Life and ET Sample Collection

I finally watched Life, the 2017 movie about an international team of astronauts who collect and study a Martian life-form. It’s an intense movie. I’m glad I did not watch in the movie theater but from the comfort of my own couch on a much smaller computer screen. Thank you, local library, for getting the DVD, thus enabling me to watch the movie (and many others) for free. (Image below from Wikipedia.)

Life takes place aboard an international space station. At the beginning of the movie the team receives an incoming unmanned spacecraft that has collected specimens that may indicate the first extra-terrestrial (ET) life-form outside of planet Earth. The station houses a lab with a myriad of safety protocols, which proceed to fail one after another as the malevolent life-form that eventually grows to have an Alien-like visage turns out to be highly intelligent, strong and dangerous. Why are all these alien life-forms malevolent? Well, if they weren’t there might not be much of a movie.

Having recently attended the ISSOL meeting, I’ve been thinking about the next steps in the search for the origins of life. While many scientists are making inroads into elucidating the mechanistic aspects of the origin of life here on Earth, others have been looking outside our planet. These include space agencies with large, albeit limited, budgets trying to maximize what they can learn from a mission to Mars or Enceladus. There’s only so much on-board analytical instrumentation you can pack on an unmanned mission. Thus, not surprisingly, there have been a number of proposals for sample collection and return.

The journal Astrobiology recently had a special issue on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. It came to prominence in 2005 when the Cassini spacecraft discovered geyser plumes including water vapor and other molecules shooting out near its south pole. More recent evidence suggests a significant subsurface ocean below the ice that could harbor life. Sample collection would be much easier because there’s no need to try and land a spacecraft or rover. A flyby through the plume would be sufficient. What might be an indicator for an onboard instrument that a sample might contain signs of life? Steve Benner has an interesting article in the issue that focuses on looking for polyelectrolytes, reminiscent of DNA – but not identical. He argues quite convincingly that the polyelectrolyte backbone is crucial for Darwinian evolution of genetic material. On the other hand, he also argues that homochirality and C_2n biosignatures are not as crucial.

I don’t know how the funding process works for a sample collection and return mission to be approved. But if the public has anything to say about it after watching Life, I think they would insist on the most stringent protocols to protect us from the malevolent ETs out there. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of fictional narrative in influencing how we think about certain scenarios regardless of the statistical possibilities or impossibilities. In any case, the scientists aboard the station in Life, before the mayhem starts, do discuss how important studying alien life could be in thinking about life origins. Interestingly, the way they reanimate the alien supercell “fossil” is by retuning its environment to match Earth’s early Proterozoic era in terms of the mixtures of gases and the liquid environment.

Overall, the movie is just okay. I’m still waiting for Alien Covenant to show up at the local library. The reviews and ratings weren’t sufficient for me to plunk down money to see it in the movie theater. I predict a closely related storyline.