Dr. Sara Seager

Well, we don't know if life exists there.

And this is like the billion dollar question that everyone has of how do we know if there's life anywhere?

And at the moment, what scientists are doing is they draw a dividing line.

in chemistry.

And on one side of the line are the kinds of basic molecules that nature provides, like from photochemistry or from volcanoes or minerals or just chemicals that are just present.

And on the other side of that line are incredibly complex molecules.

so complex that we think only life could make the molecules.

And therefore, one of the main ideas is if we can find complex molecules, we can infer the presence of life.

The only problem is where do you draw that line?

And also that line keeps changing.

Well, I would say yes and no.

I mean, if you think about it, people are trying to create life on Earth in the lab, like life that may have arisen here on Earth first early on in water, and scientists still haven't been successful at that, although they've been successful in many separate areas in the formation and origin of life.

So we can repeat those same experiments.

Like, for example, here on Earth, in the laboratory, people take lipids, like fats with heads, like polar head groups, and they put those in water to try to form little compartments, vesicles.

We can't say primitive cell membrane, but that's to get the idea, like little tiny spherical vesicles, you know, because all of our life has compartments.

So we can copy some of those ideas and we can try to find materials that are stable in concentrated sulfuric acid, what the Venus clouds are made of, and we have done that.

Well, in this case, I'd like to give credit to Daniel Dizdevich, who was the lead author on this work, part of Jack Shostak's group.

And they took some lipids with polar heads.

So these are simple like, you know, chains of carbon atoms and about 10 or 12 long.

And you put them in water and they point their polar head outward.