Other Earths

It's time for Aspen Ideas.

The Aspen Institute is kind enough to offer some public lectures. I attended one this evening with Astronomer Dimitar Sasselov . The subject was "Other Earths and the Origins of Life".

I expected to be waaaay out of my depth; but this was Astronomy for dummies and I felt pretty comfortable.

 I expected the "news" of the recent discovery of earth like planets since it this was on today's twitter feed: 

@science First transiting planets in a star cluster discovered, Kepler-66b and Kepler-67b http://bit.ly/17hhBX9

Transits of planets across other suns tell us if the planet is in the "goldilocks" sweet spot (not too hot and not too cold) and if there is an an oxygen/nitrogen signature (and water).

Anyone who's seen Carl Sagan's look back from Voyager shouldn't be too surprised by this. 

Here's the cool part... Astronomers are looking for microbes. That's what life on earth is, microbes. All life on earth carries the "memories" of every challenge, every twist of fate, every choice along the path to "us". We are inextricably linked to our planet and the history of the  last 4 billion years of life on this planet. Dimitar Sasselov calls this "first generation" life. Microbe to Man- 4 billion years- everything coming from that first kernal of microbial life to the present.  The microbe's ability to adapt is rooted (quite literally) in the last 4 billion years of trail and error.

Now, the Universe, 8 billion years, are there "second generation" life forms out there? Second generation would be a life form which is engineered by the first generation form of life. It would be a life form which uses different building blocks than the microbial source code which created generation one. 

It's not just theory, when trying to find the fewest # of genes using our own microbial building blocks we come up with 180+ *but* when we try engineering genetic life without using our own microbial building blocks we get 150+ 

Life, engineered by a lifeform on this planet but not of this planet.

Generation 2. 

Okay, may have garbled it, but that's what I took away from this mind candy evening snack.

I couldn't help but relate this to the recent TED Global talk from Suzana Herculan-Houzel who has been counting neurons in order to understand why we think differently from other animals. Dimitar Sasselov is searching for the origins of life and Suzana Herculan-Houzel is searching for the origins of self-aware intelligence. 

With TED Global and Aspen Ideas coming so close to each other my head might just explode. They call post TED a "tedache" what in the world do you call post Aspen?

July 20th: Here's an interesting addendum, a really old galaxy

..and a question on reflection, since GMO is pretty scary when we're modifying wheat (seriously did anyone *ever* think they would read a headline that includes the words "wheat escapes"?)  and products like "neverwet" make my spidey senses tingle off the chart... how do we really think that "Generation 2" is gonna turn out?