#33 Sarah Rugheimer - LIFE Mission, Prebiosignatures, Mountains

I thought a good place to start actually would be to ask the question, how do astronomers or scientists more generally look for life and which of those methods sort of most excites you to get up in the morning and look for life?

For sure.

I mean, there's a couple ways, depending on are you looking for life in our solar system on Mars? That's a very different sort of search than, say, looking on a distant exoplanet.

I think both are really exciting, quite frankly, and both get me out of bed in the morning.

But I've dedicated my research to that second one.

How could we detect life on a planet orbiting another star light years away? And I think there's some real key differences in those two approaches.

So when we think about life in our solar system, we can get really good data.

We have like petabytes of data or something of all the solar system objects.

We can go to Mars.

We can go to eventually Enceladus and these other places where we might find life and actually directly look.

In situ.

Yeah, in situ.

We're not relying on kind of needing to detect a global biosphere.

And so because of that, I think we'll both maybe have a more conclusive detection of life if it's in our solar system because we can actually go there.

Right.

But for exoplanets, we are... kind of necessarily hamstrung in our efforts that we can never send a probe to actually confirm.

So what we're relying on,

we'll never say never, maybe, maybe one day,

maybe one, not in my lifetime, not unless like cryogenic freezing works or we upload to the cloud, but.

I'm not banking on that.

So that means we need to look for large imprints of the signs of life in an exoplanet atmosphere.

And that necessarily means it's a huge imprint of life.

So we're talking a global biosphere.

Life is everywhere on the planet.

And that might make it into the atmosphere so that we can use spectroscopy and find those chemical fingerprints of life and detect those with future missions.