Before telling you about the news I am about to comment on, a premise: every day a study from a certain university comes out to talk about, and which the media generally takes as good, but the scientific community does not. To be credible, a single study must be verified independently by all scientists in the sector. Then there are studies that are not real studies but hypotheses, which nevertheless make people talk about themselves. Also because researchers believe that after a while they are disappointed by not having discovered anything.
Coming to today’s news. A planetary scientist, Robin Wordsworth, and an astrobiologist, Charles Cockwell, the former from Harvard University and the latter from the University of Edinburgh, have published a study arguing that life does not need planets. It can thus be generated in space. They took as an example organisms such as cyanobacteria or arctic algae (which formed billions of years ago, but on Earth). Imagining that in space “biologically generated barriers” can let in the light necessary for photosynthesis, block ultraviolet light and maintain adequate temperature and pressure values for water to remain in a liquid state in the cosmic freeze.
How stupid are all the other scientists and astrobiologists who are looking for life forms on exoplanets (planets close to other stars), or rather are looking for planets where life is possible. That they have the conditions under which life can form, oxygen (an atmosphere), liquid water, and a magnetic field that protects it from solar and cosmic radiation. There may also be planets with more unlivable conditions in which some form of life may have formed.
Of course, anything can be hypothesized. But where would they get the water, which would be kept in a liquid state by these organisms? And for radiation, how would they protect themselves without their DNA being broken down? Would they invent bio-suits, little Iron Mans adrift in space? Of course, we have tardigrades, microscopic invertebrates capable of resisting almost everything, absence of oxygen, nuclear radiation, but with a small detail: they developed on Earth, in the long and complex biological path of evolution. So much so that we have not yet found any life form in the solar system. We could perhaps find it on Europa, Jupiter’s satellite, since the Galileo probe, in 1997, revealed a jet of water from a surface geyser, demonstrating the existence of an ocean beneath the crust.
Here, if we could get there, perhaps there could be life (not something similar to a whale, more like our friendly aforementioned tardigrade).
In any case, I am sure of one thing. The news of the day is this. But the one not tomorrow will not be that at NASA they exclaimed: «Wow! We did it all wrong! We have to look for space algae!