Guest post: On earth nature will work hard
Originally a comment by KB Player on You have to get water there.
All the effort to make something which on earth nature does it by itself even on unpromising sites.
This morning I walked past a piece of “waste” ground, a slab of concrete about two feet from the ground, about 100 yards long and 10 yards wide. It was put in as part of the tram works, probably around 10 years ago.
It is now covered with buddleia, which attracts insects in the summer. There’s a cotoneaster with berries. Soil is building up from the leaves that have fallen and rotted. I did a little guerrilla gardening the year before last and planted some daffodil bulbs, and in some places the soil was deep enough to sustain them so they flowered. Buddleia is a terrific coloniser – one colonised a gutter on my house, so the roots grew up a down pipe and clogged it with soil.
A book I read recently, Islands of Abandonment, which I thoroughly recommend, goes to different places like slag heaps, or the area around Chernobyl, or abandoned war zones, and tells of how they can regenerate. On earth nature will work hard to keep growing. Trying to make it work on somewhere which hasn’t had the millions of years to provide that kind of ecosphere sounds like the worst waste of time and money. Is it from a kind of Year Zero mind set – that having made a mess we can start afresh somewhere – with the same disasters as other Year Zeros, as in Cambodia.
Just a couple of days ago, we were talking in the car about how long it would take plant life to erase all signs of human habitation if Ireland were to be abandoned to nature. I reckon that most rural roads would be impassible in two years, unrecognisable in five, and obliterated in ten. My husband reckoned it would take twenty years for cities to be more green than brown/grey/black/glass.
The thing is, all our human infrastructure so far has been made using native materials. OK, so some of them have been engineered beyond recognition, but all have been made using stuff from this planet; quite a lot of which was walking around not very long ago in cosmic timescales. This means that even the most unpromising, apparently sterile, man-made environments have built-in ecological niches which Earth life can exploit.
When a bóithrín (single track country road) is resurfaced properly, the old tarmac layer is levelled, and a new one laid down on top of the old by pouring wet tar and sprinkling a generous layer of grit and gravel on the top, to be pressed in by the local traffic. Within a few days, there is a central line of grit and gravel along the length of the bóithrín, where car and tractor wheels can’t drive, but where loose stones have been flung by the tyres. Within weeks, this little nature reserve has also collected dust and seeds, blown from the ditches and fields, and grass has started to grow. Within months, there is a long narrow lawn in place, clipped short by the undersides of cars, in which daisies, dandelions, buttercups and other ground-hugging wild flowers are growing. By the time a year has passed, the roots of the grass have penetrated the tarmac layers and cracked them apart, and the roots of other native plants are reaching down to the land below. Similar encroachment has been happening from both sides of the bóithrín, as plants spread out from the ditches. After two years, the bóithrín is now just wide enough for the widest vehicle to commonly use it (usually tractors) and passing oncoming traffic often involves one vehicle reversing quite a distance to the nearest field gate or farm entrance. The remaining plant-free tarmac has cracked, and lumps have been lifted out by tractor wheels, leading to potholes. By three years, most traffic is avoiding that bóithrín altogether, leaving only residents to fight nature, accelerating the decline of the surface. For the last fifteen years, the council has made no attempt to mitigate the damage caused to the bóithrín on which I live, except to fill the worst of the holes with a dollop of tar every couple of years. At this point, we’re seriously considering asking the farmer if we could take a short-cut across his ploughed field to get to the road, because it would be a smoother ride.
The upshot of this is that we are so used to plants simply getting on with growing, even where we don’t want them, that we have entirely neglected to consider that they can only be as successful as they are because they have an entire planet supporting them. That would not be the case anywhere else, even in our own solar system. Even if we can send living things to other planets, we can’t send our planet with them.
Conversely, anywhere we can get to within the foreseeable future will kill us without effort or thought. Survival in any of those places will be hard work. Even just breathing.
Any planets we could get to that are already habitable will likely already be inhabited. Then we get a chance to redo the “Old World meets New World” disaster all over again, but on a planetary scale. No thanks. The collision between European societies with those in North and South America is one of the true tragedies of history. Human ignorance of diseases resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of human beings. Given the character of European states and their exploratory and colonial ambitions, of things, this result was almost inevitable, to the everlasting detriment to the peoples already inhabiting those two continents. We got things wrong 500 years ago. The results were genocidal. That’s not a record to be proud of, or an example to repeat.
If Mars (or Europa, another possible candidate for having undergone biogenesis within our solar system) should turn out to harbour life, we should leave them alone. Yes, even if they’re microbes. What right do we have to take over their worlds for our own use?
I’m probably going to need some major correction by the biologists here, as I’m going far beyond my area of expertise, but I’m a fool who doesn’t believe in angels so in I rush.
I remember reading several years back that all life on earth is based on the same small subset of all possible amino acids (I forget the exact numbers). So that raises the question: is that subset necessary for life to arise, or is it just an accident of how life evolved on Earth? If it’s the latter (which to my naive eyes seems likely), then most likely any form of life we stumbled on out there (in the unlikely event that we actually were able to travel to a life supporting planet) would be based on a different set of amino acids, and so would be (mostly) indigestible for us. We wouldn’t be able to eat the food on Rigel Seven (and the Rigelians wouldn’t be able to eat our food).
Am I totally off base here?
Another book on the theme is The World Without Us, which is similar to Islands of Abandonment.
@tigger_the_wing – In rural New Zealand, where I grew up, roads with a little ecosphere down the middle were fairly common.
A lot of cycle routes are made out of sections of abandoned road – you will be cycling a few yards from the new busy A road, on what was once an A road, and is now a rooted, bumpy track, growing narrower and greener. When I’m one of those I recall lines from Kipling’s The Way through the Woods.
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
It doesn’t take anything like 70 years to obliterate a road.
@#2: Vide Lord Howe Island, parts of which are off-limits to all but scientists because of their distinctive ecologies. And fortunately, no valuable minerals etc have been discovered there – yet.
But if the Giant Impact Hypothesis of the Moon’s formation (currently the favourite) is correct, then our Moon is the ancient core of the Earth, and beneath all the surface dust could have precious high-density metals galore; like say, gold. Developments in technology may make that economic to mine at some future date. Then economic arguments and realities will likely sooner or later trump the scientific ones; particularly if the past is anything to go by.
https://www.lordhoweislandtours.net/mount-gower-tours
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis
I was in a part of Seattle just now that’s bordered on the south by a canal with a large boat basin in one direction and in the other direction locks that take boats and ships from the freshwater part of the canal to the salt & Puget Sound. I went to look at the boat basin for a few minutes and crossing the street to go the other way I noticed a scrubby area around some industrial building or other with a chain link fence, and what was growing in that scrubby area? Buddleia, lots of it.
WaM, since we haven’t found life anywhere else, it’s difficult to be conclusive in an answer to your question. The discovery that amino acids and organic compounds are found all over the place make a lot of scientists excited about the possibility of life. Some of the amino acids found are the same as the ones on earth, others aren’t. Now, here’s what I’ve heard; a Google search wasn’t able to verify for me, because I don’t have time to do a deep search, but the amino acids that build life on Earth are all in the left-handed orientation. One source I read (if I find it in my shelves, I’ll reference it later) said most of the amino acids they were finding were in the right handed orientation. That’s only from my memory, so take it for what it means.
Even though space appears to be rich in organic material, we still haven’t found signs of actual life. As a biologist, I suspect that is because you need certain conditions to support life, and the known planets don’t have them. Some of the exoplanets they’re finding are promising, but science doesn’t like to extrapolate too far past the data.
So the answer to whether we could eat the life in space? Shrug.
@#3
Terrestrial life uses 20 amino acids, out of a pool of at least 70 known. And as iknklast says, chirality is a factor in the ones we use. But there are plenty of what would seem to be perfectly compatible amino acids that terrestrial life just doesn’t use.
It may be due to a simple accident of choice or availability very early in the history of life. There’s some reason to believe that the genetic code (the actual sequences of bases that specify particular amino acids in protein synthesis), which is universal among terrestrial organisms, is another frozen accident, determined by very early arbitrary choices. Although I’ve read recently that there does seem to be some chemical relationship between the terminal bases in each triplet and the amino acid specified by that triplet. A bit hard to picture, that, given the redundancy of the code.
Interesting comments from the biologists/biologist adjacents about amino acids.
David Attenborough is doing yet another amazing series on the Beeb, Frozen Planet II. The animals are wonderful, ditto the scenery, the photographers and the production team generally amazingly dedicated, and will spend months in tents to get a shot of something for our entertainment, and David Attenborough is the most beloved and respected human being in the UK, now the Queen has died. But I find it hard to watch such programmes. They are all about disaster, catastrophe, the loss of everything that isn’t us or made by us or domesticated by us. DA of course spreads that message – but he does seem to have the power of a hedgehog on a motorway.,
Thanks for the responses, iknklast and Raskos. Of course, as you point out, any speculations we make about life beyond Earth are based on a sample size of one, so, yeah….
But anyway, establishing human colonies away from earth is a pipe dream, for all the reasons you’ve cited.
What A Maroon #3
I suspect you are right. I’m glad to get the comments from iknklast & Raskos.
There is a short novel by Poul Anderson “The Man Who Counts” in which the plot is very much driven by that likelihood. The human characters are stranded far from the only human base on a planet with such incompatible biochemistry. There is an intelligent native species on that planet with a stone age but quite sophisticated (for people lacking metals) technology. How to get help from the locals to get a rescue mission within the time limit posed by limited human edible food is the main problem.
I participated in a Fold@home project several years ago. It’s a distributed computing project taking advantage of unused cycles on contributors’ PCs. The project was determining the most efficient proteome folds and was fascinating to watch as my computer ran through cycles looking for the folds that require the least amount of energy to maintain. The purpose was to compare between ideals and what are found in nature, and somehow ussc that to model various potential diseases. It was actually a bit beyond my understanding .
But the lesson i took from it is that the evolution of life is not random and would likely follow specific patterns, so it’s possible that life compatible to ours could evolve on other planets. There’s no guarantee, and chirality is a definite factor to consider. But I’m reminded of the Gould saying about “rewinding the tape” to play it again, and checking to see what would evolve the second time.