Search for Life Needs Rethinking

May 17, 2006 -- -- If you were on a distant planet, and if you had instruments that could tell you the composition of Earth's atmosphere, how would you know there was life on this planet?

Water in the atmosphere would suggest there could be water on the surface, and as we all know water is considered crucial to life. But water would only suggest that life is possible. It wouldn't prove it's there.

Carbon? That basic component of "life as we know it?" Not necessarily. A diamond is pure carbon, and it may be pretty, but it isn't alive.

What really sets Earth apart is nitrogen, which makes up 80 percent of the planet's atmosphere. And it's there only because there is abundant life on Earth, say scientists at the University of Southern California, who have come up with a provocative approach to searching for life on other planets.

"If there wasn't anything biological on Earth, there wouldn't be very much nitrogen in the atmosphere," says Douglas Capone, professor of environmental biology at USC and lead author of a report in a recent issue of the journal Science. The report grew out of a class discussion two years ago in a course taught by Capone and Kenneth Nealson, professor of earth sciences.

Students were asked to come up with different ideas about searching for extraterrestrial life. What is a distinct "signature," as Capone puts it, that would show there is life on another planet?

That's a question that has been kicked around in many quarters in recent decades, especially since all efforts to find some form of life, no matter how primitive, either on Mars or in the distant reaches of space, have failed. At least so far.

The current effort to search for some evidence of life, even fossilized life, on Mars focuses primarily on the search for water, because it has long been believed that water, or at least some fluid, is necessary for the chemical processes that lead life to take place. But that's probably the wrong approach, the USC group argues.

"It's hard to imagine life without water, but it's easy to imagine water without life," says Nealson, who was on the Mars team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory before moving to USC.