ago. There in the interior, we believe and again here believe, it's a scientific belief in a sense that's illustrated by scientific inquiry, we believe that in the interior of Europa there must be a mass of liquid water at the interface between the huge ice crust and the nucleus, the rock nucleus inside. There must be liquid water and we believe that that has been there for a long time. Again chemical evolution could have taken place there and again the conditions might have existed there or even exist today so that life, very different from what we see today on the surface of Earth at least, life might have emerged there.
Today we also believe that even Venus which looked like a very improbable place could have been a place for harboring life, very different from the ones we could even imagine could have survived there, but could have been a place for harboring very simple life and even today perhaps in the interior of Venus there might be some form of life.
So if our solar system is pregnant with life on our planet, and perhaps had life in other places or even have life today, and our solar system is around a star which is a very, very common type of star, of which stars of the same type of sun there are millions upon millions in our galaxy, why would it be that we would be the only place with life. I think the universe must be teeming with life, this time life with a lower case "l", referring to life as a generic phenomenon, and therefore I believe the universe must be pregnant with life everywhere and that we're not alone and that's why NASA for example is now trying and the European Space Agency by the way and space agencies and scientists around the world are trying to design instrumentation that will allow us to look at small planetary systems, or planetary systems with planets about the size of Earth that we would perhaps be able to analyze with 9 pixels or 27 pixels or whatever, a very small number of pixels that would give us information, spectroscopic information about signatures of life that could be detected remotely and we are very excited we're living at this time because we are at the doorsteps of huge discoveries awaiting us in the next decade or so.
Q; In today's world is astrobiology a luxury?
A: Astrobiology is a wonderful pursuit of human curiosity and human generosity. Astrobiology is not expensive at all, astrobiology is about trying to understand the future evolution of our planet, astrobiology is about understanding that evolution, the physical evolution of our planet, and understanding why are there things like tsunamis, understanding what are the effects of global warming, astrobiology is about understanding can we create a better environment for the generations coming after us, astrobiology is about protecting our children, astrobiology is about understanding life with a capital "L", life on planet earth and understanding that with the intention of protecting it, with the intention of knowing what to do about, for example, how the immune system works, understanding what to do about remediations of huge ecological catastrophes, it's about understanding how to monitor the quality of life, really monitor the quality of life, understand change, genetic change, that's what astrobiology is about. Astrobiology at the same time is about understanding the wonderful connection that must exist but which is at the forefront of science today which is the connection between physics and biology, that is what astrobiology is about. Astrobiology is about applying the connection between physics and biology, about exploring because we are here things we want to know and about understanding and transferring that understanding, that knowledge for the good and the health of society and the good and health of all billions of people who inhabit our wonderful blue planet.
A: Because astrobiology is about understanding what Life with a capital L, referring to life on earth is and for that you need to resolve a number of issues associated with the application of the scientific method to life.