While we’re still waiting for ET to give us a ring, many worlds might not have life that’s discovered the joys of radio yet. Scientists ran a two-pronged study to see how bacteria might fare on other worlds.
We currently define the Habitable Zone (HZ) of a planet by the likelihood that particular planet can host liquid water due to its peculiar blend of atmosphere and distance from its star. While this doesn’t guarantee the presence of life, its a good first place to start. Trying to expand on this, the scientists used a climate model to refine the boundaries of the HZ for atmosphere’s dominated by H2 and CO2 gases.
Once they determined these limits, they then mixed up some example atmospheres and subjected E. coli to the environments. Their findings “indicate that atmospheric composition significantly affects bacterial growth patterns, highlighting the importance of considering diverse atmospheres in evaluating exoplanet habitability and advancing the search for life beyond Earth.”
If you want to look more into what might be out there, how about analyzing the WOW Signal or looking at what the Drake Equation is all about.
So they tested standard air, 90% N2 + 10% CO2, 100% CO2, 80% methane + 15% N2 + 5% CO2, and 100% H2 atmospheres. I don’t think it is terribly surprising that they got growth in all of them, as we already knew E. coli was a facultative anaerobe, and most of those gases are present in anaerobic gas mixes, although maybe not at those concentrations. The CO2 atmosphere caused the slowest growth. At a glance they don’t mention monitoring the pH of the LB medium, so I wonder if higher levels of dissolved CO2 were nudging that outside E. coli’s preferred range, hence the slower growth.
“Their findings ‘indicate that atmospheric composition significantly affects bacterial growth patterns…'”
In related news, I just received a sizable grant to study if heavier objects weigh more. The funding committee asked for a timetable to completion and I assured them my research will be finished the day my car loan is paid off.
Take an organism developed and evolved in one environment, place it in another and it’s growth pattern changes. Well, of course it does! What does that tell you about whether something else could or could not develop and grow in that environment originally?
I’m normally resistant to complaints about academic studies being wastes of money because I know there is so much anti-intellectualism, anti-tech and anti-science out there. I just assume all that stuff is someone’s crappy bias coming out. But I am starting to wonder if maybe there is more truth to it.
Boy we got a bunch of geniuses in the comment section here, instead of doing the study they should’ve just asked you guys since you’re all clairvoyant.
To be fair, they may be geniuses indeed. In some way.
Look, in German there’s the term “Fachidiot” (special field idiot) that refers to a person who knows a lot about a very limited topic only.
Such a person lacks knowledge of other fields, thus he/she can’t make the connection to related fields that might be important in relation to the topic.
Hence, laymen with a lot of knowledge from all over the place may “see through” in a situation in which an expert doesn’t.
So it’s not bad if laymen do question experts and challenge them.
Yeah you’d think we’d have learned this lesson approximately five years ago. Turns out fachidiots make very poor leaders and are terrible at general reasoning and reading the room
Heh, yeah. Good point! ;) What I was refering to was a healthy amount of common sense and general knowledge.
Because, so the logic goes, if you have a wide coverage of a little bit of knowledge of everything then you can decide to increase the knowledge of a special field, as well.
It allows you to select special information and learn it.
By contrast, if you’re living in a bubble and know of your own special field only, then you don’t know what knowledge you’re missing and can’t complete your knowledge.
So it’s generally good if people have various interests and hobbies.
Even experts can benefit from general knowledge that’s not directly related to their fields.
Because if they’re just a little bit more than one-trick ponies, then they can already call out for help. Experts of other fields then can join the discussion and they all can work together as a team.
A layman isn’t the same as a “jack of all trades, master of none, but often better than a master of one” as the phrase goes. The thing about a master of a trade is that it’s more than a journeyman which is more than an apprentice, and the number of masters is limited, it’s not automatic just because someone has been a journeyman for a number of years. This is a traditional view, perhaps it’s different from the modern one, but traditionally it’s entirely reasonable to buy a very well crafted thing from a journeyman who’s been one for a long time, while the master only takes on the special jobs and consults with the journeyman and such. The highly paid professional in the modern world may not be a master in the way I mean it.
That all being said, the phrase isn’t “An apprentice of all trades beats a master of one”. A layman who’s not even got the experience or skill of an apprentice isn’t what the phrase talks about either. The person who’s as good as a journeyman at many trades, that’s the guy who can beat a master of one trade. A true master of even one trade will acquire at least some skill at adjacent trades in the process of mastering his own, and if he ever turns his mind to another trade and puts his full humble effort in, he will almost certainly find some of his skill transfers.
People tend to want geniuses and experts to have some glaring weakness to make it possible to devalue them. Consider stereotypes from your teen years at school – if someone is smart and gets good grades, then they have to either be considered socially unthreatening (shy, awkward, unable to read the room, friendless) or physically deficient (bad vision, ugly, weak, bad hygiene) so that the social pecking order isn’t threatened. Of course while these can go together, it’s obviously not necessary, yet things like this still exist in the real world even though we’re all theoretically supposed to have grown up. In reality while you can get to positions of authority while being clueless, most people who demonstrate actual expertise and mastery of one subject are able to handle basic real life issues better than a random 12 year old would.
That said you do get the people in bubbles where they can’t understand things any other way than their own, and can’t therefore extend their knowledge by working with someone else who’s better at other things – I just don’t grant them the rank of master :P
Or let me put it this way, the Titanic was being designed and built by experts, while Noah’s Ark had been built by laymen, ;)
I keep writing to them with my enormous treatise on alien life which was all revealed to me in a dream, but they aren’t calling me back for some reason…
Run the experiments for 20 years and then you may have useful data about what bacteria can and cannot evolve to handle. BTW there have been similar experiments of very long time periods. Would be interesting to start with different synthetic genomes, minimally and maximally complex metabolic capabilities, then see what is gained or lost over time.