I've just returned from the tenth annual Astrobiology conference of the big SPIE (Society for Optics and Photonics Engineers) conference held in San Diego. Like most scientific gatherings, there are literally a hundred parallel conferences on topics that span nano-technology to space weather. But still, this Astrobiology conference is unique I would guess that none of the other conferences bring in molecular biologists, bio-chemists and meteoriticists. For in fact, SPIE is a strange home for Astrobiology.

I've touched upon this story before, with respect to the "water on Mars" issue. To refresh your memory, In 1996 David McKay, a scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, announced that he had indication of life found in a meteorite that had come from Mars. The circuitous evidence was almost as convoluted as the history of its controversial publication in Science, but regardless, the press were excited, and by various influences, NASA budgets correspondingly increased.

For reasons that still escape me, not all NASA scientists were happy about this. Apparently, there are two mindsets in a bureaucracy: Mode A--a rising tide lifts all ships; and Mode B--your gain is my loss (also called a zero-sum game). Mindsets are somehow pliable through graduate school, but harden into concrete by the time research "independence" is achieved, sometime in one's thirties. Well NASA was in Mode A all the way up through 1973 when the Apollo program ended, the Vietnam War ended, the growth in physicist graduates ended, the Carter "stagflation" years began, and basically NASA went into Mode B. Those scientists who were 35 in 1977, are 65 today, which means they are the top managers. They just "knew" that life on Mars was going to steal money from their budget, and they were determined to prove it wrong.

The above graphic shows how severe the 1971 decrease in NASA's budget was in terms of "real" dollars and in terms of per mil (parts per thousand) of the Federal budget. The inset shows the exponential growth in physicis PhD's granted over the 100 years preceding 1970 (a straight-line when plotted on a log scale), and the phenomenal change that 1970 brought. Hence the change in mindset for scientists, though not nearly as important for engineers.

Consequently, McKay found himself surrounded by detractors, much as Gil Levin, the principle investigator of the Labelled Release (and here) experiment 20 years earlier on the Mars Viking lander, which found rather compelling evidence of life. To Levin's credit, it was probably not "zero-sum bureaucracy" that opposed him in 1976, but professional envy, because his was the low-budget experiment, and all the big pooh-bahs such as Carl Sagan, were betting on the high-dollar instruments, all of which had high-dollar failures (sulfur-poisoned palladium filters, intentional masking of CH4 line, etc.) As a consequence of all these decisions, the NASA-funded "exobiology" community circled the wagons around the proposition that life "could not exist" outside of Earth. Not only were programs that claimed to find it defunded, but even proposals to search for life excluded from all future Mars missions.

This left most of the effort in Europe, such as the noted Astrobiology journal and the Cardiff University Centre for Astrobiology with the dynamic duo of Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe. Sir Fred died five years ago, but if anything, the community is growing in Europe, while being suppressed in the USA. So Richard Hoover, a polymath scientist at NASA/MSFC, had written several papers with Hoyle on the potential IR signature of diatoms in space, was inspired by the 1996 McKay paper to begin his own research into meteorites. Being well-placed in the engineering community, he finagled a conference on Astrobiology at the annual SPIE (society of optics and photonics engineers) meeting, usually held in San Diego.

Why SPIE? Because they were engineers, and for the most part, had no interest in the politics of scientists, nor were they writing proposals to NASA for scientific instruments. They built hardware, and someone else wrote the proposals. An analogy with the military comes to mind: scientists are like commissioned officers, who think they know strategy, while engineers are like sergeants, who actually do know something about tactics. There is a mutual pact between scientists and engineers not to infringe on the others turf. And also like the military, scientists with their extensive university education tend to be social liberals and vote Democrat, whereas engineers are profoundly more conservative and vote Republican. (As an aside, this is part of the cuture shock of NASA/MSFC, which unlike NASA/JSC or NASA/JPL or even NASA/GSFC, is run by engineers.)

So the SPIE Astrobiology conference is the one conference on US soil that supports the discovery of life on Mars, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the theories of Sir Fred Hoyle. This means the conference is full of foreigners, such as Academician Erik Galimov from Moscow, or ESA scientist Francois Raulin from France, or popularizer Paul Davies from England. It also means that the Americans huddle together as if they are part of some revolutionary cell, plotting the demise of NASA institutions, but more likely sharing spectacular photos of politically unorthodox discoveries. The atmosphere is heady, even a bit electric if one has a high tolerance for accented English: Raulin proposing a liquid ocean under the ice of Titan, Saturn's biggest moon; Galimov ready to concede that life violates entropy and is likely to violate Darwin's "little warm pond" as well; Davies making off-hand remarks that a small nuclear device exploded on Mars polar caps would raise enough dust to detect life spectroscopically, sort of a planetary version of Deep Impact for a fraction the cost.

But in my mind, the show-stopper was Richard Hoover's presentation of microfossils on meteorites. This work began back in 1961 with the publication of microfossils found on rare carbon-containing meteorites thought to be extinct comets. After initial wild reception, the denials poured in as fast as the Levin 1976 martian life announcement, or the McKay 1996 meteorite announcement.  But unnoticed in the 1960's flap, was a short paper by a Hungarian microscopist, Palik, who looked at the same meteorite using glycerol instead of acid or water as a solvent. She saw all sorts of fossils but not being a cyanobacteria specialist, did not identify them, nor publish pictures, only line drawings. And there the matter lay for 35 years until Hoover put the same meteorite under the lens of a scanning electron microscope (SEM). What he saw was mind-boggling.

Perfectly preserved fossils of blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) came into focus, made entirely of water-soluble minerals such as magnesium sulfate, MgSO4. No one had seen them before, excepting the Hungarian, simply because they were highly water soluble. (The Morton salt company found a patented way to remove MgSO4 from mined salt and thereby avoid the problem of moisture collecting in the saltshaker and making it "clump", so that they made it their motto, "When it rains, it pours.") But an electron microscope operates in a vacuum, using a beam of electrons instead of light to image the sample. Not only were these incredibly detailed pictures of cyanobacteria that identified them down to genus and species, they were the BEST pictures of cyanobacteria ever seen. Algal experts say that because of the tendency of the cells to clump, they can't resolve the little filaments on their surface.  Not only did the fossils show these nanometer-wide "fibria", but with 3-D detail that others had to piece together from 2D slices revealed by transmission electron microscope (TEM).

Why the detail? They had been instantaneously freeze-dried, then treated with metals like Magnesium which gave excellent contrast in the SEM photographs. And they were all well-known terrestrial organisms. Could they possibly have been contaminants? Well, it takes a long time to fossilize biology, and there was hardly a trace of the original nitrogen (which makes up proteins), with most of the carbon gone as well. Hoover got some samples of hair from Egyptian mummies (5000 years old) and mammoth hair (15,000 years old), none of which had lost their nitrogen. Not only that, but one of the fossils in the meteorite is only known in Devonian rocks dated 400 million years ago. Hardly the sort of thing that could be a recent contaminant. These are ancient organisms that apparently lived on a comet millions of years ago, and ended up as a fireball streaking through the Earth's atmosphere in the past 100 years.

This led me to my conclusion, that cyanobacteria are alive and well on comets throughout the Solar System, and populate an ecological niche that doesn't need the Earth at all. If anything, the Earth is an accidental interloper in the cometary biosphere, receiving a veritable rain of bacteria falling into its stratosphere, but rarely ejecting any life back out into the largest biosphere of the solar system, if not the galaxy. Therefore cyanobacteria may grow on Earth, but they are really optimized for growing in space, and far from being the center of the biological universe, the Earth is a bit player, having less water, less biomass than the comets in the Solar System. RTWT.

Others at the conference took the analogy in parallel directions. Not only is Earth not the linear chain of evolution as diagrammed in Darwin's "tree of life", since life is constantly falling on it from outside, but life doesn't even follow "trees". Michael Storrie-Lombardy took the DNA transcriptions of some 2700 viruses now listed in the gene bank, and ran them through computer science filters. He looked at their Shannon information content, their Lempel-Ziff algorithmic information content. Another speaker ran it through a fractal-dimension information content. And they all found very interesting things: 1) the information scales with organismal complexity--the more complicated the biology, the more complicated the DNA. No surprise there. 2) the different information measures are orthogonal, independent, separate. The information resides in multiple scales, multiple ways. Imagine that one runs the text of the Bible through such filters, the Shannon filter might pick out that the letters of the alphabet appear in different ratios, the Lempel-Ziff picks out that "th" is a common letter pair, and the fractal analysis picks out the words and sentences appear in clumps. 3) The viruses are often encoding entire genes that have nothing to do with the virus, but are identical to other organisms in that environment. For example, Prochlorococcus marinus is the smallest cyanobacterial DNA set that can do photosynthesis, converting sunlight and CO2 to sugar and oxygen. Viruses carry those genes in their genome, ready to infect unsuspecting lazy sugar-eaters and convert them to industrious factories of oxygen and carbohydrates.

Why is all this important? Because viruses carry genes between organisms. Horizontal evolution, no heredity needed. Suppose a scenario, for example, that as soon as Earth cooled down from its formation by melting impact of smaller asteroids, say 4.5 billion years ago, cyanobacteria rained down on it and started converting its atmosphere to oxygen. As soon as there was enough oxygen, why forams or small critters that make up plankton could grow. But no planktonic organism would survive the conditions on comets, so it looks like Earth might have to evolve the ability itself. But no, all we need is a virus from space to arrive with some useful genes and bingo, new organisms appear on Earth. 

Or for another scenario, suppose we have these Earth oceans teeming with life, and really big asteroid wallops the Earth, melts the crust, evaporates the oceans, turns the atmosphere to steam, and sterilizes the planet. How are we going to get our trilobites back? No problem, viruses have been hiding out in the mud have stashed away all the necessary genes to splice things back together. After all, what is the trigger for those annoying cold-sores that go dormant in your face for years, but in times of stress will break out and start shedding virus particles? Could not the Earth be full of such latent viruses, waiting for the trigger that makes them multiply?

The Earth, then, is no grab bag of individual species all competing ferociously for survival, any more than the modern global economy is a bunch of capitalist-crazed monopolies trying to extract the most money from your wallet. Just as economies function better with rational cooperation, so also the biosphere functions better with rational cooperation. While Gaia might be too much an anthopomorphic attempt to describe the biosphere, it is also too limited, for the biosphere includes not just Earth, but Mars and Titan and Europa and the Oort Cloud, and probably even the rest of the galaxy.

And what exactly would a galactic Gaia mean? Forget Darwin and his warm pond, that is just sooo parochial. We are either talking Hindu pantheism, or monotheistic Creationism. There really aren't any other choices. Hoyle and perhaps Wickramasinghe believe that if the Universe is eternal, then one can have a quasi-random pantheism without a Creation. This runs counter to all the rest of astrophysics that insist on a beginning, a Big Bang, which to his dying days, Hoyle denied. But without Hoyle's refuge in infinity, creation and a galactic biosphere are two absolutely fatal blows to Darwinian evolution.

A unique conference indeed.