In “Weird Life,†David Toomey writes about the search for life that is not just strange, but very strange; in fact, like nothing we’ve discovered before. In a recent e-mail interview, Mr. Toomey discussed the origins of life on Earth, the porous line between science and philosophy, his favorite science fiction and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
You’re an English professor with a Ph.D. in English literature. How did you get so deeply interested in science, and how did you come to write about it
I don’t recall a time when I was not interested in science and the natural world. I do, though, recall a moment when I began to wonder why others were not. I was four or ive years old, and I asked an adult how far away the moon was. The answer was evasive, and I realized the answerer didn’t really know. In some ways I still don’t understand how people â€" particularly adults â€" can be so incurious about the world around them, and I think I came to write about science in part because I saw that incuriosity as a problem. (By the way, the moon is about a quarter of a million miles distant, give or take.)
First things first: You differentiate “weird life†from “familiar life†and even “extreme familiar life.†What’s the quickest way to explain that distinction to a layperson
“Familiar life†is a phrase I (and many others) use to describe the kind of life we know to exist â€" you, me, geraniums, blue whales, sponges, soft shell crabs. “Extreme familiar life†is life we know to exist that survives in extreme environments, like hydrothermal vents near the ocean floor. Familiar life of both varieties has DNA, the same 20 or so amino acids and proteins, and a biochemistry that employs the same chemical pathways and uses liquid water as a solvent. These shared features lead biologists to believe that all familiar life is descended from a single common ancestor and may be represented somewhere on a single phylogenetic tree. “Weird life,†if it exists, would be something completely different. It might have other features (other amino acids or other chemical pathways, for instance), it would not be descended from that ancestor, and it would be represented on another tree entirely.
The book focuses on the possibility of finding weird life elsewhere in the universe. What are the odds of finding it on Earth
Since we know so little about life’s origin, it’s difficult to give odds for this. If life is an ievitable result of complex chemistry and can arise quickly in a broad range of environmental conditions, then the odds are very good that there might have been a second genesis of another kind of life on Earth, and that it might survive somewhere on Earth today. If however, life requires a very special set of environmental conditions over a long period, then the odds are slim.
After the recent dazzling meteor that landed in Russia, I was particularly taken with the theory that life (or the makings of life) arrived on Earth aboard a meteor. Is this a mainstream theory, and do you think there are decent odds that it’s true
We know that most of Earth’s water arrived by meteorite, and research by Lou Allamandola and his colleagues at NASA Ames suggest! s that so! me surprisingly large and complex molecules came with it. Some of these molecules may have been precursors to life. As to whether life itself had an extraterrestrial origin, it’s certainly possible, but we’d have a long way to go to prove it.
Would it be so thrilling to find, say, a microbe on one of Saturn’s moons, or is sentient life the only kind that would have significant ramifications for us on Earth
The discovery of sentient life would have immediate, profound and probably widespread ramifications for us on Earth. The discovery of a microbe on a Saturnian moon would certainly be thrilling to a biologist, and I hope it would also be thrilling to anyone who gave thought to our place in the cosmos. That microbe would show that life is not exclusive to Earth, and may be widespread in a universe that is stranger and more interesting than many had imagined.
Leslie Haynsworth David ToomeyWhat’s the state of support for searching for life in the rest of the universe
At present, no missions to search for life elsewhere are being planned or developed by NASA or the European Space Agency. The only mission now underway to perform onsite study of any planet or moon’s surface is NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (better known as the Curiosity rover), and it is designed not to detect life directly, but merely the conditions that would make it possible.
Is NASA devoting enough resources to it, in your opinion
NASA should probably not take advice f! rom Engli! sh professors.
You cite several works of science fiction and their imaginings about life elsewhere. Do you have a favorite fictional depiction of weird life
If pressed for a favorite, I’d say the planet-wide sentient ocean in Stanislaw Lem’s novel “Solaris,†and the two films of the same name. Thousands of scientists spend their lifetimes studying it and theorizing about it, yet they cannot understand it, and cannot even say exactly what it is they are studying and theorizing about. It’s the best dramatization I know of the geneticist and evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane’s truism, which I’ll paraphrase as, “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine.â€
