life is the most complex thing in the known universe just ask anybody in the
White House abundant on earth hugely successful in colonizing every available
niche it seems that once started life is unstoppable but does that mean there's
life on other planets elsewhere in the universe
so far we have not seen signs of life elsewhere and not for lack of trying
is there other life for traces of former life out there is there now or has there
ever been intelligent life anywhere but on our earth with a hundred billion
galaxies the order of a hundred billion galaxies each containing the order of a
hundred billion stars most of which we now know have their own planets the
probability of life having evolved elsewhere seems very very high indeed on
the numbers it seems highly likely that intelligent life has evolved in the
universe at some other time at some other place and maybe is out there now
how will we find out for sure tonight we're going to take you on a journey
from Earth through the solar system the planets around other stars in the search
for life let's start with the earth and I note that some have asked whether
there's intelligent life on earth I believe there is but let me turn it over
now to Gavin Schmidt Gavin
is the only example we have so far of a planet with a biosphere as we get
further away earth shrinks from a recognizably inhabited place to a blue
dot and then to just a tiny point in orbit around the Sun the further out we
go the harder it is to tell that there is life on Earth but there has been life
on Earth for more than three billion years the universe has existed for 13.8
billion years since the Big Bang and our solar system has been around for the
last 4.6 billion years of those but remarkably quickly after the solar
system formed and rocky planets condensed and cooled there was liquid
water on the surface of our planet for a planet 4.5 billion years old we have
evidence of water from only 0.2 billion years later but it took life perhaps
another 500 million years to appear early life-forms weren't much to look at
but life itself has been here a long time we don't yet know how life got
started there are many theories but we do know that it got going under some
very challenging conditions the Sun was 30 percent dimmer than today but with
more solar flares there was no oxygen and therefore no ozone layer to protect
the surface from harsh ultraviolet rays but earth did have the ingredients
necessary to support life a solvent like water an energy source and abundant
nutrients for 1.5 billion years this primitive life survived in the oceans
protected by the waters opacity but around 2.5 billion years ago bacteria
started to use sunlight directly to fuse water and carbon dioxide to make sugars
which were then used as food but every molecule of carbon dioxide they
used and there is a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere they released
a molecule of oxygen those bacteria were followed by photosynthesizing algae
mosses and plants and eventually after a number of false starts the oxygen built
up in the atmosphere until around 500 million years ago it got close to
present-day concentrations giving a start to the huge variety of land
animals insects and plants we see today meanwhile the climate was not static the
planet went through cycles of snowballs and hothouses driven by plate tectonics
volcanism greenhouse gases and impacts indeed it was only after the last
snowball earth event that set the stage that the stage was set for the evolution
of multicellular life in the early carrion 600 million years ago the new
species that were rapidly born evolved and died changed the planet forever the
surface became completely covered you could say infected infested with life
and that life affected the climate changing the composition of the
atmosphere the reflectivity of the surface and the cycling of water
radically transforming the view from space life co-created the broad array of
special unique ecosystems and micro climates the characterized the earth
today visible even from a million miles away but remember for most of the time
that life existed on earth it did not have a land fingerprint and the oxygen
that we now rely on wasn't detectable for perhaps half that time under those
conditions or any others in Earth's history how can we know what would have
been seen from further away this is where our understanding of current
climates and processes the control composition clouds and dynamics come
into play we can simulate the impacts of climate on life and the
packs of life on climate at each stage of our planets history simulations which
include the physics of clouds oceans ice and about mysteric particles like dust
we can take those results and then project how those climates would look
from space from beyond the even the solar system but we can go further we
can even simulate the climate the climates of Venus and Mars 3 billion
years ago when they were both very different places places that perhaps
also had the seeds of life and Jen can discuss that if life ever existed in our
solar system then it found a way to adapt to extreme conditions conditions
that may be more extreme than what we have on earth I am constantly amazed to
find that life has adapted to every niche no matter how harsh the
environment take for example the extraordinary springs of the law in the
Danakil desert of Ethiopia these Springs are hot salty rich and heavy metals and
their acidic micro organisms thrive in these pools even the pools of pH less
than one that's more acidic than battery acid life adapted another example the
Atacama Desert in the rain shadow of the Andes Mountains it is the driest land
desert on earth this Martian like landscape has been shaped by the wind
and salty aerosols for millions of years it has been one of the most challenging
places to find evidence of life and yet it's there a few cells here and their
life adapted one last example and this one really baffles me Chernobyl this
diverse life the diverse life in this agricultural region is punctuated by the
presence of fungi that live off the radiation from the 1986
down of reactor for these fungi use the radiation the gamma radiation in the
same way plants use sunlight to grow life adapted on earth could life have
arisen and adapted to the extreme conditions of other places in our solar
system we're going to find out we will search for biomolecules the organic
compounds that make up life its food and waste products we may need to extend
that search to other types of signatures to build confidence in that detection we
might search for active cells and catch extraterrestrial life in action we might
search for fossilized cells in ancient rocks and ice
Gavin explained that earth is the only known biosphere
however Mars is a close neighbor although it is like it looks like a
rusty barren plant today its history was very similar to Earth in the beginning
did life arise on Mars around the same time that life arose on earth why are
these two planets so vastly different today both Earth and Mars had a liquid
core when they formed movement of this molten iron generated a magnetic field
that shield the atmosphere and surface from being blasted by ionizing radiation
earth maintains this magnetic field but not so for Mars convection of the
Martian core slowed or stopped four billion years ago without the protection
of the magnetic field the powerful solar wind streaming continuously from the
young Sun crashed into the Red Planet piling up in front of it like a bow wave
a ship except in this case the wave is charged particles that electrically
strip away the Martian atmosphere this process continued for eons regulated by
the sun's activity and slowly stripped away all gases from the volcanoes and
the rocks with a magnetic field and atmosphere mostly gone the rocky surface
of Mars was bombarded
ionizing radiation from the galaxy and the Sun this radiation comes in the form
of photons such as UV x-ray and gamma rays as well as charged particles
however unlike what we experience here on earth all of these forms have an
enormous amount of energy when ionizing radiation encounters
molecules it changes them radiation damage to molecules means damage to life
and the signatures that we seek we know that life adapts if life ever existed on
Mars did it adapt to the harsh radiation environment at or near at surface life
has surprised us on earth and perhaps life will surprises on Mars too I have
spent the last 4 years exploring Mars through the imagers and
the instruments of the Curiosity rover we have discovered that Mars is not
really red it's gray with a rusty skin Mars is not really dry either liquid
water on Mars formed rivers deltas lakes maybe seas it has been cold and warm
acidic and alkaline its surface and atmospheric chemistry evolved it has
organic matter and the key nutrients needed for life we have only scratched
the surface of Mars and begun to decipher his story did life ever live
there is there life on Mars now and could life live here in the future
beyond Mars we will search for life in the ocean worlds of the moons of Jupiter
and Saturn Jupiter has a magnetic field 20,000 times stronger than Earth's the
field produces a doughnut-shaped belt around the planet in which charged
particles get trapped Europa is a water ice covered ocean world and one of great
interest as a possible abode for life it sits right smack in the middle of
Jupiter's magnetic belt which means that it is being bombarded
by intense amounts of radiation although the Europan surface is
inhospitable it may offer a glimpse of the chemistry of what lies beneath
Europa's thick crust is insufficient is sufficient for protecting the underlying
global ocean from radiation and it is hypothesized that Europa may have
hydrothermal vents stemming from is rocky interior and if so these are ideal
sites for life and they support the potential of life in the ocean now let's
go to Saturn where the moons are embedded in the Rings where we think
life may exist on some of these moons like Europa and saw this as an icy ocean
world and in 2005 the Cassini spacecraft witness geysers of gas are rising from
the surface these plumes are direct conduits to a deep ocean we might search
for signs of life by flying through these plumes and then there's heightened
a rocky moon with seas of liquid methane and an atmosphere of organic smog Titan
is drenched in hydrocarbons and it's cold enough to freeze most of them life
as we know it is largely made of hydrocarbons although it may be a
stretch of our imagination to think that life might live here it is considered
potentially habitable did life arise on Titan there are possibilities for
extraterrestrial life in our solar system
however as Aki will explain there are even more possibilities of life outside
of it
if we're going to look for life that's really earth-like we need to look for
planets around other stars exoplanets for short when I started undergrad we
only knew of nine planets in the solar system actually eight now and in grad
school we thought exoplanets would be rare twenty years ago we discovered the
first planet around another star since that time we've gone from a few planets
in the solar system to literally thousands of exoplanets orbiting other
stars and we have only searched a tiny portion of the galaxy with the Kepler
space mission we think there's at least one exoplanet for every star in the
galaxy which would mean over a hundred billion planets in the Milky Way alone
so that's at least 14 planets for every human on earth and the Milky Way is only
one of a myriad of galaxies in the universe we've found that the planet
formation process is more robust and easy than we thought and exoplanets are
common they can form around all different kinds of stars even ones not
like the Sun there are even planets around binary stars like Tatooine and
star wars to our delighted surprise exoplanets are not only common but
diverse the first planets discovered are unlike anything we have in the solar
system they are hot Jupiters massive gassy
planets orbiting closer to their stars than mercury orbits our Sun so in the
solar system we have two basic classes of planets we have massive gas giants
like Jupiter and small rocky planets like Earth but there's all sizes of
planets out there from super Jupiter's to Neptune's to rocky planets several
times more massive than Earth all the way down to true earth sized planets so
with all this richness of planetary real estate it encourages us to start
thinking more ambitiously to search for those rocky planets that are actually
like earth we may have already found some but we actually can't tell right
now what their surfaces are really like so as gavin mentioned Earth's abundant
surface life makes it unique in the solar system and this is probably
the only kind of life that we can detect from really far away there might be
other kinds of life on other kinds of worlds out there but we probably won't
be able to recognize it so astronomers are really focused on finding the true
earth twins out there and we will look for them in the habitable zones of
nearby stars so the habitable zone is the region
around a star where an earth-like planet is just the right temperature to have
liquid water on its surface the key ingredient for earth life so for the Sun
the habitable zone stretches from just outside Venus's orbit to Mars for bigger
brighter stars the habitable zone moves out to cool off like moving away from a
campfire and then for smaller dimmer stars the habitable zone moves in to
keep the planet warm now this spectrum is how astronomers want to look for life
on other worlds it's the light from the earth as if it were really far away
separated by color don't panic we'll go through it okay so this rise in
brightness on the far left is literally our blue sky and this narrow dip comes
from oxygen which is produced by plants these several deep dips come from water
vapour and then over here is a methane feature so methane in our atmosphere
comes largely comes from bacteria in the guts of our livestock and in swamps so
the Earth's atmosphere is full of biosignatures gases that wouldn't be
present in our atmosphere without life now the technical challenge of ever
seeing something like this is one of the hardest things scientists have ever
thought of trying and here is why the earth is ten billion times fainter than
the Sun so if the looks or sky beam the brightest man-made light in the world is
the Sun the earth is four candles on your dinner table but astronomers
actually observe things that faint all the time the real problem is those four
candles are sitting right next to the bright lights if we're looking at the
solar system from 33 light-years away which is not that far it's pretty nearby
the separation between the Earth and the Sun is point one arc seconds or the
width of a human hair from distance of two football fields so
imagine trying to see those candles if they were right on top of the Luxor sky
beam we have to suppress the light from the star before we can see the faint
blue dot next to it there are a couple of different technologies people have
come up with to do this one of them is a star shade a gigantic deployed screen
that would fly tens of thousands of kilometers in front of a telescope you'd
be aligned with a star to block its bright light but this telescope is a
relatively small one if we really want to get a spectrum like the earth one I
showed we need a bigger telescope so nASA has begun a concept study for a
super-duper Hubble called leVoir which will search for dozens of earth-like
planets and probe their atmospheres in addition it would enable a wide range of
general astronomy just like Hubble did with powerful future missions we could
see the pale blue dot of Carl Sagan's imagining and have a fighting chance of
finding life out there among the stars so to put this grand endeavor into
perspective we turn to Pierce
the universe is really big and really old life has been on earth for about
four billion years now we know that in the universe physics and chemistry are
the same everywhere a hydrogen atom here is just the same as a hydrogen atom on
the other end of universe the laws of physics and chemistry work the same
everywhere now we strongly suspect based on an example of one our earth that the
laws of biology worked the same everywhere - and by then I mean the laws
that Charles Darwin discovered for us we think that based on these laws that
evolution can drive life to greater complexity and ultimately to
intelligence it's the smart thing to do now look at this tree of life we can see
intelligent animals that were familiar with humans elephants dolphins these
creatures are very closely related to us but look over here on the far right
there's one other intelligence and invertebrate intelligence that evolved
completely separately from the rest of us they split off from us before brains
were even thought of when all creatures had were just a few No nerve cells
octopuses have an intelligence that's comparable to quite a lot of mammals and
it evolved completely separately these guys are like little aliens living with
us on our own planet if you look at an octopus you can see that its brains are
actually distributed all over its body most of its brains were in its feet or
in his legs and they're connected to the nerve center in his head by a neural
network it's a distributed intelligence but it turns out that they think pretty
much the same way that mammals do they self problems they seem to be self-aware
they have a short-term memory and a long-term memory they learn and they get
mad they basically tank all the business of
living in a complex environment the same way that we mammals do we think that we
understand how an octopus thinks so the secret of intelligence is in the
software it's not in the hardware it's very likely that an alien intelligence
would be comprehensible to us in the same way that an octopus is thoughts are
more or less comprehensible to us too we should be able to communicate with them
if we met them so you'd think there'd be plenty of opportunities for life to
evolve somewhere else and maybe swing by the earth or at least call on the radio
but we haven't found any alien monolith or beer cans or cigarette ends and we
have not heard them tweeting on the radio either so where are they that's
what Johnny von neumann asked where are they there are lots of theories about
that but I'm going to concentrate on the more plausible ones first of all there's
the water trap maybe the world's that have water on them are all ocean for the
most part and if that's the case you can't discover combustion you can't make
metals so you can't make a radio or a spaceship if our dolphin friends lived
on the notion planet they would be stuck where they are in the Stone Age forever
we might discover intelligent life here but they could be incredibly boring
talking endlessly about the flavours of different kinds of plantain and that
sort of thing when we be on a planet that has dry land but no metals or very
few metals same problem you can't develop a technology and how about the
difficulty of interstellar travel maybe it's just too hard it looks like a real
challenge for us it could be a couple of hundred years before we try that maybe
it's just too hard and then there's a great sci-fi standbys hostile races
evolved they wipe out everyone else that's sort of like
and I think we should move on quickly this is meant to be a fun evening and
then there's another theory which is that we could be the first we could be
the first intelligence to evolve in this part of the galaxy someone has to be we
could be the elder race so here's a time history of Earth when you look at all
the time that life has been here nearly 4 billion years
humans have only been around for a couple of hundred thousand years
civilization for about six thousand years depending how you count it and our
technical era only for 200 years when you look at this picture it is obvious
that the most likely first alien life-forms that we discover will not be
intelligent they will be somewhere back here equivalent to life on Earth during
the first 3 billion years of evolution similarly nearby life on an extra planet
is probably plotting its way up the evolutionary ladder remember how long it
took us to get where we are where we could even think about life elsewhere so
what are the chances of us finding anything or anybody
soon here's a timeline of missions for exploring the solar system with some
notional ideas of what we'll be doing in the next 50 years I think that over the
next 30 to 50 years we will have thoroughly explored every nook and
cranny of the solar system and seen or determined where there is life here or
past life or not I think there's a good chance we'll nail like them on flat and
there is a chance of looking for bio signatures in the atmospheres of
exoplanets here's the missions again pretty notional I'm gonna solve 30 to 50
year time frame in the future that we could see looking at exoplanets where
we'd be looking for traces of life in their atmospheres it turns out that we
Earthlings have the prime real estate in our solar system
far as having a habitable environment is concerned most of the rest of the solar
system looks like a really tough place to live
but you never know we need to thoroughly check out our own
backyard as well as the planets around other stars we'd look like idiots
if we fail to check for life close to home and fail for lack of trying now
back to the beginning John Holdren question why do we even care about this
stuff we think it goes beyond just intellectual curiosity it's in our
nature because we humans grow up as part of nature and need to pay attention to
it I want you to imagine what humans could do in a couple of hundred years or
so imagine a probe from Earth entering the solar system of another star after a
journey of decades maybe a century note the MSB our logo what would it find my
advice to you is eat healthy don't smoke don't jaywalk and you might find out
it'd be good to find out that were not alone thank you for your attention
I guess you're about the only person around it doesn't have TV we are
Oh
on fire please








Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét