For Dale Anderson, the quest to discover what life exists on other worlds means delving into the fiercest regions of our own.
Anderson, with his colleagues at the new Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, hopes to help answer one of humankind’s most essential questions: Are we alone in the universe?
Many of the scientists at the Sagan Center, part of Mountain View’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, spend time looking through telescopes and studying data received from satellites and space probes. But Anderson does most of his work far from Mountain View, above the Arctic Circle. He dives into water locked beneath thick sheets of frozen ice to study the microscopic creatures that live there. In learning how those beings survive, he hopes to figure out if, and how, creatures could live — or could have lived — in the frigid climes of Mars.
SETI leaders founded the Sagan Center to create a central entity for top scientists there and elsewhere who are working on this search for extraterrestrial life, said former NASA-Ames chief Scott Hubbard, who heads the new center.
This move to get the 50 or so Sagan Center “principal investigators” under one umbrella comes at a crucial time, as NASA is cutting funding to such efforts by half, Hubbard said. One of his main goals at Sagan Center chair is to raise funds from corporations and individuals to keep the search going.
SETI research is the kind that takes lots of patience and has to be looked at from numerous angles, Hubbard said. “Our goal in creating this center is to provide a long-range strategic view. Our scientists need stability for the long haul.”
The center will need to raise several million dollars over the next few years to make up for the shortfall in funding from NASA, Hubbard said. This would allow the center to build a new lab for looking at extraterrestrial organics — carbon material that comes into Earth’s atmosphere on the backs of meteorites.
In that vein, another Sagan Center researcher, Mark Showalter, studies the atmospheres of Jupiter and other far-off bodies. His goal is to see if there’s any evidence there that would point to similar planets in other stellar systems. “As far as we know, in order to have life you have to have planets,” he said.
Showalter gets a lot of his data from the Hubbell Telescope and spacecraft like Cassini and New Horizons. The New Horizons craft is on its way to Pluto and will pass Jupiter in four months, hopefully providing plenty of interesting information for Showalter’s research. “I am a lucky guy,” he said. “I get to work with some of the most sophisticated devices ever created.”
Such high-level research can have applications beyond the search for extraterrestrial life, Hubbard said. For instance, some of the information from devices that take images of outer space can be transferred to help understand our home planet. One Sagan scientist is working with multispectral imagining — looking at infrared light — to study changes in microscopic organisms in the San Francisco Bay, Hubbard said.
Anderson’s work with “extremophiles” — organisms that exist in very hot, very cold or otherwise inhospitable climates — could be of interest to pharmaceutical researchers, Hubbard.
“Let’s say a biotech company can sequence the genes for an organism that can exist in high ultraviolet or high radiation; that could turn into some kind of medical therapy for you and me,” Hubbard said.
Other researchers are looking into protecting Earth from the kind of asteroid collision that wiped out the dinosaurs. Still others are trying to predict earthquakes.
Such research can seem abstract, subjecting scientists and their parent organization to ridicule in Congress when they ask for government funding, Hubbard said. “We need this [donated] money to follow out-of-the-box but interesting ideas.”
As a grad student at Cornell University more than 20 years ago, Showalter knew Carl Sagan, and he thinks the famous astronomer would approve.
“The man has quite a legacy and he certainly inspired me to go into astronomy,” Showalter said. “Working at a place that honors his memory is really a privilege.”
