Detecting life on other planets by measuring molecular chirality | Hacker News Reader

Detecting life on other planets by measuring molecular chirality

eurekalert.org

16 pointsCatDancer5 comments

So, presence of oxygen and methane aren't necessarily indicators of life because "that makes assumptions about what life is", but stating that life must result in a huge majority of specific-handed molecules doesn't?

You've got it backwards. They are not saying all life-bearing planets must have chiral molecules, and therefore we can tell whether a planet has life based on the light. They are saying that if a planet exhibits light coming from a source with lots of chiral molecules, then the only known explanation is life, and we can conclude it is life. A non-chiral source proves nothing either way.

Note this same logic holds for oxygen. This expands our ability to positively identify life to places that may not have gone the oxygen route. (We know this is possible, because Earth itself was like that for a while, and we continue to have a wide variety of anaerobic organisms, and even some complete anaerobic biomes underground, I believe.) It does nothing to our ability to negatively identify life (or positively identify lack of life, if you like), which we have little ability to do in general.

No one is stating that live must produce large numbers of chiral molecules, but that large numbers of chiral molecules are expected to be produced by life.

(Although it is harder to imagine life without chiral molecules than life without carbon molecules.)

I'm wondering how likely this is to work over interstellar distances. Especially, given most (if not all) extrasolar planets have been detected through indirect means (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_planet#Detection_met...) rather than direct imaging.

Though I haven't read the article, but if the title suggests that life is limited to what we observe on Earth, then either we are defining life that way (and by definition we would only have it on earth-like objects) or have taken a very narrow view of what life is. Life is a very fuzzy concept, every researcher, every journalist defines it in his own way. Does life have to have carbon? Does it have to wiggle?

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