Atlantis Dispatch 010 - path two

in which ATLANTIS contemplates tempests…

Act 1, Scene 1 - Tempest. Engraving by Benjamin Smith, based on a 1797 painting by George Romney.

October 4th, 2021

…begin transmission…

One way of thinking about life is to think about how it could have emerged anywhere in the universe. We don’t know, specifically, how life originated on Earth (or if it originated here at all). Nor do we know whether or how it has emerged, or could emerge, anywhere else in the universe. When biologists work on the problem of life’s origins, therefore, they are compelled to come up with theoretical frameworks for thinking about these questions. They also try to look for the strongest signals that life leaves in its wake. 

            This year, SFI’s Chris Kempes and Simon Levin, along with a team that includes NASA’s Heather Graham, developed a new ecological biosignature for identifying life not just in Earth’s oceans, but in radically different extraterrestrial environments. The basic idea of the team’s work is that the science of life can be observed in the chemical patterns of a living environment. They focus, in particular, on the science of stoichiometry, which, as Graham explained in a recent appearance on the Alien Crash Site podcast, allows us to observe “the relative abundances of all of the elements” in some entity or environment. In other words, stoichiometry allows us to observe elemental ratios. 

            For the researchers of the new study, the stoichiometry of an environment can be a kind of biosignature. If an environment shows certain kinds of consistent ratios in its chemistry it suggests that the environment contains biological phenomena. So, if we sail out to an ocean world on another planet and take water samples, and if substances in those samples show distinct ratios that scale with the size of specific particles therein, we are likely observing a living ecosystem. 

            With this new possibility in hand, Atlantis traveled way out to space, out to Uranus’s moons, and wondered what we might find on Ariel, Miranda, or Caliban’s frozen rocky surfaces. How might the irregular and eccentric satellite, Prospero, have reorganized the elemental sets on his moon? What magical ratios will reveal themselves around Uranus? 

We haven’t seen anything yet, but now we know that as soon as life shows up, anywhere in the universe, it reorganizes the chemistry that surrounds it. Living entities are not simply independent beings that stand distinct from their environment; rather, they reorganize their environments into systems that support their particular form of life. And in this way, the very environments in which life appears take on and express the signs of life, itself.

Now, when we turn back down to Earth, and contemplate the ways that life organizes its chemistry here, we see that there is a particularly dominant organism making the stoichiometric patterns. When humans are in the picture, life starts to look like it doesn’t exactly organize itself to stay alive. And yet these theoretical original ecosystems on other planets (which may, eventually, not be so theoretical) remind us that the key to keeping a life system alive seems to be to organize chemistry in just the right way. Can we do this better? To do so would be a brave thing for a new world. 

We love Prospero’s magic illusion of course, but we very much hope that we might get better at applying his scientific-political wisdom, too. When Prospero was in exile, he took the time to learn some political science, and he reorganized Italy so it would advance Shakespearean heroes rather than Machiavellian princes. So, what about us? Well, for now, Atlantis remains in orbit, brewing up the ways in which we can reorganize the human political world so that humans can re-orient life’s chemistry in a great global symbiosis. 

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