Scialog: Signatures of Life in the Universe Initiative Begins
Increased exploration of our own solar system and an ever-growing catalog of planets in other solar systems have brought fundamental questions to the forefront of science: What makes a world habitable? How can we tell if certain molecules are signs of life? How does life change a planet, and does it create detectable signatures from afar? Most intriguing of all: Is there evidence of life beyond Earth?
To catalyze transformative research that will bring us closer to answering these and other basic questions about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, Research Corporation for Science Advancement has launched a new initiative, Scialog: Signatures of Life in the Universe.
Co-sponsored by RCSA and the Heising-Simons Foundation, with additional support from the Kavli Foundation, the inaugural meeting of the initiative June 10-11, 2021, brought together 54 early-career scientists from a variety of fields including earth and planetary science, chemistry and physics, astronomy and astrobiology, and microbiology and biochemistry. Guided by nine expert Facilitators, the group discussed challenges, brainstormed ideas for novel research, and formed teams to propose collaborative projects with high-impact potential.
“The key ingredient of Scialog is to have fun,” said RCSA President & CEO Daniel Linzer. “This is one of the few times you can let your hair down and talk about big ideas, cutting-edge ideas, even crazy ideas, with people not just from your own field but from other fields – to compare notes, learn other methodologies, and form a network of people who share interests but not always the same approaches.”
Scialog, short for “science + dialog,” was created by RCSA in 2010 to bring together scientists from a variety of disciplines to work together to advance basic science in areas of global importance. By maximizing interactions between people with different experience and approaches, and who might not normally meet or work together, the process aims to spark highly creative and novel ideas for transformative research.
“At Scialog, we’re interested in seeding connections,” said Program Director Richard Wiener. “That may be from collaborations you form now while writing a proposal, or later through conversations over the lifetime of your careers."
Keynote presentations by two leading scientists set the context for discussions at the two-day virtual meeting, encouraging participants to find areas of opportunity to advance science where challenges or bottlenecks now exist.
Tim Lyons, a distinguished professor of biogeochemistry at the University of California, Riverside, said lessons from the search for signatures of life in Earth’s early oceans and atmosphere can help inform the search for life beyond Earth.
“The more I study ancient Earth the more I realize that even on our own planet, where you have a nearly infinite access to materials and the ability to bring them back to the lab and do a huge array of highly sophisticated analyses, it can still be very difficult to agree on whether they are biologically sourced,” he said.
A better understanding of Earth's earliest chapters and the prebiotic chemistry that ultimately gave rise to life could help distinguish which biosignatures are “faithful recorders of life” on other planets, he said.
Victoria Meadows, astrobiologist, professor of astronomy and leader of NASA’s University of Washington-based Virtual Planetary Laboratory, said the most important frontier in the search for life beyond Earth is “developing all of the bits and pieces we’re going to need for a probabilistic framework for biosignature assessment.”
As new space- and ground-based telescopes make more information about exoplanets available, she said a framework would need to answer some basic but critical questions: Where are likely targets? How would we recognize life’s impact on the environment of that planet? How do we increase our confidence that we have detected life?
A framework will also require the participation of researchers from many different disciplines to assess fully any data within the specific context of each planet.
“It’s not enough to detect a potential biosignature. You also have to be able to interpret it, whether it’s a stromatolite signature or a gas in the atmosphere,” she said.
“Interestingly, the discoveries of methane on Mars and phosphene on Venus have provided valuable case studies for understanding how to respond to and assess claims of biosignature detection” and have offered the opportunity to involve more of the community in assessment, she said.
After the keynote presentations, participants broke into a series of multiple small-group discussions to address gaps in current knowledge and identify opportunities for collaborative research.
Multidisciplinary teams will submit proposals for seed funding of novel research projects a week after the conference, and awards are expected to be announced later this summer.
RCSA has six current Scialog initiatives. Along with Signatures of Life in the Universe, they are Chemical Machinery of the Cell, Negative Emissions Science, Advancing BioImaging, Microbiome, Neurobiology and Disease, and Mitigating Zoonotic Threats, which will hold its inaugural meeting in September.
