Lee Cronin
speaker
545 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Jun 2024
Lee Cronin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So that would be, you know, it's kind of a sliding scale. It's kind of nice. Got it.
Yeah.
I would do mass spec.
I would, I would look, yeah. So if you're just going to Mars or Titan or Enceladus or somewhere, so a number of ways of doing it. So you could take a large scoop or you'd go for the atmosphere and detect stuff. So, and you can make a light, um, a life meter, right? So, um, well,
One of Sarah's colleagues at ASU, Paul Davis, keeps calling it a life meter, which is quite a nice idea because you think about it. If you've got a living system that's producing these highly complex molecules and they drift away and they're in a highly kind of…
demanding environment they could be burnt right so they could just be falling apart so you want to sniff a little bit of complexity and say warmer warmer warmer oh we've found life we found the alien we've found we found the alien elon musk smoking a joint in the bottom of the cave on mars or elon himself whatever right you say okay found it so what you can do is the mass spectrometer um
you could just look for things in the gas phase, or you go on the surface, drill down, because you want to find molecules that are... You've either got to find the source living system, because the problem with just looking for complexity is it gets burnt away.
So in a harsh environment on, say, on the surface of Mars, there's a very low probability that you're going to find really complex molecules because of all the radiation and so on. If you drill down a little bit, you could drill down a bit into soil that's billions of years old.
Then I would put in some solvent, water, alcohol or something, or take a scoop, make it volatile, put it into the mass spectrometer and just try and detect high complexity, high abundant molecules. And if you get them, hey presto, you can have evidence of life. Wouldn't that then be great if you could say, okay, we've found evidence of life.
Now we want to keep the life meter, keep searching for more and more complexity until you actually find living cells. You can get those new living cells and then you could bring them back to Earth or you could try and sequence them. You could see that they have different DNA and proteins. Go along the gradient of the light.
So I would take a life, so my life meter, our life meter, there you go. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Would have both infrared and mass spec. So it would have two ports so it could shine a light. And so what it would do is you would have a vacuum chamber and you would have an electrostatic analyzer and you'd have a monochromator to producing infrared and
So you'd take a scoop of the sample, put it in the life meter. It would then add a solvent or heat up the sample, so some volatiles come off. The volatiles would then be put into the mass spectrometer, into electrostatic trap, and you'd weigh the molecules and fragment them. Alternatively, you'd shine infrared light on them. You'd count the number of bands.
But you'd have to, in that case, do some separation because you want to separate. And so in mass spec, it's really nice and convenient because you can separate electrostatically. But you need to have that. Can you do it in real time? Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much, yeah. So let's go all the way back. Okay, we're really going to get this. Let's go. Lex and Lee. No, no, Lex and Lee.
All right. So you have a vacuum chamber. You have a little nose. The nose would have a packing material. So you would take your sample, add it onto the nose, add a solvent or a gas. It would then be sucked up the nose. And that would be separated using what we call chromatography. And then as each band comes off the nose, we would then do mass spec and infrared.
And in the case of the infrared, count the number of bands. In the case of mass spec, count the number of fragments and weigh it. And then the further up in molecular weight range for the mass spec and the number of bands, you go up and up and up from the dead, interesting, interesting, over the threshold, oh my gosh, Earth life.
And then right up to batshit crazy, this is definitely alien intelligence that's made this life, right? You could almost go all the way there. Same in the infrared. And it's pretty simple. The thing that is really problematical is that for many years, decades...
What people have done, and I can't blame them, is rather they've been obsessing about small biomarkers that we find on Earth, amino acids, like single amino acids or evidence of small molecules and these things, and looking for those, looking for complexity. The beautiful thing about this is you can look for complexity without Earth chemistry bias or Earth biology bias.
So assembly theory is just a way of saying, hey, complexity and abundance is evidence of selection. That's how our universal life meter will work.
So we did this a few years ago when I was trying to convince NASA and colleagues that this technique could work. And honestly, it's so funny because everyone's like, no, it ain't going to work. And I was just like, because the chemists were saying, of course there are complicated molecules out there you can detect that just form randomly. I was like, really?
That's like, that was like, you know, it's a bit like a... I don't know, someone saying, of course, Darwin's textbook was just written randomly by some monkeys and a typewriter. Just for me, it was like, really? And I've pushed a lot on the chemists now, and I think most of them are on board, but not totally.
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