The question that intrigued the great American quantum physicist John Archibald Wheeler in the last decades of his life was: “Are life and mind irrelevant to the structure of the universe, or are they central to it?” Wheeler originated the notion of a “participatory,” conscious universe, a cosmos in which all of us are embedded as co-creators, replacing the accepted universe “out there,” which is separate from us.
From Ice Worm to RoboSimian and Cliff-Climbing Mini-Helicopter, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has engineered an army of robots capable of driving on the plains and craters of Mars, explore cliffs, polar caps and other hard-to-reach places on the Red Planet and beyond.
Putting aside random events such as the 14-mile wide asteroid that destroyed the 150-million-year reign of the dinosaurs and cleared the path for the evolution of the human species, aliens are potentially shaped by the same processes and mechanisms that shaped humans, such as natural selection. “A fundamental task for astrobiologists is thinking about what extra-terrestrial life might be like,” said Sam Levin, at the University of Oxford.
Fungi spores on the International Space Station (ISS) that can survive doses of radiation 200 times higher than those that would kill a human, researchers reported at the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference, might also one day threaten other parts of the solar system hitchhiking on space missions from Earth. Outside of the space station, doses are higher—and they would be higher still on the hull of a spacecraft going to Mars or beyond.
“An enduring mystery regarding the origin of life,” says NASA scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center about the inorganic transition to life, abiogenesis, “is how biology could have arisen from non-biological chemical processes.”
