Hunting for Signs of Alien Life on Mars, Burying Them Here on Earth

As far as

NASA

scientific missions go, the Curiosity rover is an easy sell: hunting for signs of life. Though, omitted from many headlines I’ve seen is that we’re actually more looking for signs of past life or, even more likely, signs that Mars was once able to support life in the form of organic molecules. And it’s not even the most likely candidate for life in our solar system; it just happens to be close, kind of cheap to get to, and very well-known in the popular imagination. The biggest hope for life in the solar system is actually Saturn’s moon Enceladus, a relatively tiny ball of ice with a geyser at its south pole — likely shooting up from a subsurface body of water — that happens to contain organic molecules that we already know about. If

NASA

planetary scientist Chris McKay

has his way

, we’ll get a mission out there. Sometime.

If and when we get a mission to Enceladus — entailing trips seven years in length, there and back — the life we’re likely to find will be of the extremophile variety. An extremophile is just what it sounds like, an organism that can survive in conditions where “normal” life can’t, like in highly acidic, almost-boiling hot springs in Yellowstone or underneath the permafrost in far northern Canada or in pockets of liquid water deep within glacial ice. A popular hangout for extremophile life on Earth is very deep underneath the ocean, clustered around hydrothermic vents, perhaps not too much unlike our geyser on Enceladus.

In other words, one of our best avenues for learning about alien life is on Earth, a couple of miles under the ocean’s surface. (Enceladus is around a million-and-a-half kilometers away; Mars is an average of about 225 million kilometers.) It’s bizarre conditions like those on the ocean floor (and other extremophile habitats) that have the most in common with conditions beyond Earth. And it’s brutal locales like these do we find our best hopes for the possibility of life existing elsewhere, whether it’s a couple cells of bacteria or a ten-foot tubeworm.

We’re highly unlikely to find a ten-foot tubeworm hanging out on Mars. Moreso, we might find the various things a ten-foot tubeworm (though probably something much less dramatic) needs to exist. This is still exciting, and it’s still exciting finding different varieties of extremophile life here on Earth, looking at those conditions and comparing them to what we see in the sky. So, it’s saddening to read today about new deep-water seabed mining operations being approved in Papua New Guinea, specifically targeting hydrothermic vents.

The company, Nautilus Minerals of Canada, now has a 20 year lease to do this, according to the Guardian:

The mining process will involve levelling underwater hydrothermal “chimneys”, which spew out vast amounts of minerals. Sediment is then piped to a waiting vessel, which will separate the ore from the water before pumping the remaining liquid back to the seafloor.

The PNG lease is thought to be a testing ground of sorts for this kind of mining, with certainly many other mining companies looking on and waiting to take a shot. You can imagine the gears turning about the relative palatability of mining mountaintops versus mining places that will never see sunlight. Some pro-mining dude quoted in the above-linked article went as far as to say, “You chop off one of these venting chimneys and another one will grow back, so it’s a little like the mining equivalent of cutting grass.”

Cutting grass … yes, exactly. The grass in my yard is covered in extremely rare and unusual varieties of organisms and comes with the possibility of releasing massive amounts of heavy metals and toxins into ecosystems every time I cut it. Perfect. Just like cutting grass. Kind of like how clear-cutting forests is just like trimming hedges and mountaintop removal is like excavating a garden bed. Thank you, industry scientist, for treating us like adults.

In any case, we’ll be mining the fuck out of alien planets/moons/asteroids, too, soon enough.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

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