Cosmic Connection (7 page)

Oxygen chauvinism is common. If a planet has no oxygen, it is alleged to be uninhabitable. This view ignores the fact that life arose on Earth in the absence of oxygen. In fact, oxygen chauvinism, if accepted, logically demonstrates that life anywhere is impossible. Fundamentally, oxygen is a poisonous gas. It chemically combines with and destroys the organic molecules of which terrestrial life is composed. There are many organisms on Earth that do without oxygen and many organisms that are poisoned by it.

All of the earliest organisms on Earth did not use molecular oxygen, O
₂
. In a brilliant set of evolutionary adaptations, organisms like insects and frogs and fish and people learned not only to survive in the presence of this poisonous gas but actually to use it to increase the efficiency with which we metabolize foodstuffs. But that should not blind us to the fundamentally poisonous character of this gas. The absence of oxygen on a place such as Jupiter is, therefore, hardly an argument against life on such planets.

There are ultraviolet light chauvinists. Because of the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere, a variety of oxygen molecule called ozone (O
₃
) is produced high in the atmosphere, about twenty-five miles above the surface. This ozone layer absorbs the middle-wavelength ultraviolet rays from the Sun, preventing them from reaching the surface of our planet. These rays are germicidal. They are emitted by ultraviolet lamps commonly used to sterilize surgical instruments. Strong ultraviolet rays from the Sun are an extremely serious hazard to most forms of life on Earth. But this is because most forms of life on Earth evolved in the absence of a high ultraviolet flux.

It is easy to imagine adaptations to protect organisms against ultraviolet light. In fact, sunburn and high melanin pigmentation in the skin are adaptations in this direction. They have not been carried very far in most terrestrial organisms because the present ultraviolet flux is not very high. In a place like Mars, where there is little ozone, the ultraviolet light at the surface is extremely intense. But the Martian surface material is a strong absorber of ultraviolet light–as most soil and rocks are–and we can easily imagine organisms walking around with small ultraviolet-opaque shields on their backs: Martian turtles. Or perhaps Martian organisms carry about ultraviolet parasols. Many organic molecules also could be used in the exterior layers of extraterrestrial organisms to protect them against ultraviolet light.

There are temperature chauvinists. It is said that the freezing temperatures on planets like Jupiter or Saturn, in the outer Solar System, make all life there impossible. But these low temperatures do not apply to all portions of the planet. They refer only to the outermost cloud layers–the layers that are accessible to infrared telescopes that can measure temperatures. Indeed, if we had such a telescope in the vicinity of Jupiter and pointed it at Earth, we would deduce very low temperatures on Earth: We would be measuring the temperatures in the upper clouds and not on the much warmer surface of Earth.

It is now quite firmly established, both from theory and from radio observations of these planets, that as we penetrate below the visible clouds, the temperatures increase. There is always a region in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune that is at quite comfortable temperatures by terrestrial standards.

But why is it necessary to have temperatures like those on Earth in order for life to proliferate? A human being is seriously inconvenienced if his body temperature is raised or lowered by a mere 20 degrees. Is this because we happen to live by accident on the one planet in the Solar System that has a surface at the right temperature for biology? Or is it that our chemistry is delicately attuned to the temperature of the planet on which we have evolved? The latter is almost surely the case. Other temperatures, other biochemistries.

Our biological molecules are put together in complex three-dimensional arrangements. The functioning of these molecules, particularly the enzymes, are turned on and off by altering these three-dimensional arrangements. The chemical bonds that do these rearrangements must be weak enough to be broken conveniently at terrestrial temperatures, and at the same time strong enough not to fall to pieces if left alone for short periods of time. A chemical bond known as the hydrogen bond has an energy appropriately intermediate between these unreactive and unstable alternatives. The hydrogen bond is intimately connected with the three-dimensional biochemistry of terrestrial organisms.

On a much hotter planet like Venus, our biological molecules would fall to pieces. On a much colder planet in the outer Solar System, our biological molecules would be rigid, and our chemical reactions would not proceed at any useful rate. However, it is conceivable that much stronger bonds on Venus and much weaker bonds in the outer Solar System play the same role that hydrogen bonds play on Earth. We may have been much too quick to reject life at temperatures very different from those on our planet. There are not many chemical reactions known that can proceed at useful rates at some very low temperature such as might exist on Pluto, 30 or 40 degrees above absolute zero. But there are also very few chemical laboratories on Earth where experiments are performed at 30 or 40 degrees above absolute zero. With a few exceptions, such experiments have not been performed at all.

We are thus at the mercy of observational selection. We examine only a small fraction of the possible range of cases because of some unconscious bias, or the fact that scientists wish to work in their shirtsleeves. We then conclude that all conceivable cases must conform to what our preconceptions have forced upon us.

Another common chauvinism–one which, try as I might, I find I share–is carbon chauvinism. A carbon chauvinist holds that biological systems elsewhere in the universe will be constructed out of carbon compounds, as is life on this planet. There are conceivable alternatives: Atoms like silicon or germanium can enter into some of the same kinds of chemical reactions as carbon does. It is also true that much more attention has been paid to carbon organic chemistry than to silicon or germanium organic chemistry, largely because most biochemists we know are of the carbon, rather than the silicon or germanium, variety. Nevertheless, from what we know of the alternative chemistries, it appears clear that–except in very lowtemperature environments–there is a much wider variety of complex compounds that can be built from carbon than from the alternatives.

In addition, the cosmic abundance of carbon exceeds that of silicon, germanium, or other alternatives. Everywhere in the universe, and particularly in primitive planetary environments in which the origin of life occurs, there is simply more carbon than alternative atoms available to make complex molecules. We see from laboratory experiments simulating the primitive atmosphere of the Earth or the present environment of Jupiter, as well as in radioastronomical studies of the interstellar medium, a profusion of simple and complex organic molecules readily produced by a wide variety of energy sources. For example, in one of our experiments, the passage of a single high-pressure shock wave through a mixture of methane (CH
₄
), ethane (C
₂
H
₆
), ammonia (NH
₃
), and water (H
₂
O) converted 38 percent of the ammonia into amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. There were not enormous quantities of other sorts of organic molecules.

Thus, both the atoms and the simple molecules of which we are made are probably common to organisms elsewhere in the universe. But the specific way in which these molecules are put together and the specific forms and physiologies of the extraterrestrial organisms may be, because of their different evolutionary histories, extremely different from what is common on our planet.

In considering which stars to examine for possible radio signals directed at us, much attention is usually given to stars like our Sun. It has been reasonably argued that searches should begin with the one type of star we know has life on at least one of its planets, namely stars like our own Sun. In Project Ozma, the first attempt to search for such radio signals, the two stars examined, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, were both stars with mass, radius, age, and composition very similar to our Sun, which astronomers call a G-0 dwarf. They were, in fact, the nearest two Sun-like stars.

But should we restrict our attention to stars like the Sun? I think not. Stars of slightly smaller mass and of slightly lower luminosity than our Sun are longer lived. These stars, called K and M dwarfs, can be many billions of years older than the Sun. If we imagine that the longer the lifetime of a planet, the more likely it is that intelligent organisms have evolved on it, we should then bias our searches toward K and M stars and avoid G-star chauvinism. It may be objected that planets of K and M stars are much colder than Earth, and that life on them may be less likely. The premise of this objection does not appear to be true; such planets seem to be closer to their stars than the corresponding planets in our Solar System; and we have already discussed the fallacies of temperature chauvinism. Too, there are many more K and M stars than G stars.

Is there planetary chauvinism? Must life arise and reside on planets, or might there be organisms that inhabit the depths of interstellar space, the surfaces or interiors of stars, or other even more exotic cosmic objects?

In our present state of ignorance, these are very difficult questions to answer. The density of matter in interstellar space is so low that an organism there simply cannot acquire enough material to make a copy of itself in any reasonable period of time. This is not true in dense interstellar clouds, but such clouds live for very short periods of time, condensing to form stars and planets. In the process, they become so hot that any organic compounds contained within them are probably destroyed.

We might imagine organisms evolving on planets with atmospheres slowly leaking away to space, permitting the organisms gradually to adapt to the increasingly severe conditions, and finally acclimatizing to what in effect is an interstellar environment. Organisms leaving such planets–perhaps by electromagnetic radiation pressure, or by solar wind from the local sun–might populate interstellar space, but they would still be faced with insurmountable problems of malnutrition.

A quite different sort of interstellar organism may be much more likely: Intelligent beings who arise on planets as we have, but who have moved their arena of activities to the much vaster volume of interstellar space. Beings in our far technological future should have capabilities at which we cannot today even dimly guess. It is not out of the question that such societies could tap the matter and energy of stars and galaxies for their own uses. Just as we are organisms completely at home only on the land, although we evolved from the sea, the universe may be populated with societies that arose on planets but that are comfortable only in the depths of interstellar space.

T
here is a place with four suns in the sky–red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons.

I know of a sun the size of the Earth–and made of diamond.

There are atomic nuclei a mile across that rotate thirty times a second.

There are tiny grains between the stars, with the size and atomic composition of bacteria.

There are stars leaving the Milky Way. There are immense gas clouds falling into the Milky Way.

There are turbulent plasmas writhing with X- and gamma-rays and mighty stellar explosions.

There are, perhaps, places outside our universe.

The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming a part of it.

The planets are no longer wandering lights in the evening sky. For centuries, Man lived in a universe that seemed safe and cozy–even tidy. Earth was the cynosure of creation and Man the pinnacle of mortal life. But these quaint and comforting notions have not stood the test of time. We now know that we live on a tiny clod of rock and metal, a planet smaller than some relatively minor features in the clouds of Jupiter and inconsiderable when compared with a modest sunspot.

Our star, the Sun, is small and cool and unprepossessing, one of some two hundred billion suns that make up the Milky Way Galaxy. We are located so far from the center of the Milky Way that it takes light, traveling at 186,000 miles a second, some 30,000 years to reach us from there. We are in the galactic boondocks, where the action isn’t. The Milky Way Galaxy is entirely unremarkable, one of billions of other galaxies strewn through the vastness of space.

No longer does “the world” mean “the universe.” We live on one world among an immensity of others.

Charles Darwin’s insights into natural selection have shown that there are no evolutionary pathways leading unerringly from simple forms to Man; rather, evolution proceeds by fits and starts, and most life forms lead to evolutionary dead-ends. We are the products of a long series of biological accidents. In the cosmic perspective there is no reason to think that we are the first or the last or the best.