Ologies with Alie Ward - Smologies #14: ALIENS with Kevin Peter Hand

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

A Smologies kid-friendly version of… ALIENS! EXTRATERRESTRIALS! MARTIANS! The phenomenal Dr. Kevin Peter Hand of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory dishes on the oceans of distant moons, methane rivers, ice crusts, the James Webb Space Telescope findings, what might be out there, aliens, what elements a planet needs to sustain life, and how finding extraterrestrial microbes would change the way we see life on this here tiny blue dot in space. More kid-safe Smologies episodes at alieward.com/smologiesDr. Kevin Peter Hand's book: Alien Oceans: the Search for Life in the Depths of SpaceDr. Kevin Peter Hand on Twitter @alienoceans and Instagram @kevin_peter_handDonations went to Traveling Telescope & Vermont's Manchester Rescue SquadFull-length version available at alieward.com/ologies/astrobiologyBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter or InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter or InstagramSound editing by  Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions & Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisOlogies theme song by Nick ThorburnSmologies theme song by Harold MalcolmWebsite design by Kelly R. Dwyer  

Smologites. Here you are. This is a short classroom-friendly version of a classic oligies episode. It's perfect for a quick listen or one where there are potentially Smologites present. What a week for this. In case you missed it, NASA just released images from the James Webb Space Telescope. This is the largest optical telescope in space. It launched in late 2021 and it cruised into its orbit about a million miles away in January. We saw the first images come out this week, July 2022, and it was a big deal, a bigger deal than any of our brains can comprehend because it produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the universe ever to date. And NASA says thousands of galaxies, including

the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared, have appeared in Webb's view for the first time. And this slice of the vast universe is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length by someone on the ground. It is a tiny slice, and in that tiny slice there are thousands of little dots in the photo. Each one a galaxy, and in each galaxy potentially hundreds of billions, maybe trillions of stars. There is a lot out there and how exciting to be on Earth as it's discovered. So enjoy this Smologites episode about what might be out there. Oh hey, it's that guy in your video editing class who choose so much gum you're actually worried about him. Halliward, back with another episode of Allergies.

So this episode, I'm just, I'm going to say this up top, just get out of the way. It's out of this world. Okay, I said it, it's out of this world. Okay, astrobiology, let's get to it. Once called exobiology, but let's consult the Greek, shall we? So astro comes from the word for star and biology has its roots in the verb to live. So what is out there living on those ding-dang stars? What's on the planets? That's the big question. Is anything alive out there? What are the odds? Is it big? Is it small? Is it cooler than us? So to get some answers, we'll consult a professional. So over the course of 11 months and 27 gentle, desperate emails from me. Thisologist kindly obliged and the resulting interview

is I was literally about to say stellar. I'm not going to, I swear that was an accident, but it was a stellar interview. He's such a great dude. So he has been a researcher at the SETI Institute, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence that was founded by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. He's a National Geographic Explorer who has trekked the Arctic and down to the depths of the sea. You may have seen him in James Cameron's Aliens of the Deep and is currently the Deputy Chief Scientist for Solar System Exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. And side note, the opinions he expresses therein are his own and not those of JPL or NASA. Because when you're in charge of looking

for space aliens for NASA, you got to toss out some disclaimers. He stopped by last week after work and we settled in for an evening talk about icy moons, tiny extraterrestrials, subsurface oceans, various voyages made by NASA spacecraft and essentially what is lurking in the great darkness of the universe. So make some space in your brain for the brilliant and wonderful astrobiologist Dr. Kevin Peter Hand. Okay, that's what I thought, but just in case it was honed and I've never said it aloud, I thought I'd ask. Now, you are an astrobiologist. Correct. What exactly does it mean? It's a very good question. Many different ways to answer it, but simply put,

astrobiology is the study of the living universe. And yeah, that's it in a nutshell. The study of the living universe. Correct. So this is excluding rocks, air. Well, keep going and we'll come back to some of that. Rocks, air, light, cars, minerals. So what's important about it being the study of the living universe is that oftentimes when people think about astrobiology, they say, okay, this is the search for life beyond earth. And that's correct. That's certainly part of astrobiology. But what's also very central to astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, and future of life on earth. Where did we come from? Where are we going? How did life originate? And so when you think about the living

universe, of course, right now, all we know of is life on earth. We have yet to find even a little spec of life beyond earth. But based on what we know from life on earth, and based on what we know about the other major sciences, physics, chemistry, geology, we can make the prediction that if the conditions are right, life should potentially arise beyond earth. For me, what that means is a focus on worlds in our solar system that could harbor life. Sorry, just a mouth theremin over here. Could help it. I focus most of my time, both from a research standpoint and a mission standpoint, on Jupiter's moon Europa, and to a slightly lesser extent, Saturn's moon Enceladus.

Why are we looking at moons so much rather than the planets? Yeah, so this has been one of the big game changers in astrobiology, what I like to call sort of a new Goldilocks. I think I see where this is going. In the early days of astronomy and planetary science and astrobiology, back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, when planetary scientists, astronomers, exobiologists thought about what it takes for a world to be habitable. That framework was largely based on our earth biases. Wherever we look and find liquid water on earth, we generally find life. Therefore, you need liquid water for life. In order for a planet to harbor liquid water, you've got to have liquid water on the surface in contact with a nice thick atmosphere.

For a planet to be able to sustain those kind of conditions, you have to be at just the right distance from your parent's star so that you're not too hot or not too cold. It was neither too hot nor too cold. It was just right. What we've learned in the past few decades, and this was largely informed by the Voyager spacecraft and then the Galileo spacecraft and then the Cassini spacecraft that went into the outer solar system, is that these moons of the outer solar system are presenting us with a new Goldilocks scenario. It's a Goldilocks scenario where the energy to maintain and sustain liquid water comes not from the energy of your parent's star, but rather from the energy of

tides, the tug-and-pull that these moons experience as they go around their gas giants or their ice giants. The Jovian system, the moons of Jupiter, are a great example of this. There are four large moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Io does not have an ocean. Io doesn't really have any water. Io orbits Jupiter, and Io is tugged to such a great degree that it is the most volcanically active body in our solar system. We're volcanically active than the Earth. The volcanoes are erupting on Io right now. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, it's just a beautiful, beautiful gem of a world. And it really does kind of look like a gemstone when you look at these pictures. It's a lava party happening so far away. It is. It is. Break out the popcorn and just watch. Spring break on Io.

So in this new Goldilocks paradigm, Io is kind of like Venus. It's got too much tidal energy. It's too close. Venus is too close to warm. Io has got too much tidal activity. Let's go to the furthest out of the large moons, Callisto. Now, Callisto, we think, it does have an ocean trapped beneath a very thick ice shell. But Callisto has very little tidal energy dissipation going on in it. So in that scenario, Callisto is kind of like Mars. It's maybe doesn't have quite enough energy to really make it an ocean that we could explore and think could sustain life today. But in the middle, we've got Europa and Ganymede. And Europa in particular, we think occupies this new Goldilocks sweet spot where it's got just the right amount of tidal

energy dissipation. So it's to sustain a global salty liquid water ocean that's 100 kilometers or 60 miles in depth. Oh my God. Yeah, that's the right response. How deep are our oceans? So it's about 10 times as deep as our ocean. Holy smokes, the octopods. They must have. So in the Mariana trench, we're about seven miles deep, 11 kilometers down. Europa's ocean 10 times as deep. So there's plenty of water on Jupiter's moon, Europa, both in ice and in liquid form in his deep. Now, could extraterrestrials be lurking in those deep, dark waters? Europa's small. It's about the size of our moon. Europa's about one seventh of the Earth's gravity. So when you do the math, the pressure within Europa's ocean is comparable to, it's a bit more, but it's comparable to the pressure

found within the deepest trenches of our ocean. And so when we think about, well, could life survive within Europa's ocean, we can actually do the experiment and look at places on planet Earth where the conditions are comparable and say, oh, wow, life found a way in that environment that has parameters similar to Europa's ocean or Enceladus's ocean and so on and so forth. Life will find a way as you once so eloquently put it. And we can make the sort of biological plausibility connection. And now, Europa, is that where we're really looking in terms of searching for something alive? Is that really where all eyes are kind of on Europa? Well, I love to highlight three prime ocean world candidates, Europa, Enceladus and Titan.

Titan, let me talk about Titan briefly first and we can come back to it. Titan is just an amazing world with this atmosphere and liquid methane, ethane lakes carving out its icy surface and there's liquid water, ocean beneath its ice crust. And from the standpoint of astrobiology, Titan is my favorite place to go and look for weird life. And what I mean by weird life is life unlike life as we know it. Life as we know it is based on liquid water as the solvent, the substance in which the chemical reactions of life take place. And those chemical reactions in the building blocks are, of course, based on carbon. We are a carbon and water based life form. On Titan, life would potentially also

be carbon based, but the solvent might be liquid methane and ethane in those lakes that we see on Titan. Could the business of life get done? Could life originate? Is there a weird life form that could arise in those lakes and seas? I don't know, but I'd sure love to get there and explore. And then Titan could, of course, within its liquid water ocean beneath its icy shell, harbor water and carbon based life similar to what we know and love here on Earth. Now, how flammable is this thing? Like in here, methane and ethane? Can you start Titan on fire? The short answer is no, because in order to light something on fire, what do you need? Oxygen. Yes. And so Titan's atmosphere has basically no oxygen.

And so that actually is one of the limiting factors for me when I think about the feasibility of life on Titan. Okay, so back to general habitability. Kevin says liquid water is one of the keystones. So what else is on our intergalactic shopping list? The other keystones for life are that you need the building blocks, the stuff that life is made of, the bricks and mortar. For us, that's carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, a smattering of some 54 elements from the periodic table. Then the third kind of lesser appreciated keystone is life needs energy. It needs a power source. It needs something that can sustain the growth and reproduction and the maintenance of life. Technically, we call that the redox gradients that life harnesses. You bring together

a reductant, a compound that likes to give up electrons with an oxidant that likes to accept electrons. And for us, Homo sapiens, that redox reaction is eat some carbohydrates, eat some food, and breathe in oxygen. And then we do a slow burn in our stomachs and biology in us. We're a glorified campfire. And so we're doing a slow burn with our redox chemistry inside our bodies. So next time you're eating fistfuls of cookie dough, just holler, I'm redoxing. Microbes, however, can vary quite a bit and have all kinds of metabolic pathways. So by studying how they do it at the bottom of trenches and in the Arctic and next to volcanoes, we can try to determine how those little bibbis on other planets and moons might go about their

business. Okay, are you ready for some Patreon questions? Sure. Okay. But before we get to listener questions from Patreon, a quick word from our sponsors who have allowed me to raise the pay of the folks who helped me make oligies also let me donate to a cause of the oligest choosing. This week, Dr. Kevin Peterhand chose to support the work of Traveling Telescope. And this is a cause started by Susan Marabona and her husband, Chu, and colleagues to share astronomy with school kids and the general public in Kenya. So that is Traveling Telescope. And there will be a link in the show notes if you want to know more about them. Now, an additional donation this week was made to Vermont's Manchester Rescue Squad in memory of Peter Hand, Kevin's father who passed

away last summer. And the Manchester Rescue Squad provides 24 hour, 365 paramedic level emergency care via paid staff and volunteers. They also do CPR and first aid classes. So on behalf of all the oligites, our heart goes out to the hands. Okay, now some messages from a few sponsors. All right, your questions. Okay, Patreon questions. We got a gazillion. I'll do what I can. Okay. It's kind of a lightning round. I categorize them as best I could. Okay. So Jasmine Wells, Vincent, Maddie Worker, and Mike Marlow all kind of want to know, as a firm believer of other forms of life, what's the most probable planet for alien life to exist on? Like what are the most likely places? Yeah, Mars is fantastic. Mars is still a

wonderful place to look for evidence of past life and potentially life that's alive today. We'll just have to dig a lot deeper. So I put Mars, Europa, Enceladus, and Titan. Okay. And when it comes to the search for extant life, I really prioritize Europa and Enceladus for extant life similar to life as we know it. And then if we go one layer deeper, I prioritize Europa over Enceladus for a couple of different reasons. Europa, we have good reason to predict, has had an ocean for the history of the solar system. Yeah. So it's an ocean that's been around for a while. Enceladus, there's still some question marks. The reason Saturn has rings is because some sort of collision, some sort of impact event happened in the neighborhood

of the moons of Saturn in the past tens to hundreds of millions of years ago. Okay. So remember Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons. Kevin says that Saturn had had some drama. So did Enceladus form from that? Is its ocean relatively young? We don't know. Other people had questions about the oceans. Trying to settle a debate, Oshanna Reese asks, are deep sea creatures aliens? I think they are. And also, are we looking at the deep sea to provide any clues of what could exist on other planets? Yeah, great questions. The answer to the first one is as alien as they are, and I've gotten to see some of them up close and as astonishing and beautiful and bizarre as they are, they are very well connected into our tree of life. They are

based on DNA and RNA and the ATP paradigm with proteins, et cetera. So yeah, they are not different from life as we know it. So are we looking in our own oceans to see whether or not our search for life elsewhere can be informed by life that works in these deep ocean environments? The answer is absolutely, and it's something that I'm very passionate about and I've been fortunate to be able to take part in some of that exploration in science. What about your favorite thing about astrobiology or your job? The best? I've got a lot of great colleagues and we love brainstorming about forcing each other to think out of the box about how to explore planet Earth and understand life on Earth and how to apply

that to worlds and wonders beyond Earth. So that kind of intellectual popping the popcorn is a lot of fun. If someone wanted to be an astrobiologist, what would you tell them? Where do they start? Yeah, it's a great question. In the field of astrobiology today, there's biologists, chemists, geologists, geochemists, oceanographers, my own background, physics and astronomy and geological environmental sciences. I also did a masters in robotics. It takes all kinds to get this sort of, let me use a few buzzwords, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary kind of research done. And so what I tell students and folks interested is within the framework of sciences that feed into astrobiology,

follow your passion, biology, geology, physics, astronomy, et cetera, et cetera, chemistry. And enjoy that fundamental research and then extend and bridge it into astrobiology. Smart. It's just the sound of so many people changing their majors right now. Thank you for studying aliens. Thanks for having me here to talk about aliens. So ask interesting people intergalactic questions because you never know what you might learn. There is a lot out there to understand and smart people love getting asked questions. You can check out Dr. Kevin Hand's book, Alien Oceans, The Search for Life in the Depths of Space. He is amazing. He is at Alien Oceans on Twitter. I am at Ali Ward with 1L.

He is at Alegies on Twitter and Instagram too. And we like to keep these episodes short. So the full list of credits is in the show notes. Special thanks, of course, to Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas and Mercedes Maitland of Mind Gem Media and Jared Sleeper of Mind Gem Media for helping edit all these together. And if you stick around to the very, very end of the episode, I give you a little bit of life advice. And this week, this is a life advice taught to me by my sister Celeste, who was a reporter. And if someone is telling you a long story and you kind of like want them to cut to the chase, you can politely prompt them to do that by saying, wow, how did it end? And then that's how you kind of get to the conclusion. So that's sometimes helpful. I hope that's

helpful. My sister told me that a million years ago and I use it all the time. Okay, all right, until next time, Smologites. Bye-bye.