If there was a simple meaning of the often-used scientific term “emergence,” then 100-plus scientists wouldn’t have spent four days presenting, debating and not infrequently disagreeing about what it was. But as last month’s organizers of the Earth-Life Science Institute’s “Comparative Emergence” symposium in Tokyo frequently reminded the participants, those debates and disputes are …
The Moon-Forming Impact And Its Gifts
The question of how life-essential elements such as carbon, nitrogen and sulfur came to our planet has been long debated and is a clearly important and slippery scientific subject. Did these volatile elements accrete onto the proto-Earth from the sun's planetary disk as the planet was being formed? Did they arrive substantially later …
Time-Traveling in the Australian Outback in Search of Early Earth
This story was written by Nicholas Siegler, Chief Technologist for NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with the help of doctoral student Markus Gogouvitis, at the University of New South Wales, Australia and Georg-August-University in Gottingen, Germany. This past July I joined a group of geologists, geochemists, microbiologists, and fellow …
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Piecing Together The Narrative of Evolution
An essential characteristic of life is that it evolves. Whether on Earth or potentially Mars, Europa or distant exoplanets, we can assume that whatever life might be present has the capacity and the need to change. Evolution is intimately tied to the origin-of-life question, which this column often explores. Having more answers regarding how life …
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Diamonds and Science: The Deep Earth, Deep Time, and Extraterrestrial Crystal Rain
We all know that cut diamonds sparkle and shine, one of the great aesthetic creations from nature. Less well known is that diamonds and the bits of minerals, gases and water encased in them offer a unique opportunity to probe the deepest regions of our planet. Thought to be some of the oldest available materials …
To Understand Habitability, We Need to Return to Venus
“You can feel what it’s like on Venus here on Earth,” said Kevin McGouldrick from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “Heat a hot plate until it glows red, place your palm on its surface and then run over that hand with a truck.” The surface of Venus …
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2.5 Billion Years of Earth History in 100 Square Feet
Along the edge of an inlet on a tiny Japanese island can be found– side by side – striking examples of conditions on Earth some 2.4 billion years ago, then 1.4 billion years ago and then the Philippine Sea of today. First is a small channel with iron red, steaming and largely oxygen-free water – …
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Could High-Energy Radiation Have Played an Important Role in Getting Earth Ready For Life?
A version of this article first appeared in Astrobiology Magazine, http://www.astrobio.net. Life on early Earth seems to have begun with a paradox: while life needs water as a solvent, the essential chemical backbones of early life-forming molecules fall apart in water. Our universal solvent, it turns out, can be extremely corrosive. Some have pointed to …
Messy Chemistry: A New Way to Approach the Origins of Life
More than a half century ago, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey famously put water and gases believed to make up the atmosphere of early Earth into a flask with water, sparked the mix with an electric charge, and produced amino acids and other chemical building blocks of life. The experiment was hailed as a ground-breaking …
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In Search of Panspermia (and Life on Icy Moons)
Sometimes personal affairs intervene for all of us, and they have now for your Many Worlds writer and his elderly father. But rather than remain off the radar screen, I wanted to repost this column which has a new import. It turns out that versions of the instrument described below -- a miniature gene …
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Many Worlds 