Adam Frank: belief

Transcript context

…What kind of chemicals would life produce? Right. And that’s the interesting thing. So we can use earth as an example. We can say, look, oxygen. We know there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere if it wasn’t for dimethyl sulfide, which is a compound that phylloplankton dump into the atmosphere, a lot of it, that’s sometimes mentioned. And there was a paper that somebody wrote where it was like, “Well, we’re not saying we see it, but there’s a bunch of noise in the spectra right there.” So there’s a whole list of things that earth has done that are in the atmosphere that might be biosignatures, but now we’re reaching an interesting point. The field has matured to the point where we can start asking about agnostic biosignatures, things that have nothing to do with earth’s history, but we think that would still be indications of this weirdness we call life. What is it in general that life does that leaves an imprint? So one of these things could be the structure of the network of chemical reactions that biology always produces very different chemical networks, who’s reacting with who, than just rock and water. So there’s been some proposals for networked biosignatures. Information theory, you can try and look at the information that is in the different compounds that you find in the atmosphere, and maybe that information shows you like, “Oh, there’s too much information here. There must’ve been biology happening. It’s not just rock.” Same thing for techno. That’s what we’re working on right now, for technosignatures as well. So how do you detect technosignatures?…

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