Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Was a Natural Fuel Cell Key to the Origin of Life on Earth?

Episode Date: July 1, 2014

There’s so much we don’t know about the origin of life here or anywhere else in the universe. But there must have been an energy source. Researcher Laurie Barge led work that simulated the natural formation of a fuel cell that may have taken place in Earth’s primordial oceans.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Life, the Universe and Fuel Cells, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Did life on Earth get its start deep in the primordial ocean as the sort of chemical reaction that drives a fuel cell? That's the line of research being investigated by scientists, including our guest this week. Lori Barge recently led publication of a paper about the laboratory simulation of conditions around warm ocean floor vents that has very interesting implications. We'll talk with her in a few minutes.

Bill Nye continues to follow developments in the NASA-supported efforts by three companies that hope to provide rides to the International Space Station in their commercially developed space vehicles. Later today, a sleepy Bruce Betts will tell us what he saw in the sky that kept him up last night. Emily Lakdawalla has begun a well-earned three-week vacation. Filling in for her this week is a new addition to the staff of the Planetary Society. Jason Davis has been contributing terrific articles to a Society blog for a long time. Now, with the arrival of an exciting new phase for the LightSail project, he has moved up to full-time work.

We talked via Skype a few days ago. Jason, welcome aboard. Hey, thanks, Matt. Glad to be here. And it is great to have somebody in this role. Great to know that LightSail is moving along enough that we need somebody in this role. What will you actually be up to? I will be serving as a sort of embedded journalist. I'll be following the team closely and working with them and posting regular updates as we continue to get the spacecraft ready for

launch. All right, well, let's get that started right here, although people should be looking for your blog entries on a regular basis, as they have probably been seeing them now and then in the past about lots of other topics. But now now lots of focus on light sail. So where are we? What's happening with the project? Right now, the team is preparing for a full day-in-the-life test. They will be essentially setting the spacecraft up to perform as if it had just been released from its launch vehicle, is unfurling its sails, and beginning to send some of the first data back to Earth. That test is now planned for later in July.

And after that, it's off to environmental testing in August. And then they're going to get ready to integrate it into the launch vehicle. And this is, it's not an easy process. They do run into challenges now and then, don't they? Yes, they do. One of the big problems they are trying to work on right now is a problem with the spacecraft's boom deployment system. There are triangular booms that extend from the spacecraft and pull the sail out once it's in orbit. The spacecraft had sat dormant for

a couple years while some other critical components on it were upgraded, namely the software. When they tried to do a boom-only test earlier in June, they ran into some snags. And they seem to have worked through most of those, and that set them up for this full day-in-the-life test. A big milestone coming up. And then more big milestones that we will be talking about in a live webcast that we hope people will tune in to. Jason, I'm really glad that you will be joining us for part of that show. It is going to be Wednesday, July 9th, beginning at 7 p.m. Pacific. And we'll put up the link to find this.

We're doing it with our friends at Southern California Public Radio, KPCC, here in the Los Angeles area. We're going to do it in their Crawford Family Forum, and so they'll be originating the webcast. If you are local, if you're going to be in Southern California, there may still be seats left, but we do hope you'll go to the web page that we will put up on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio, and get from there to the KPCC page

where you can join us for the webcast, and we'll be taking a few questions from folks out there in the virtual world as well. Should be a very exciting announcement that we will have for people. And, Jason, glad you'll be joining us. Going to be glad to be there, and it's good to be on board. Thank you so much, Jason. Jason Davis, as you heard, our embedded journalist,

who will be blogging and covering in many other ways, including video, the LightSail project, which is moving into a very exciting phase. Up next, the CEO of the Planetary Society, the guy in charge of all this stuff, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill, welcome back. I think you want to talk about developments on the commercial crew front. That's right. Although I'm CEO of the Planetary Society, we focus on planetary exploration, what's called the commercial crew efforts or commercial crew program to take humans to the International Space Station. This is at the forefront right now of the news in space. There's three companies,

the venerable Boeing, the very, very well regarded SpaceX, space exploration technologies, and Sierra Nevada space are all competing to make a capsule, a spacecraft that can go up and back inexpensively. I mean, inexpensively in space terms. In relative terms, right. Yeah. And so there's a lot of money at stake. Each company's taken over $400 million from the U.S. government, $440 million or so. And there's a lot riding on this. And when people are in space, Matt, when people are flying around, that's when everybody on Earth gets excited about space exploration in a way that my beloved robots don't get people involved.

If you're out there listening, you're a voter and taxpayer, follow the story. It's a really important time, a transitional time in space exploration. We don't have the resources to go back to the moon right now or go to Mars. That's not Coke or Pepsi. Mars is an extraordinary, huge undertaking. But it's important to keep people flying in space, to keep everyone on Earth engaged in space exploration, because space exploration, as I like to say, Matt, brings out the best in us. So here's hoping that whichever two companies come through this sieve, this next round of cuts in commercial crew, and by cuts I mean like a sports team, people who get to play on the varsity,

whoever gets to play on the varsity in space is really going to change the world. It's an important and transitional time. Indeed. Thanks, Bill. And I also want to mention that same light sail event, that live webcast that we're doing on the evening of July 9th. You'll be there with us. You'll be on stage. Oh, yes. I go way back with solar sailing. My predecessor, Lou Friedman, wrote a textbook about it,

which I bought when I was in engineering school almost 40 years ago. Wow. And so I am a big fan of solar sailing. And this spacecraft, this technology really could lower the cost of all sorts of missions in space. And frankly, it's just cool. We'll be able to see it from the ground, built by members, just people who are excited about space. And I'm hoping by lowering the cost of space exploration, we can engage more people and dare I say it, Matt, change the world. Thank you, Bill. Thank you. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society. Up next, a conversation about closing in on the origin of life and how it may have started out a little bit like a fuel cell. Where do we come from and are we alone?

Those are the two biggest questions Bill Nye says scientists want to answer. The work we're about to talk about may have something to say about both of those quests. My guest, Lori Barge, led the study presented in the March issue of the journal Astrobiology. Even the title of the paper is enticing in a science geeky way, the fuel cell model of abiogenesis, a new approach to origin of lifeulations. Lori is a postdoctoral fellow on the IC Worlds team at NASA's Astrobiology Institute. The institute is based at the Ames Research Center, but she does most of her work at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Southern California. That's where I got her on the Skype line a few days ago for a conversation about this research

and the laboratory simulation of conditions that may well have existed billions of years ago before life appeared on this planet. Laurie, it's kind of rare for a paper to give me goosebumps, and I'm very happy to be talking to you as the lead author of this paper that came out in March. Once again, welcome to the show. Thank you. So is it accurate to say that I am alive and kicking and talking to you because my cell's ancestors learned how to act like fuel cells? Well, sort of. Your cells actually are able to perform a lot of the same functions that a fuel

cell or a battery does. For example, they transfer electricity in their enzymes. They also, because the membrane separates two fluids, that provides an energy source, and the cell takes advantage of that. And this is the same principle that fuel cells use in order to harness electricity from, say, a fuel. And on the early Earth, a similar thing would have occurred in deep-sea vents.

And that membrane is really key to all of this, isn't it? That's correct. And on the early Earth, these hydrothermal vents would have produced a fluid that is very, very different from the ocean water that it would have been feeding into. The hydrothermal vents you're talking about, they're a little bit different than the famous images we've seen of these that are called black smokers? Yes. The vents that I'm talking about, these are more gentle vents. They're not superheated. They're merely warm. And these vents were predicted by Michael Russell, who's my advisor at JPL, to exist, and they were found in 2001. So it's thought that on the early Earth, those type of vents, these gentle, warm vents,

would have been able to act as fuel cells, as flow-through reactors, and possibly drive reactions that could have led to an emergence of life. So what is special about what is coming out of these vents, at least what is different as compared to the seawater that surrounds them, or maybe I should say surrounded them millions or billions of years ago. That is actually what allows the vent to produce its energy. The seawater on the early Earth would have been acidic, like soda water. It would have contained dissolved carbon dioxide. And so the water that would come out of these gentle alkaline vents would have also been alkaline, which means that there would be a difference in the amount of protons between the two fluids. And when you set up a gradient of protons, that actually is an energy source,

and it's the same type of energy source that life uses today. Where does a membrane come into this? The membrane is what separates the two solutions. Even in a battery or in a fuel cell, it's very important to have the two solutions, the fuel and the oxidant, be separated by some kind of barrier. If they mix, you don't have this, what's called a disequilibrium between them anymore. So in these hydrothermal vents, a chimney structure would grow. And you can see these today on Earth. We have vents such as the Lost City vent, which is in the North Atlantic. There's also black smokers that have chimneys as well.

These chimneys are hollow, and the wall of the chimney is a mineral that separates the hydrothermal vent fluid from the ocean. So that wall, it's not like a brick wall, it's permeable. That's correct, just like a membrane in a cell. And there, of course, is where the magic lies, because what did you find when you, well, first of all, tell us what you attempted to do in the lab. Were you basically attempting to simulate under laboratory conditions

what we see in the oceans? That's right. And so this is work that I've been doing with Mike Russell to test his origin of life theory at JPL for the past four years. What you can do is simulate the growth of a hydrothermal chimney by making a simulated ocean of the early Earth and then slowly injecting a simulated hydrothermal vent fluid. And you can grow a very small mimic of a hydrothermal chimney this way. This has already been done by others before me. And what we did in this paper was try to convert

that experiment into an actual fuel cell experiment. And we may be able to post a photo at the show page where people will be able to find this at planetary.org slash radio of this laboratory experiment and these images of these little chimneys that you grew. Were you successful? Well, what we did first was set up a fuel cell and then try to define what components of that fuel cell correspond to what components of the vent. And not just a vent, but any geo-electrochemical system. There's other parts in geology that can behave similarly to a fuel cell. For example, the electrochemical corrosion of meteorites.

And there's other examples as well. In a fuel cell, you have the part that accepts and donates the electrons. This is the electrode. And that needs to be a conductive material that can catalyze a redox reaction. So what we wanted to do was make the catalytic material be similar to minerals that you might have found on the early Earth. We did a few different kinds of experiments here, trying to expand the fuel cell idea beyond simply the hydrothermal vent, but also testing whether or not meteorite corrosion could have occurred and could be simulated by this process. For one example here, we made simulated chimney material, and then we

tested whether or not a simulated chimney could conduct electrons. And it turns out that it can, which is not surprising since in modern black smoker systems, the chimney is capable of conducting electrons. When you mentioned the meteorites, you actually introduced some meteorite material, didn't you? Yes, and this is a separate experiment than the one that simulates the vent. This actually builds on very interesting work that's being done by the second author of this paper, Terry Key at the University of Leeds in the UK. That's Lori Barge of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, talking about research which may

be taking us closer to the origin of life on Earth. She'll tell us more after the break. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, this is Casey Dreyer, Director of Advocacy at the Planetary Society. We're busy building something new, something unprecedented, a real grassroots constituency for space. We Thank you. REX mission to asteroid Bennu. All the details are at planetary.org slash b-e-n-n-u. You can submit your name and then print your beautiful certificate. That's planetary.org slash Bennu.

Planetary Society members, your name is already on the list. The Planetary Society, we're your place in space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. The origin of life remains one of the greatest mysteries facing science. There are many things we don't understand about how a collection of organic and inorganic ingredients somehow became animated, self-replicating organisms. One thing is for sure, though, there must have been a source of energy to drive the process. Could that energy have been available at the juncture of warm alkaline vents at the bottom of the primordial ocean and the acidic water of those seas?

It appears the answer is yes, especially with the knowledge that naturally forming membranes can mediate the reaction between those two fluids. It is remarkably like the reaction that takes place in a fuel cell, the devices that have powered some human spacecraft and may someday power many of our cars. Research by our guest, Lori Barge, and her colleagues is helping to build the case.

She's with NASA's Astrobiology Institute and works at JPL. Let's go back to the fuel cell portion of this and the formation of that membrane, iron sulfide, inorganic, of course, but in function. Is it similar to the membrane that surrounds all of our cells? In certain ways. First of all, the membrane separates two different fluids, which is a very important means of maintaining the energy that's present. The membrane is also conductive because it's composed of certain minerals such as iron sulfide.

And some of these minerals that are found in these simulated early Earth events, they are very similar to the centers of enzymes that do the same kind of reactions. How big a jump is that to a membrane in a biotic system? Can you see, are we beginning to see the outline of a line of development, of evolution from this inorganic fuel cell-like system to life? Well, this is actually a very detailed theory that's been developed by Michael Russell over

the past 25 years. And the idea is that these inorganic membranes, as we call them, this is the hydrothermal chimney that we have simulated in the fuel cell as well. These inorganic membranes, as we call them, this is the hydrothermal chimney that we have simulated in the fuel cell as well. These inorganic membranes are able to separate two fluids. They can conduct electrons. They also can trap organic molecules and promote certain reactions. And so the idea is that maybe these inorganic membranes could have concentrated organics within them and then eventually been replaced by the more lipid membrane that we now know. How about other kinds of biotic compounds, enzymes, proteins, even replicating molecules like, if not DNA, at least RNA? Well, it's certainly possible to try experiments where we could test these things.

This is all very, very new work, and a lot of these experiments that you're talking about have never actually been attempted. And so it would be very interesting, I think, to try doing some of these simulated chimneys and simulated fuel cell experiments using RNA and DNA in a prebiotic context. Some of the challenges involve trying to replicate the early Earth as opposed to the modern Earth. For example, our atmosphere would destroy all these experiments because of the oxygen. And so all of our experiments have to have a constant feed of a nitrogen gas or something else that represents the early atmosphere. Metabolism began without oxygen.

And so in our experiment that simulates the origin of metabolism, we need to make sure that there's nothing in there that might not represent what was there at the beginning. Where do you want to take, you and your colleagues, like Michael Russell, want to take this research next? Well, there's many, many directions that this is going, and we have lots of colleagues around the world and at JPL working on different aspects of this.

I'm personally interested in trying to develop the fuel cell experiment to simulate various different kinds of geological systems aspects of this, I'm personally interested in trying to develop the fuel cell experiment to simulate various different kinds of geological systems, and also to test different geological materials as catalysts in a fuel cell. Laurie, you're part of the Astrobiology Institute, specifically the IC Worlds team, as we mentioned, so I'm assuming that there are people at NASA and elsewhere who believe that this has perhaps as much significance looking into life elsewhere in the solar system and the universe as it does here on Earth.

That's correct. And the reason is the energy that is formed in these vents, it comes from the interaction of the ocean with the rocky seafloor. This is chemical and electrochemical energy that's provided by the Earth. And so on any planet where you have an ocean that actually interacts with the rocky seafloor, it is possible that the same kind of process could occur. We have various examples of this. On Mars, there's much evidence now that at some point in the past,

there may have been water on the surface. And also in Jupiter's moons, for example, Europa, we know that there is a liquid water ocean that is probably in contact with the rocky crust. So one of the big questions for the Icy Worlds team is could an origin of life occur on Europa in the same manner? I want to take it back really to how you got involved in this in the first place. Oh, well, I actually sought out working at JPL because I really wanted to work on the origin of life. I actually sought out working at JPL because I really wanted to work on the origin of life. So I did my PhD thesis on self-organizing chemistry and trying to figure out how far chemistry can take you into things that look like life but aren't. And then the next step, I thought, was to try to understand how chemistry can actually become life eventually.

Now, I'm always wary of asking a scientist to extrapolate out too far beyond the data. But do you think that we are closing in on the origin of life? Well, it's hard to extrapolate. I would say that we have to do the lab experiments. And it's going to require a lot of intense lab work to try to simulate these processes in environments that mimic the early Earth. And if we want to know if it can occur on other worlds, we're going to have to simulate those conditions as well, which can get very challenging, especially when you're talking about the icy moons where the pressure at the bottom of the ocean is so high. Well, speaking of places like Europa, and for that matter Enceladus, how much would

you like to see a mission out to one of these moons that is hiding a watery ocean and probably some geothermal activity like that you're studying. Well, I think it would be great to find out as much as we can about these icy moons. And I hope that in the future we will have missions that will tell us about what sort of interiors these moons have and specifically whether or not they actually have hydrothermal activity. Absolutely fascinating work. And I want to thank you very much once again for joining us to talk about it here on the radio show.

And I hope that we can also talk to your colleague, Michael Russell, at some point, because of a paper that he has led, came out about a month after the one that you were the lead author of, sort of folding all this evidence together into this coherent theory that he has been working with for about 25 years. Once again, belated congratulations. I wish we could have gotten to this topic a little bit sooner, but I sure hope that the work is going to continue and wish you the greatest of success. Thank you very much. We've been talking with Lori Bard. She is a NASA postdoctoral researcher on the IC Worlds team of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

It's based up at the Ames Research Center, but she does her work at the Jet Propulsion Lab near Pasadena, California. I'll be right back with this week's edition of What's Up. And for that, we'll welcome Dr. Bruce Betts. Got Bruce Betts on the Skype line once again to tell us about the night sky and give away a book and a T-shirt. Exciting times. Welcome back. The director of science and technology.

I'm excited. Come on. I know it's been 11 and a half years, but you know you love this. I'm very excited about it. No, it's just too early in the morning for you as we're recording this. I totally understand. You were up late looking at the night sky, no doubt. Of course.

I was up late, and then you wake me up early. It's almost noon. I'm sorry. Somewhere. We'll put you out of your pain. Tell us about the night sky. I'm sorry. Somewhere. We'll put you out of your pain. Tell us about the night sky. Disturbing. So we've still got a host of planets in the evening sky, although Jupiter is getting awfully low in the west shortly after sunset.

But you have a shot at seeing it because it's so bright. And then Mars and Saturn are in the south, and we've got the moon coming to play with them so on July 5th the moon will be very close to Mars on July 6th it will be between Mars and Saturn and on the 7th it will be very close to Saturn in the pre-dawn sky Venus also dropping lower but still visible in the pre-dawn east we move on to this week in space history. In 1908, the Tunguska impact occurred in Siberia. Impact of an asteroid-type object slamming into the atmosphere. Airburst leveling 2,000 square kilometers of forest. Ten years. Ten years is how long Cassini has now been in orbit around Saturn

doing amazingly great science. Isn't that great? We had that conversation just recently, yet another conversation with Linda Spilker, project scientist there, leading up to this 10th anniversary, and great science to come. Indeed. They just keep discovering stuff and learning stuff. It's like a science mission or something. Yeah.

Gosh, what's that about? All right. On to... Space fact. So speaking of Cassini, in its first 10 years at Saturn, Cassini has orbited Saturn 206 times. And those are big orbits. That's why there aren't more of them in 10 years. Those are very big orbits, yes.

Some of them. They vary. We move on to the trivia contest, and I asked you, when did Venus Express, that is now coming towards the end of its mission at Venus, when did it enter orbit around Venus? The winner, full disclosure here, I know this guy. I used to work with him. It's been, I don't know, a couple of years since he's won, but he's a semi-regular entrant. It's Craig Journet in a neighboring town to my hometown, Los Alamitos, California. Craig said orbital insertion was on April 11, 2006, but it didn't enter its target orbit at APOCenter. Did I pronounce that correctly? I have no idea. Until May 7,

almost a month later, May 7, 2006. And I do believe he got that right. He did indeed. It's common to adjust your orbit after you get there. So yeah, they've had a very long science mission as well. You can find a blog from Emily recently talking about the upcoming end of mission for Venus Express. Yeah, I read that one. It's kind of a bittersweet thing. Great mission. Congratulations, of course, to all the scientists and engineers at the European Space Agency

who have been behind this for so long. Craig, you're going to get Max Goes to the Space Station, a science adventure with Max the dog. Part of that series from our friend Jeff Bennett, Jeffrey Bennett, with illustrations by the great Michael Carroll, one of the great space artists. You can get the book any place, all the usual places. I see now that there is even an e-book version of this.

That and a Planetary Radio t-shirt are going out to Craig. I want to mention Mark Wilson in San Diego. Mark apparently feels that this is one of those days when the Venus Express went into orbit that everybody remembers what they were doing. Mark says, if my memory serves me correctly, I ate a bag of beef jerky that day.

A special, special moment for planetary exploration and for him. Yeah, I'm a turkey jerky man myself. What do you got for next time? Says so much about you. How many moons has Cassini discovered at Saturn? How many moons has Cassini discovered at Saturn?

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get us your entry. What a great question. And you have until Tuesday, July 8th at, what would we say, 8 a.m. Pacific time, to get us this answer. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about yawning like I'm doing right at this moment. Thank you.

Good night. And here I was just about to say, go back to bed, guy. We're done. Job well done. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up, no matter what time it is. Thank you. Good morning. One more pitch for the special Planetary Radio Live that we're planning for Wednesday, July 9th.

I hope you can join us, if not in person, at Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum in Pasadena, then via the live webcast. It begins at 7 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, and it will be available on demand shortly after the show. We'll also feature highlights here. Bill Nye and I and a bunch of other great people will talk about the LightSail project, including an announcement that brings the age of solar sailing even closer. The link to learn more is on the show page you can reach from planetary.org slash radio.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the sky-faring members of the Society. Clear skies..