 that we've been doing this year that's been a little bit different is we've been highlighting an activity related to the topic this month. This month we're looking at an area of research and astrobiology. So Vivian White has this one activity which you can also find in the NSN Life in the Universe outreach toolkit. So over to you Vivian. Hi everybody it's great to see so many people on this presentation. I'm just going to start off and quickly go over a really fun activity called Life in the Extreme. This is like he said from the Life in the Universe toolkit which you can get on the Night Sky Network. Yes thanks Brian for putting a list in there. This is a great activity that is really engaging with your audience. It comes with this introduction card that has all the presentation steps on the back which is really a nice thing to have. What you do is you start off with a question something like let's see who thinks there might be life elsewhere in our galaxy or what kinds of world do you think aliens might live on? And you say actually we don't know but we are studying it and scientists are looking to extreme environments and the organisms that live in those environments to study what the possibilities of life looks like. So you would then hand out all these different cards. We have everything from penguins to like and this is definitely the kids favorite snot heights very cool and my favorite the water bear. So there are 14 different cards you can make copies of these you can download them. On the back of each of these cards it has some information about each of the organisms that talks about the temperature and what kind of pressure and how much water they need and the acidity that they can live in. So then you start to ask them to sort themselves by and there are lots of different options on the back of your presenter card say you know who lives in a really cold environment and everyone sorts themselves to the right or to the left and there are you do this four or five different times who lives in high acidic various acidic environments or who lives in high temperatures and they sort themselves out and you can see that there are variations on that spectrum for all of these different things and then kind of the punchline of this is who can live without water and nobody none of the organisms that we found on earth can live without water they can't they can't live and thrive without water I should say. So it points to the fact that we use water as a way to look for life elsewhere in the universe and it's a fun activity with some good follow-ups that you can go through it's great with a group you I even do it print out a couple of different sets of them you can even make your own if you'd like of different organisms I know some of the parks that we work with make their own for the organisms that live in their park environment. So this is from the like the universe toolkit and it was produced by us here at the astronomical society the Pacific and sponsored by JPL's exoplanet exploration program and the virtual planetary labs so thanks to them you can get that on the MSN and I am gonna I think it's gonna relate quite a bit to the talk we're having tonight so enjoy. Great thank you Vivian. Okay so now to our featured presentation Bruce Dahmer is a Canadian-American multidisciplinary scientist designer and author at UC Santa Cruz Dr. Dahmer collaborates with Professor David Dahmer and other colleagues developing and testing a new model for the origin of life on earth. For NASA in the space industry he works on the design of spacecraft architectures to provide a viable path for expansion of human civilization beyond the earth. He began his career in the 1980s developing some of the earliest user interfaces for personal computers led the community in the 1990s bringing the first multi-user virtual worlds to the internet and has spent 25 years chronically in the history of computing in his Dinjabarn computer museum. Please welcome Bruce Dahmer. Hello everyone. Let me just share my screen. Let me get this down here. So how's it going? The panelists hear me? It's uh everything's okay. Looks great. Sounds great. You're our mission control there. Oh wonderful. I want to really thank the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and all of you out there for attending and I'm going to take you on a journey uh and that journey is going to take us uh to the far reaches of Australia deep into pools in Yellowstone uh back in time to the Archaean and Haiti and earth uh out to Mars and on to Enceladus and Exoplanets which I think is a a tasty set of delights for many of you there. uh Astronomy was the original field that that started us out really as a as a science I think in some ways astrobiology is is docked into and was was created into being by astronomers so that's why it's astrobiology so let's get started. So part one is the origin of life we have two parts here we have the origin of life and the search for life in the universe they're both life topics but uh this one's lodged primarily on the earth so if you look at this picture you see it's sunlight pulling forward uh life uh as we know it and this is the clue as to life's origins so when did this start it started for me and when I was 14 years old in 1976 uh and as uh was Brian mentioned I'm from Canada so this is a sage brush hill near my town in Kamloops British Columbia and I was walking out in the hills and up was coming a flower a mariposa lily and I bent down to study it and thought what a beautiful structure you know but how can how can a structure like this which is complex come from a simple thing like a seed or a bulb and I thought that's pretty interesting I didn't know about algorithms and software and computers and genetic codes and then I remembered I just read about this guy Albert Einstein who did thought experiments when he was in his teen years and one of his famous ones was riding alongside a beam of light you know running alongside it and it led to special relativity so I thought well that's how you do science you do thought experiments so I did one and this is the first thought experiment because I asked myself the question or asked whatever the question to the universe what created all of life not just one bulb or seed but the or bulb or seed and this is what came into my mind which is a seeding mass of molecules trying to self organize and I kind of asked it a question but it asked me a question which was how did we make a copy of myself or ourselves how did we figure that out how did we make a copy of ourselves and I thought well how can a seeding mass of molecules like a bunch of Lego blocks how can that self assemble into something you know you just can't sort of shake a bucket of Lego blocks and have it do anything now this is Fred Hoyle's argument and basically the seeding mass of molecules asked me to figure it out and it took me 40 38 years actually working with colleagues to come up with this model because I thought you know if you need to if you're going to make a machine you need another bigger machine right an automobile should be made an automobile factory so how do you make a complex machine without the bigger machine there so this guy Charles Darwin was one of the first persons in the in science to try to figure it out and he had worked out evolution through natural selection you know in his work and his truck travels on the Beagle in 1835 and he at the end toward the end of his life in a letter to his friend Hooker wrote this famous phrase and everybody knows the warm little pond part of it but really what actually the the pay dirt for this thing is later in the phrase where he talks about all sorts of ammonia phosphoric salts like heat electricity which is all right it's all good but this is the key one a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still comp more complex changes and you actually nailed it this is actually the fundamental thing you have to do to start life is to grow polymer and then extend it and allow it to undergo complex changes that is it if you're not making polymers in length you're not going to get to life so our field the science of the origin of life sort of got really started in 1952-53 with the Miller Urie spark chamber experiment everybody knows about that prior to that in the 1920s through 50s Haldane and Oparin talked about suits and their concept was you needed to have more complex things made from simpler things and you need to concentrate them somehow in the 1970s the deep sea hydrothermal vents were discovered and we actually just met met some of the people who were on running the Alvin who did this this is fascinating and it was suggested later that perhaps the life could begin in these extremophile environments however in 30 years of laboratory work there's never been the demonstration of a polymer of any length that could be formed in continuously aqueous environments like this and not the formation of membranous capsules either so as of really last year at our origin of life meeting in San Diego it was very clear that the chemistry community is now returning its focus to land-based pools because we get the chemistry to work so that's a big title shift if you will in the field of the origin of life so now I'm going to take you back to a place that few origin of life researchers go because mostly our field is dominated by chemists and we use clean glassware and order reagents from catalogs and try to get things to work in a single reaction to work but nature is complex and life started on the surface of a world and in a complex environment and the only place you can go to get a clear view of the oldest environments for life on earth is this one little chunk of northwestern Australia called the Pelborough and we went on a field trip there in July 15 2015 Dave and I and it started in Perth and it went up to Canarvon a place called Shark Bay which I'll show you here which is a sailing estuary it's now a world heritage site and then it continued on but at Shark Bay we get off our bus and we actually snorkeled or we looked under the water to these interesting structures called stromatolites and they're not rocks they're made by biology they're literally grown by biofilms that sequester sand grains and build these towers in order to keep having access to the light they're pulled forward by light there's me standing at the shores of Shark Bay and this is like standing in the Archaean or standing in some ancient time you know it's amazing because this would have been a scene you know familiar to time travelers 3.5 billion years ago if you press down on the tops of these structures it's a spongy film of trillions of microbiota the top layer being of course cyanobacteria so onwards we drove to this northwestern region and this kind of looks like almost like a caldera which actually turns out it is is the north pole dome the best preserved landscape of the paleo archaean 3.5 billion years ago so there's our bus and our youths some of the geology this is a place mostly visited by geologists here's a slab of stromatolite 2.6 billion years old you can see the layering again by the successive growth of of microbial mat here's the top view of stromatolite so these are the ancient cousins of the living stromatolites of Shark Bay there's a sort of side view and here's a stromatolite bedded in shirt that's that black material on the top and bottom and so this is this actually a shirt often can preserve evidence for microfossils very controversial on our field but it's really been established that single imprints of single cells have been found in shirts it's very very rare in the church of this age but in between is the morphological evidence and stromatolites don't leave any organics this is this is basically a mineral substructure that's cemented together that is then preserved and it can be preserved sort of carbonaceously or through silica replacement this is Martin van Crenendon who's sort of in charge of the of the dresser formation in Pilbara region this is me looking through a loop at some of the structures in the strally pool formation and this is the famous strally pool formation which was the discovery outcrop for stromatolites it's about 3.46 billion years old of age so in 2014 evidence was discovered in by Martin van Crenendon Katera Djokic that in fact the North Pole dome is was ringed by hot springs it was not a marine shore as previously thought and they determined this by the discovery of this geyserite which you'll see there it's basically bands of light and dark material laid down by splashing geysers freshwater at the surface this is a remarkable discovery and within the geyserite there's evidence of palisade fabric which is solicified microbial filaments so on the left you see modern filaments and then the right you see the solicified versions they also discovered what looked like evidence for air bubbles within this material evidence of so-called EPS that glues together microbial biofilms and you can see on the bottom there's some modern this gooey stuff that microbes use to tie their communities together and when they produce oxygen it goes out as as bubbles so this is not only the oldest evidence for life on land that's ever been discovered but it and the oldest hot spring on earth by three you know by 3.5 you know two billion years but it's the first evidence the possibly the oldest from metabolism so if we look at the rock record from the earliest evidence for life it's actually turns out vibrant life at 3.5 billion years in in a hot spring location on land this is a sample I picked up two years ago this is bearite preserved stromatolite here's a lakeshore stromatolite which is a little bit less diverse because it's in a quiescent environment and this is sort of produced by unlapping waves and this is modern marine stromatolites also a little bit more of a quiescent environment a little less diverse but still you know very very vibrant so this is suggesting the rock record suggests that far from life crawling out on land sometime you know half a billion years ago life was always on the land in a quiescent environments so let's take a look at what this implication this evidence now means that if land masses say at 4 billion years ago perhaps around the time of life's origins they certainly were present there was a there was thinking earlier that we had a complete water world but this is actually not plausible because you know on a cooling mantle on a rocky road you have a vast amount of volcanic activity and a vast amount of hot springs you know both under the ocean and on the land masses you know think Hawaii or Kamchatka or or Iceland today so they actually believe now that even in the Hadea there was at least potentially 30 to 40 percent of the this surficial land mass so lots of land and what land has is a property that the ocean doesn't when you have things deposited on the land they concentrate so you know think of a rainfall and you find a little pool that has kind of salts or things built up around it you can actually concentrate material whereas the ocean is a big diluting buffer this has been the main problem chemists have had with an origin of life in the ocean it's a diluting environment so you're going to lose all your reagents if you're dilute you can't form a bond you can't form chemical bonds if you can't do that you can't get to life so it turns out that the oceans is it's the oceans themselves are an extreme a file environment for early life but perhaps the Goldilocks zone and this is a term from astrobiology for early life are these little pools that are fluctuating that have just the right temperature and the right chemical composition so if early on earth earth had hundreds of millions of years to establish adaptations it could do it on the land because you had a system where you could collect material and there was a lot of infall in those years the infalling material contained the building blocks of life it contained fatty acids amino acids and nucleobases oh these are known to have come in on carbonaceous contracts we have a meteorite collection which includes pieces of the Murray and the mercheson meteorite which are at the age of the earth pretty much they're 4.6 billion years old and they contain all these organics so this material as dust or meteorites is falling on the land concentrating in pools where they can be it can be cycled chemical reactions happen and then if you get a form of early life it can then flow downstream adapt and be stressed until it hits the salty and high tidal environments and high divalent cation environments of the oceans adapt to that later and then distribute like we saw at shark bay so you know Dave has never been satisfied with just doing stuff in clean glassware so this is one of his first trips we went you know he went 10 12 years ago to Kamchatka Russia found a little warm pool that was driven by hydrothermal activity and put in a set of reagents and membranous structures formed immediately in this little pool you may as well try it in the field so the feedstock from meteoritic compounds as a piece of the mercheson meteorite would have been falling in these pools in in abundance then Dave made this discovery that he could actually polymerize non-enzymatic that means put together polymers without the building blocks of life without the tools of life without enzymes through hydration and dehydration cycle so building this chamber at UC Santa Cruz we have those these 24 vials that move around between a hydration station and a dehydration station and if we put in solutions we put in say a slightly acidic mixture ph3 with the presence of amp and ump which are two of the building blocks of RNA they stack together with introduced lipid various lipid and lipid is what you are made of is what your cell walls are made of lipid is the organizing principle of life itself so if lipid is present in these pools from meteoritic infall it's going to form membranes when the pools dry down they're going to squeeze together all the monomers all the building blocks and you're going to get what are called in this case diester bond formation because it turns out that the the nucleic acids and the amino acids that make the polymers of your body need to dry down in order to form those polymers now life does this with ATP that kicks the water out but these are called condensation reactions you have to get rid of water in order to form these polymers the only way nature has to do that is to dehydrate so there's no way to do it in in a deep ocean vent environment like you'd find maybe anything in cell it is it's a conundrum so here's our our product that was formed here's our gels that form we're forming up to 150 base unit long RNA like polymers in just a few hours it's an amazing discovery so those are our gels in our nanopore sequencing device which we invented years ago actually pulls these RNAs through and counts the basis so this is actually RNA we're now self-assembling DNA this way amazing so we don't have to necessarily have an RNA world first so hydration dehydration cycling or wet dry cycling can also be used to make peptides several groups have done this so here I am at Bumpus hell in placing into a femoral vent a slide tray with a little bit of solution of this lipid and amp and UMP and letting then gases along just hydration and dehydration through moist gases go across the sample and we make a little bit of RNA in just this environment in here in Blassen National Park so it worked there there we went out to Yellowstone last June and here you have this pattern that you see here's a salacious hot spring this dome that it's on was made by the fluids because the fluids have a lot of devolved dissolved silica which comes out of solution into these gel like you know boundaries which then harden into you know boundaries which then harden into center and then the the waters are flowing down and they go from chemical eaters to sun eaters photosynthetic from chemo chemotrophs to photo autotrophs there's the pattern right there and in the center all around our green basically cyanobacteria everywhere and this could have been the force that oxygenated the atmosphere these protected from UV photo autotrophs what I did was put these solutions into our vials and shook them up and by golly we produced vesicles so we had lipid introduced into hot spring waters and we were able to to produce vesicles in various pHs in Yellowstone 3.3 to 8 so what happens when you do wet dry cycling is when you have the dry layer at the bottom of your dash and you rehydrate your dish or your pool the dried layers butt off trillions of these vesicles and they contain random polymers that were synthesized between the layers so you have a combinatorial engine that can create what we call proto cells and every cycle you do you get more of them because you're producing more polymers and more proto cells can't do this in any other environment than a wet drying pool so how does this lead to life well let's take a metaphor from computer science you're all nerds right you know 40 years ago I was the weird computer guy you know now we're all weird computer people well the metaphor from computer science is how could you write programs from scratch without a program well you'd start with a random paper tape puncher and a big feed of paper tapes and these are the original medium for programming micro computers and there's a tape reader that takes these random tapes into a primitive computer this is an Altair 8800 from my computer collection and this computer has an energy source that's all important and it what it does is it takes these paper tapes and it can run them in a cycle and the cycle is done through a thing called a microprocessor which runs these random instructions and these are programs and some most of the programs crash and they're selected out into the crash trash but one program works it's called program a and it works it lights up some lights on the front of the computer and so we decide the system decides rather to take program a and punch another program bc and d and attach it to a and then run it again and by golly one of them maybe ac generates a computer that has a little bit more to it maybe it has a screen and a keyboard punch more of those ac and f may generate a laptop ac f and i may generate a smartphone and this is the evolution of software and hardware together and this is inefficient but would work it's arguably that this would generate programs that work as long as you're in a cycling system that's fed by energy and new building blocks pretty pretty common sensical huh it's very inefficient so we pay slightly more efficient things called engineers to do it for us so where do we find this in nature we find this here the organics coming in from the solar system the polymerizer is our little layers of lipid with our monomers that are stacking together and making our polymers are our programs the computer that's running the program is our warm little cycling pool here's our charlie darwin it's his computer and it's driven by an energy system several energy systems the programs are protocells which we just showed you how we make and here's charlie darwin he's our our program tester and and his he decides whether or not they the protocells pop or they do not if they pop they lose their contents if they don't they survive and they go through another cycle because they go back down to the bottom of the dish refuse with the membranes that are there and repolymerance this is the evolution of software and hardware together in a chemical boot up so here's our full cycle mechanism for an origin of life in a cycling hot spring pool and this has all been demonstrated in the laboratory so here's our dry phase there's a freeze fracture of our lipid lamellae here's what happens after we add the water back in and we get all these butted off protocells with random polymers there's our testing of the protocells for stability the stable ones you can see the one with the purple polymer in it is delivered back down into the sludge at the bottom of the pool which we used to just think was a collecting sludge and now we think it's actually the common ancestor of all life we call this a gel phase carl woes called an approach and you can see a little bit of a micrograph there of stacked together protocells that are fusing back into the layers so what this is what chemists call this is a a kinetic trap where the rate of polymer synthesis exceeds the rate of hydrolysis so you continually get re synthesis this is charles darwin a protein compound shall be formed that becomes increasingly complex this is it right here so we believe this is the engine that can generate the living world so let's put it all together so here's our wonderful graphic which we took two years to put together with all of our colleagues around the world hot spring origin of life so synthesis of the building blocks and space and some of them coming from the hydrothermal system itself as well from below accumulation on land can do that in the ocean see it raining down this stuff still accumulates in your gutters you know you know these micrometeorites concentration in a series of pools of different ph's chemistry so produces organics you see the organics self-assembled membranous structures these organics if they find the way into a cycling pool or cycle are subject to this combinatorial selection process which generates these masses these uh sludges which can flow downstream you'll notice in item number five we flowed out of our cycling pool and which where we were feeding from chemicals now we're in a dilute environment of the lake we must feed from the sun which means we must develop some kind of a pigment energy capture system assist the protosellular mass would have just died off or stopped working and this is where we think that cell division had to come in somewhere along here as you exit the chemical feeding zone you have to have learned the trick of cell division so the progenote becomes the living cell mass or the ancestral microbial mat so adaptation to not only lakeshores but the saline estuary which means you have to have active pores to get the salt out because the cytosol matches a hot spring fluid fresh water much more it's it's much more than a seawater cells do not have a seawater composition so after all that you have robust microbial communities able to build the marine stromatolites that we see at shark bay so we have global distribution but this is a downhill gradient but an uphill uh adaptational uh path for making more and more robust life and this form of life dominates the earth for 90 percent of its history so the rock record supports it there's our hot spring stromatolite lake shore and marine so this has now been in publication in our field for about three four years but Scientific American picked it up on the august 2017 cover uh we bumped the eclipse off the cover I noticed a picture of Dave Brian there is at the Oregon eclipse clearly uh and we bumped it off the cover because the editors of microbiologists that you felt this was a the most important story they might publish in that decade which isn't felt nice to us but they took our our graphic this is my artwork and they did this wonderful treatment with this spiraling wet dry moist wet dry moist cycle so this is going to be republished I think in a month in a special issue on science for the 21st century so let's take a slight pause here and let's ask ourselves for the the true geeks the combinatorial physics geeks among us we might ask the question at this point what are the abstract properties of the system that can take inanimate matter and take it toward animate matter you know in a sense the sort of the god particle the god property you might call it uh what is the process now we've seen the physical process within geology and within chemistry so that we believe can do this and that is working experimentally in the lab and in the field up to a certain point uh we haven't seen the emergence of a genetic function or complex things like pores but it's it's it's a predictive system we believe that cycle long enough uh chemists will actually see the evolution of these polymers but let's ask the question what is the actual abstract parts of the process so I did a thought experiment another one one night where I visualized the plane of physics the undulating plane of physics you push down on one place and it predictably moves in another maybe a sort of classical thing and then within that plane I placed a a protocell I said what are the properties of this protocell oh they crowd things together to make them more likely they're a a probability shaping system but if you have two protocells next to each other they the membranes sort of butt up against each other and there's a transmission of smaller molecules this is message passing message passing isn't really done in physics but it's done in this system so things can transmit and affect other systems which then can act back if you get a lot of these these protocells together you get a combinatorial system that does shapes probability and has more message passing it's not a living system yet but if you look at the three plots that this would produce abstractly this increases the probability of chemical reactions it increases a network effect and it generates something quite magical this is the substrate on which you can generate informational polymers like we're doing now with a self assembly of RNA and DNA so once you get an informational polymer you have a three-phase engine that can bootstrap reality beyond physics and it looks like this a probability shaping engine creates an interconnection network which grows and from which emerges a memory system which of course when you have a memory system you get more probabilistic things happening more likely and more interconnected etc it goes and goes and goes so I sort of thought to myself and this is a comment at a conference that perhaps this is kind of somebody said well what you're doing is you're kind of creating a second Copernican revolution of course you guys are astronomers it's like well what does this have to do with the heliocentric universe there's Copernicus centering the planets orbits around the sun and publishing it after his death so he didn't lose his head or his funding you know well I said what does this have to do with it this this particular questioner said because it centers everything you're coming up the mechanism between physics and biology but it also generates all of the living world doesn't it I thought well maybe it does so maybe this thing we call it the progenote this is three-way cycling thing generates all this and it's potentially an engine of creation and one could argue that yes it affects chemistry it's growing polymers and in a way from equilibrium system it's going to teach us how to look for life in the universe it teaches us to where life could start on a land mass and that it might even show us that evolutionary biology could be rethought because the origin the common ancestor was not an individual it was a network community of simpler elements and this goes back to my original vision when I was 14 and the question was like how can a complex machine emerge well it emerges through a network effect of simpler machines and we may have found an empirical system that can do that it even affects metaphysics or spiritual inquiry because you think it wasn't really survival of the fittest at all it was it was a network collaborative thing that lifted the living world and probably still is the fundamental driver and unit of selection is the network effect of sharing stuff this may allow us to actually build true ai's instead of these things that fall over because you could build true learning systems based on these three principles and it's actually how our economy and politics work despite those who want to divide us and and separate us from each other so it's maybe an engine of creation so coming up to the end of the life section my own example of relentless conscious attention on this problem may be shaped the probability field that life is to bring an improbable outcome into reality so here's the vision of albert einstein thought experiment that resulted in this whole massive hypothesis and that is now rolling through science this is a very improbable event that took 40 years but it's through the power of thought experiments and of course following up so everyone okay with all that so far is it make logical sense i know no one's gonna answer but maybe you're all nodding out there and so i'll carry on to the part that the astronomy geeks like the search for life in the universe bruce i'll just do a quick time check here i think we've we want to have some time for questions and so maybe five or six minutes something like that okay all right so we're going to zip through this section this is finding stromatolites in western australia this is how we do it this is what we're going to try to do with mars 2020 looking potentially and we probably don't have the right instruments to find stromatolites like we're seeing here but here we are at the uh this is i was took this picture at the mur landing site selection meeting in january 20 2003 here's our last meeting in february and our final one for mars 2020's landing site uh is in october of this year we're down to three landing sites we're arguing our team is arguing that we have to go back to columbia hills because in columbia hills we found this home plate a spirit found evidence of a hot spring by dragging its bum rear wheel through soils we turned up opaline silica which is the stuff that you saw in yellowstone so we're actually at a hot spring on mars right now uh driving over some rocks and scuffing them they noticed that this matched the silt nodule silica textures you see in breccia from el tatio hot springs in chili so we need to break rocks on mars so mars given that it had a hot spring we have a plausible chemical model for the origin of life uh on an on a terrestrial world but it suggests that if life was starting on mars it was a race against time because mars was actively dying it was losing its atmospheres its oceans etc so if my mars had a an origin of life at a hot spring it could have escaped down through the piping into become deep helophilic extremophiles and then occasionally that would come up to the surface so we call this the first and last outpost approach to the search for life on mars so it's presented at these landing site meetings so here's mars 2020 and here's myrrh if we go back here like a geologist would do we can search for this evidence and collect some samples for a return and celadus so here we come to life in the in the icy world the water worlds where we think that these plumes coming off the south pole are driven by hydrothermal vent systems there's your two types of vent systems on the earth and you've got more acidic black smokers and alkan vents and here's our hydrothermal fields on the earth you know they were making the case that life started there so how can life start at a hydrothermal vent well we don't think it can because you need extremophile organisms well adapted to these environments that are chemical feeders you can't get the chemistry going so you have salty water you have dilute conditions so you can't form your polymers you can't form membranous vesicles because of the salt either so you can't do the selection process whereas you can do all that at hydrothermal fields and there are limitations with fields as well but we're arguing that life really potentially can't start on a a nice covered ocean world in those conditions it may be inoculated later by a big impact delivering biota that were adapted so we're predicting that potentially if you need hydrothermal fields your and celadus and Europa may be habitable but lifeless but life may it may have emerged on Mars and Dave has designed a silicon nanopore to fly through the plume to look for evidence of fragments of polymers but we we're the null hypothesis we don't think you'll find it so here's the last little question how does this help us understand life beyond our solar system and exoplanets so here's Kepler 186f you know earth-like here's something that would be hot and close you're not going to get chemistry working there you need an aqueous environment at the surface here's the trapeze seven system and it's a tiny solar system that fits in well inside the orbit of mercury around a red dwarf so you know you could potentially see a life on a moon of a gas giant but what about a red dwarf what about an aqueous environment a very very low energy flux environment let's say around a trampost well we we come back to our original box our original requirement that to start life you require polymers with encapsulation and combinatorial selections no other way to boot up a program like this and we suggest that aqueous carbon chemistry is the only thing that can do this not an exotic chemistry not hard crystals nothing that's cryogenic unless you can propose a chemistry that can do this these two things you can't go to life so with that i'm going to wrap it up and thank night sky network and everyone here for hosting this talk great thank you very much bruce this is uh this is really very interesting the process that you all went through and the experimentation and it's really really fascinating and very thought provoking as as well we have a few questions that have popped up and so from linda we have is there any evidence of new original life not life that has evolved from previous life forms being generated at any time since 3.5 billion years ago if we still have goldilocks conditions on earth wouldn't life continue to generate independently that that is a superb question and in fact in that same letter to jd hooker uh darwin writes that life he actually answers this that basically life can't start again because the of existing life just eat it it just gets eaten up and and metabolized and uh also oxygen free oxygen in the environment actually is an inhibitor to a lot of our prebiotic chemistry so in a way life is present preventing a second genesis so it's you know life is voracious it's going to consume even the simple protocells not going to survive in the onslaught okay thank you lori asks is there a relationship between the laws of physics and the laws of nature or do they work against one another pregnancy for example and we may need to ask her for some clarification on on that well you know the big one is the second law of thermodynamics you know the third thermodynamics where things are just breaking down all the time and so in some sense the the laws of the boot up uh the the process of the boot up of life is dependent on being able to surf this chaotic free energy to build stuff against the degrading forces of the second law so that's where the boundary is and we are continuously cycled by energy so for example if earth was kicked out of solar orbit the entire micro complex life world would crash almost instantaneously we're totally dependent on that sun rising every morning okay um and i just want to also mention that uh if you have any questions to please put them in the q and a box rather than the chat window that way we can find them easier um jeffrey asks how does earth's oxygen atmosphere affect field testing of hot springs hypothesis if the tests conducted in anaerobic atmosphere like early earth do you see the different results that's also a very good question yes we do have an impact luckily at bumpers hell we're using the femoral fence we're getting the temperatures we need for the polymerization but we're also getting low oxygen environments there too i'm headed to new zealand uh next in june to work in rhodo roa hot springs and i'm not going to have an anoxic chamber so i'm hoping that we do get some polymerization uh when i have little slabs of mineral sitting by the pool side trying down um yeah it is a problem it's an issue so we probably get we're going to get less product okay christine asks um could you please elaborate on the mechanism of information exchange in regards to the ability of life to reproduce itself this is a extremely good question because what we are proposing is a system that doesn't need replication in the beginning this is the conundrum that's always faced sort of irreducible complexity arguments like well if you don't have an information system in a complicated way of replication you can't get life well you can get a kind of reproduction through this cycling pool because you're building protocells and trying them out for free the cycle makes them and eventually you get an informational function coupled in to the resynthesis of polymers and this is the great uh next experimental frontier in this work the team that actually can show the first short little informational polymer that can get unwound by a hot water event natural pcr template and replicate itself or partially unwind and make a product will be a team that's sort of going to be in line for a Nobel Prize I think because that'll be the spontaneous emergence of a genetic function within the cycling system de novo from scratch okay Elizabeth asks is it possible to rebuild an atmosphere gosh you know our atmosphere was certainly transformed by life uh I think Mars I I think it's implausible I think this is why Mars is a terrible place to to look at building cities and it's just a nonsense idea right that uh Mars is a mostly a hard vacuum it's got perchlorates in the soil and to actually the process of putting an atmosphere back into a planet is well beyond our capacity my other work we we focus on the capture capture of asteroids and balloon structures where we introduce atmosphere or extract volatiles from them that's the shepherd project and I can do a second talk on that here in the network at some point where we're introducing atmosphere drawn off from volatiles from planetesimals and we can create small worlds and do extraction and even mineral extraction that's a that's a design for NASA for opening the solar system uh you can see that in my TEDx talk at damer.com so you can do an atmosphere that way perhaps so terraforming no we won't be terraforming anything anytime soon I suppose so it's it's not a very good investment strategy when you can put a balloon around a an icy object and create an entire world out of it it's a lot lower cost okay Gordon asks uh what keeps protocells from replicating in a way that destroys them now that's a good question it's good old natural selection so if they replicate in a way that uh is is bad for the uh the general the group of protocells so these things are being done in a group matrix uh then that that group just gets selected out that that process doesn't get pushed forward okay well that looks like we've come to the end of the questions and so I want to thank you again Bruce for um you know getting up very early and and I think that uh you know I think we met noted earlier that Bruce is actually in Pakistan um working on some things and I find it really interesting that you're involved with doing this but you're also very involved with computers and it seems like the whole idea of information systems is a common thread between the two and so I never really thought about how they compliment each other quite that well it's it's amazing uh because in Brian in 2009 when Dave and I met here you had one of the great membrane biophysicists in the world uh meeting this the geeky guy that I always think in terms of systems and boot ups and whatnot and it turns out you needed that kind of computer science approach to tackle the original life problem and Dave and I as a partnership we've been able to do that and it's very much like uh it was that that came into geology and was an astrophysicist and just proposed that the asteroid impacts were the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs and and and so it takes takes a person from outside coming into a field often to solve major conundrums and questions I think it's a fascinating astrobiology by its very nature is interdisciplinary and and this is certainly reaching out to even beyond the the disciplines that we would you know think more likely so um a great collaboration thank you so much this is uh very very fascinating and that's also welcome thank you and that's all for tonight everyone you