Mono Lake and the shadow biosphere
January 29th, 2010 by Bartshé, Education Director
Could these Wilson's Phalaropes be a few feet from a shadow biosphere?
Last week the Royal Society in London hosted a discussion meeting about the detection of extra-terrestrial life and the consequences for science and society. During the symposium/discussion Dr. Paul Davies (University of Arizona) presented a webcast lecture The eerie silence: are we alone in the universe? In this webcast he discussed the progress of SETI and the continuing, albeit thus far, quiet search for intelligent life beyond earth. But what of any life, or a different origin of life in our solar system, or even on earth?
Dr. Davies suggested perhaps life originated more than once on earth. Is it possible that life originated multiple times on earth, a kind of multiple-genesis existing in a shadow biosphere? Might one of these life forms be a microbial extremophile wallowing in Mono Lake mud? It’s all fun and fascinating science and some of the latest astrobiology science-in-action.
If you want to dig a little deeper you might take a look at the work of Dr. Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and a research scientist with USGS and Harvard University. Dr. Wolfe-Simon’s work at Mono Lake has focused on an arsenic-metabolizing microbe, and the possibility that it may be a distinct form of life on earth, separate from all other life, existing within a shadow biosphere.
There’s a fascinating article in Astrobiology Magazine by Henry Bortman about Dr. Wolfe-Simon’s work. You can check that out here.
December 2nd, 2010 at 8:33 am
[...] though the findings were also discussed earlier this year by astrobiologist Paul Davies at the Royal Society meeting on extraterrestrial [...]