UW jumps into the hunt for extraterrestrial life

by Vince Stricherz | March 1, 1999

John Delaney is convinced there is life beyond Earth.

Last fall, the celebrated University of Washington oceanography professor told new freshmen he fully expects extraterrestrial life to be discovered within their lifetimes, which “will be the single-most profound event up to that point (in history), because that will tell us we are not alone.”

Delaney and a host of UW scientists are ready to embark on a program that will train people to find life in outer space. This fall they will begin the first doctoral program in the quickly emerging field of astrobiology. Planets and moons in our own solar system will draw the most interest as the places where such life is most likely to be found, but the training ground will be right here on Earth.

Study will focus on tiny organisms that love extreme settings—the high pressure and 500-plus-degree Fahrenheit conditions in undersea, hydrothermal vents; the frigid temperatures and high salt content in pockets of brine deep within the Arctic ice pack; boiling hot springs; and barren rocks a half-mile deep in volcanic basalt formations.

The course work will be highly interdisciplinary. Graduates will receive degrees in any of 11 areas, from oceanography to chemistry to history, with an endorsement indicating a specialty in astrobiology.

If the whole idea sounds a bit far-fetched, consider this: Scientists already know about creatures that exist and thrive in some of the most extreme, forbidding environments right here on Earth.

Exotic-looking tube worms, unique crabs, strange shrimp and giant clams are among the species that live in a complex ecosystem in hydrothermal vents more than 1.5 miles below the ocean surface, where sunlight doesn’t penetrate. Instead of solar energy, their world is fueled by a unique chemical synthesis triggered by hot water boiling out from the Earth’s crust. The interiors of sulfide chimneys built by these vents protect a little-understood but prospering population of heat-loving microbes that include the most primitive creatures known.

Similarly, microbes live within the boiling waters of hot springs such as in Yellowstone Park. Other organisms thrive in small pockets of salty soup locked within polar ice. As the water freezes, that process itself drives salt ­ and the organisms ­ from the ice into the water, making the remaining liquid so salty it won’t harden, even at temperatures well below freezing. Then there are basalt formations such as those in Eastern Washington, where microscopic creatures have found ways to survive and flourish deep inside, drawing energy from the natural weathering of the rock.

Does any of that sound like outer space? Many scientists are betting it does. Most people think of Mars as a barren planet, but there is evidence of subsurface water. NASA in December launched a mission trying to find that vital liquid of life. Europa, an icebound moon of Jupiter, is providing new clues that there might be volcanoes and liquid water beneath its frozen cloak. In October, scientists began seeing similar signs on Callisto, an icy sibling of Europa. The essentials for life are liquid water and available energy, which can be harvested from a number of sources other than sunlight, including chemical, thermal and tidal processes.

“The last five or ten years have really pushed the envelope in terms of the extreme conditions in which life can exist,” says Astronomy Professor Woodruff Sullivan, a co-director for astrobiology.

It’s not just the discovery of life in those extreme conditions on Earth, but a growing understanding of how intemperate conditions must have been when life emerged here. Earth itself is 4.6 billion years old and scientists say life came on the scene some 3.5 billion years ago on a hot planet bombarded daily by asteroids. After that, it took nearly three billion more years ­ and many changes in the Earth’s atmosphere and surface ­ before the Cambrian explosion brought forth complex life forms, crustaceans and fish with millions of cells.

An increasing number of scientists are wondering: If it can happen here, why not somewhere else?

“We recognize that there’s a good possibility that life exists in the solar system outside Earth, but if life does exist, it would be microbial, not the higher forms,” says James Staley, director of the astrobiology program. As a microbiology professor, he has made a career of studying microscopic beings and is intrigued by the prospect that such life on another celestial body could be the forerunner of intelligent life there.

“We have microbial systems on Earth that are good models for those on Mars or Europa, and those systems are poorly studied,” Staley said. He expects the astrobiology program to help change that.

The new program comes along just as excitement is being fueled by a succession of discoveries ­ from more than a dozen planets orbiting nearby stars to probable liquid water on Europa and Callisto. The UW’s program isn’t the first to explore astrobiology; a handful of institutions have some type of undergraduate programs. Last year, NASA established an Astrobiology Institute, headquartered near San Francisco, with 11 participating institutions. Though the UW proposal narrowly missed the cut for financial support from NASA, Staley, Sullivan and Conway Leovy, an atmospheric sciences professor who also is an astrobiology co-director, promise they’ll try again. They hope to capitalize on the mounting excitement around the world and on the UW campus. Meanwhile, the program will go forward with a five-year, $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation and $500,000 from the University.

Delaney has sparked his share of the excitement surrounding astrobiology by leading expeditions to thermal vents on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, 180 miles off the Washington-British Columbia coast. Last summer, Delaney and scientists from several U.S. and Canadian institutions, including the American Museum of Natural History, reeled in four “black smokers” from the ocean floor more than 8,000 feet below the surface. The sulfide chimneys held samples of the unusual life found in that unfriendly climate.

Delaney sees a clear tie between his work and astrobiology. “Part of exploring outer space is understanding what goes on in inner space,” he says

Jody Deming agrees. She’s a deep-sea microbiologist who marvels at the adaptability of micro-organisms, particularly those locked in polar ice. Microbes have been on Earth longer than any other creatures, she says, so if anything can overcome barriers to life, they can.

Close-up pictures of Europa from the Galileo probe draw the oceanography professor’s special interest. “There are lots of features here that resemble the ice caps on our own planet,” Deming says. Surface temperatures are in the neighborhood of 200 below zero Celsius, and images taken from high above the surface reveal irregularities. Bubbles in the ice could be evidence of subsurface thermal activity. Spectroscopy indicates salt content in some areas, she says, and salt is a good electrical conductor ­ meaning another potential energy source to support life. And long, squiggly lines on the surface, she jokes, are evidence of icebreakers plowing through the frozen landscape.

But Deming also sounds some cautionary notes. Life on Earth has been found only to about minus 80 degrees Celsius (-110 Fahrenheit), so it could be that any microbes found on the surface of Europa would lie dormant at minus 200 (-330 F).

Life also has been found at the greatest pressure known on Earth ­ about 300 atmospheres, or 300 times greater than the air pressure at sea level. That’s enough force to flatten an Army tank and strain even a heavily reinforced nuclear submarine. But the pressure on Europa is expected to be 1,000 atmospheres or more, and no one knows what the upper survival limit is. “It may be just above what we have on Earth. Then we’re out of business,” she says.

The proponents of the UW astrobiology program expect to topple a pressure zone right here on campus-historic barriers between various academic programs. Scores of professors are developing the highly interdisciplinary curriculum involving 11 UW degree programs – oceanography, astronomy, aeronautics and astronautics, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, microbiology, atmospheric sciences, geophysics, geological sciences and history. The School of Oceanography will provide dedicated laboratory space for students to study organisms that live in extreme conditions.

The program also will tap two outside entities ­ the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland and ZymoGenetics of Seattle. The Richland laboratory will offer students a chance to study microbial life in the subterranean basalt formations in eastern Washington. ZymoGenetics will offer internships so students can study the unique enzymes contained in unusual bacteria, a particular interest to the company. Such bacteria have proven valuable for designing products, even some as mundane as household detergents.

Some look for astrobiology to one day be a separate degree program. Leovy isn’t among them. One of the greatest advantages with the current plan, he says, is that it draws on many people from many different fields who otherwise might never collaborate and learn about each other’s work. Simply put, it tears down walls between departments, and he doesn’t like to think new walls might someday be built around a new department.

Leovy also expects the students to be particularly challenged as they blaze new paths of discovery. “Astrobiology students will have to learn rigorously, as well as more broadly, than most other science graduate students,” he said.

Even though the program won’t formally begin until later this year, it already has its first participant ­ Matt Schneider, a 28-year-old engineering graduate student from Seattle. He’s been a regular at a seminar series created by astrobiology faculty, who explore widely disparate scientific topics related to the program.

“It’s just a tasty subject because there’s a lot of possibilities for discovery,” Schneider says. “One of the best things is that it’s so multidisciplinary.”

In fact, that’s an educational revolution, he says, highlighted by the seminar series in which professors have to talk about their specialties at a level that can be understood by those in other fields.

“A biologist speaking to an engineer ­ that’s a pretty strong difference in backgrounds, and it’s pretty neat to be exposed to that broad base of knowledge,” he said.

Schneider finds that he has a bit of explaining to do when he tells friends and family that he’s pursuing a career in astrobiology. Their typical reaction: “What the heck is that?” But that doesn’t bother him, and he says he hasn’t run into much skepticism. He hopes to use the degree to land a NASA job, perhaps working on missions to Mars or Europa. He envisions himself as a liaison between the scientists who cook up the discovery projects and the engineers who design the equipment to get the job done.

Graduates are likely to find their main employment opportunities in academia or in laboratories at NASA or at companies such as ZymoGenetics. Sullivan suggests that some might even turn their talents to science writing, bringing greater general understanding of scientific breakthroughs to the public.

He expects about a dozen students when the program formally sets up shop. Budget constraints, not a lack of interest, limit the number of students the program can accommodate. The NSF grant contains money only for the students’ research assistantships. Still, the interest continues to build. By telephone, letter and e-mail, queries have come from across the country and around the world ­ even though the NSF assistance is limited to students from the United States.

“They’re coming from all directions and it’s interesting, the different backgrounds,” Sullivan says.

The idea for an astrobiology program grew out of a special seminar, spearheaded by Sullivan and Oceanography Professor John Baross, that was offered at the University in 1996. The seminar, “Planets and Life,” came shortly after the discovery of planets orbiting nearby stars and an announcement that NASA scientists possibly had found microbial fossils inside a Martian rock. That claim has come under growing skepticism and now appears unlikely. Some scientists contend that even if Martian fossils are found, the life forms themselves might have originated on Earth and been blown to the Red Planet in a cloud of interplanetary debris following the impact of an asteroid in the dim reaches of history. On the other hand, the discovery of planets in neighboring star systems has continued at an almost-dizzying pace, giving even more impetus to the study of astrobiology.

To actually launch the program, the faculty has faced a daunting task, including the design of five new courses to complement existing courses that will be included in the curriculum. The departments involved will have to figure out new ways of testing and grading students who aren’t spending as much time on core course work as other majors. For instance, an astrobiology student majoring in chemistry will have very different course demands than other chemistry students. Fully one-third of astrobiology course work will be in areas not closely related to the student’s home department, so an astronomy major pursuing astrobiology could well spend a lot of time studying microbiology or oceanography.

There’s also a required annual workshop, three days in which students do research in the field ­ hunting for microscopic creatures at Hanford or studying comet dust under an electron microscope, searching for organic molecules vital for life to occur.

One thing astrobiology won’t include ­ at least not formally ­ is something known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI. Large arrays of radio telescopes focus on many different parts of the heavens, searching for an artificial radio signal among the abundant natural radio waves that flood space. Just one such verified signal could be the first contact from an intelligent being or race from some distant planet or galaxy ­ a phone call from ET, so to speak.

“The question is how screwy does it have to look before you can’t come up with a natural explanation for it,” Sullivan said. He noted that, back in the late 1960s, the regular waves from pulsars at first were studied as possible transmissions from intelligent beings.

The idea of studying extraterrestrial radio waves was first suggested in the late 1950s and the first observations came in 1960. Today perhaps 25 people worldwide devote at least half their time to SETI, and 100 or so ­ including Sullivan ­ attend the conferences and maintain a keen interest in SETI’s progress.

They are driven by a belief ­ voiced by Jodie Foster’s character in the Carl Sagan-inspired film “Contact” ­ that if, in this vast universe, we are the only advanced life, “it seems like an awful waste of space.”

But Sullivan says SETI won’t be a part of astrobiology. In 1990, SETI received funding from NASA, but skeptics in Congress, along with those who thought the money should go to something more worthwhile, turned off the cash spigot in 1993. It has, in short, become a lightning rod for the religious sensibilities of some and the government-spending concerns of others.

But Sullivan notes that with each succeeding decade, SETI has become a bit more respectable and has lost more of its “fringiness.”

“In the same way, astrobiology also is becoming more respectable. It is being recognized as something that can be pursued scientifically, and should be,” he said. “Even if extraterrestrial life is not discovered, the research spawned by astrobiology will undoubtedly lead to important new insights about life on our own planet.”

Star search 1999

As Donald Brownlee watched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida last month, Stardust blasted into the heavens. It’s not likely many observers considered the wistfully named mission’s implications for the hunt for life away from Earth, but Brownlee certainly did.

The astronomy professor is among scores of faculty taking part in the University of Washington’s fledgling but groundbreaking doctoral program in astrobiology, the search for life on other celestial bodies, which begins this fall. He also is the principal investigator for Stardust, a seven-year mission designed to travel to comet Wild 2, capture samples of comet dust and bring them back for analysis.

This is a mission Brownlee has dreamed of since 1980. Technological advances and fortuitous events in space made it possible. In 1974, Wild 2 came close enough to Jupiter that the giant planet’s gravity altered the comet’s orbit around the Sun. Now instead of continuing to circle only among the outer planets of the solar system, it actually passes relatively close to Earth. Yet it hasn’t been among the inner planets long enough for heat from the sun to have destroyed or altered telltale properties, characteristics Brownlee believes will provide new clues on the origins of the solar system and possibly the universe itself.

Last fall, as the Leonid meteor shower was concluding its annual display, an excited television reporter was in Brownlee’s office. NASA had flown two planes high in the atmosphere to study Leonid particles and agency scientists noted the probable existence of organic properties. Brownlee reached into a file cabinet and withdrew a small rock, about the size of a charcoal briquette. This chunk, he announced, was about 2 percent carbon, was rich in organic material and was the first meteorite found to contain amino acids. It has been known for some time, he explained, that comets carry organic molecules.

They also carry water, a key component of life. It is thought that comets might well have deposited the first water on Earth, and perhaps the amino acids that evolved into life. If that is truly the case, then comets are a bit like Johnny Appleseed, wandering the universe and sowing the seeds of life as they go. Whether those seeds grow depends on the conditions they encounter after they are planted.

“The building materials are there, and then the question is, ‘Does life occur?'” Brownlee said. “And who knows? I think most people believe that it’s probably very common that if you have the right environment and you have the material, then life will evolve.”

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Vince Stricherz is a science writer in the UW Office of News and Information and formerly a reporter for the Eastside Journal.