NASA Funded This Crazy Project To Search For Life On Mars

is there life on Mars This is an age-old question and we are getting really close to being able to find the answer there are spacecraft right now on Mars searching for evidence that there was water for long periods of time that the conditions for life were there but next come the missions that are going to search for life but there's a bit of a time crunch and that's because humans are potentially going to be going to Mars and humans are filthy and they are covered in bacteria one of the big risks is that we go to Mars and all we find is earth-based cyano bacteria that had moved quickly and colonized the whole place so we've got this window to search for Life on Mars before Earth life tries to take over and so my guest today is Dr Yan spachek he is a senior research scientist at the foundation for Applied molecular Evolution and he is the winner of a NASA 9 grant for the agnostic life finder this is a mission a gadget um that would be attached to any process on Mars that's attempting to extract water so imagine if a rocket is trying to refuel itself using water it's going to break it up into hydrogen and oxygen or make methane on the surface of Mars This Taps into the water supply and tries to screen out organic m molecules DNA things that could give you evidence that there is life on Mars and if so then you can do a more deeper search so we talk a lot about the what the agnostic life finder will be how it's going to work how it could be deployed but yon has his hands in a lot of projects he's working on the upcoming Morning Star mission to Venus this is that mission that the privately funded Mission that's going to be searching for evidence of life in the cloud tops of Venus living in the sulfuric acid he's working on another mission called Inspire that could potentially send thousands of impactor probes to Mars very on the cheap to try and get a lot of experiments going at the same time so we have really interesting wide ranging conversation about both his nyak project but all of his other projects and ways that you can get involved so enjoy this interview with Dr Yan spachek Yan first congratulations on winning one of the 2024 uh nasan nyak grants so describe your proposal to NASA what do you what's the what's the plan okay thank you uh So the plan is to uh seek Exon Life on Mars before we send humans there the idea is that uh um as before we send humans to Mars we will be mining uh Martian water it's called isru inc2 research utilization to produce um propellent and to you have a consumable for a future astronauts so I thought about it and thought that this could be um actually astrobiological sample uh we can take this water and extract biopolymers from this uh and that's that's the instrument we are building that's um Al um uh as you said Alf um and it's a and and what does that stand for that stands for agnostic life finder uh right but it's a backronym right like right it's the it's a reference to the TV show behind me oh there he is okay yeah I was wondering podcast listeners he's pointing to the uh the puppet so no it's it became as an acronym and then became a sort of uh as you said background yeah right uh so it's either agnostic life finder or alien life finder because you know we are looking for aliens living now on Mars hopefully um so yeah the idea is to use um electrodialysis um and going even further back um idea is that all life has to have some genetic polymers uh in them uh that enable the evolution so instead of seeking uh bio signatures which are products of life like methane or um some shapes um we can search for molecules that enable uh Evolution so instead of searching for uh those unreliable bio signatures uh we aim to look for well body electrolytes and the idea behind this that's uh actually from Steven Benner who Pi on this nyak proposal um it's called poly electroly theory of a gene and um the idea is that all uh genetic polymers needs to be um multiply charged uh to to prevent the long molecules which carry the information from uh crumbling on themselves just like proteins do uh into uh global global shapes um so that's that's idea so so so DNA is charged in a way that that essentially it repels itself so that it doesn't just fold itself up into a little ball and that by searching for that charge those charged particles in water samples you're hoping to get evidence of of some kind of Life there right so yeah you summarize it well uh so if we search for molecules that are long polymers which have multiple charges it's quite unlikely that they would be produced abiotically so if we find something like that uh we can say that we found life with high probability and that's why it's agnostic life finder because we are not searching just for DNA we are searching for all kinds of polyelectrolyte and so if you take water here on Earth and you run it through this kind of an experiment will you get any false positives or is it is everything that is detected as a as a Charged long polymer some either life itself or some some side effect of life right so before we run the water through um we need to sonicate it uh through the ultrasound to disrupt the cells because DNA is usually most of the DNA oceans is enclosed actually in the bacterial cells so we need to disrupt them first and once they are in streams we can pull them out and um we haven't tested yet but the assumption is that there would not be false positives uh the aim of The nyak Proposal is to actually test it on a four samples from Antarctica later this year so we will see uh what might be false positive uh would be uh like silica particles which have a specific size and charge but uh so they would be captured in the same channel as a DNA for example uh but uh subsequent analysis of them uh would uh you know tell us whether whether it's long polymer or whether it's a small particle so and the membranes uh which separate those channels from the stream of liquid to the capture channels are will be selected so we will reject vast majority of of these uh particul right well and you're you're sort of s going into my next question here in bits and pieces so um explain how you think this process is going to work you know you you have a tube you you suck up some water or you melt some water or however you get some water into your device what is the pathway what is actually happening inside the device to so I'm real yeah um I'm hoping uh well we we are relying on somebody else doing the hard part which is actually M the Martian water so we have we have a honey beer robotics for example they have a red Bel project where they are designing um mining of a Martian water uh they will make a rod well which is a you make a bore hole then you pump hot water in and suck up the melted water um along with the Martian water um or uh SpaceX uh on their official web page have a u note that they will use local Martian water to refuel Starships to refuel Starships you need to uh mine hundreds of tons of Martian water to get enough hydrogen to reduce the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere so Al our instrument would sit on that stream of melted water uh which would likely be uh from mid latitude uh subsurface ice which um we assume based on our latest research data uh that it's a massive ice um basically from 40 degrees north toward WS on Mars so that's um yeah the assumption is that both Mars life and life humans that are going to Mars uh require water and so we can merge these two ideas together um so yeah Al will be hitchhiking on a on this uh on these types of missions whoever Minds water we can provide it for them right so so whoever like there's going to be plenty of reasons to grab water from from Mars for living on Mars for creating Rocket Fuel all that kind of stuff and so you can just tap into the flow of water and start sampling it for life correct yeah okay all right and so so so so then don't worry about that pesky engineering problem of getting the water uh all you have to think about is is analyzing the water so so what is happening inside your inside your experiment okay so then um we assume that the melted water will be full of particulates because it's a basically Perma frost on Mars uh there will be dust there will be um clay particle particl um and it will contain quite a bit of salt we are not sure how much salt will be there um it depends on how the subsurface ice was deposited and perhaps even how lucky you are with your Rodwell if you tap into side which have more salts you will have more salts so this melted water with the particulates will be uh passed through our instrument uh the point is that we don't have any filters perpendicular to the flow of the water we have filters uh on sides which means that the large particulates can pass straight through to along with a main body of water which will be processed further as a as uh the rocket company wishes um but uh Upstream from that uh on our instrument we will have a section which is in electric field between two electrodes and so um to the towards the anode which is positively charged electrode will uh move our poly electrodes like DNA towards c will move U perhaps alien genetic polymers or some proteins and uh yeah that's how we so that's uh the central channel from these two channels are is separated by micro filtration membrane which has a pore size about 0.1 Micron we'll uh do better selection based on a on a um clay particle distribution we expect to be in a Mars regulate or on site and what prevents the the DNA to migrating further towards electrodes it's another set of uh membranes which have a pores pores small enough to not let larger organic molecules to pass through but still uh large enough to pass ions to allow to sustain the electric field that's what we need and then we have a one more set of of membranes which is too much details but right right but okay so so if the process works as you're hoping then thanks to by having these various the anode and the cathode you got the you are pulling these these organic molecules into a place a chamber a collection bucket how are you then going to try to analyze these molecules right so we we are proposing to use nanopores either uh for for screening for DNA uh biological nanopores like minion would be ideal because we already have preconcentrated desalted sample of DNA which passed through the screen uh more agnostic approach is to use mineral pore nanopores which are again a nanopore sequencing technique where you are pulling the polymer through a pore and as it passes through you are analyzing uh conductivity through the pore and that that will tell you about the approximate shape of the molecule you are pulling through oh that's really interesting so sorry let me just stop you here so so so you're taking this molecule you're pulling it through a a pore that's only like a little bigger than the molecule itself and as the molecule is coming through the pore you are analyzing the electric charge on the on all of the atoms in the molecule and that's giving you a sense of of how complicated the molecule is well you almost got it uh so instead of analyzing the charge on the molecule uh you are analyzing uh resistance across the pore so if you put the molecule in the pore as it's coming through it's a basically increasing the resistance in the channel so you can see the decrease current uh over time and based on the time of transition you can estimate the length of the molecule and based on the How deep the uh basically reduction of current is you can estimate how thick the molecule is so if you have something like DNA you will see nice like shape and in the time current uh curve which indicates that it's long molecule with a with consistent with with uh thickness if if it's a some inconsistent molecule you will see like more rough profile wow and and is this like this technology used today like if you if you take DNA put it through these micropores measure the conductivity you can say oh a a chunk of DNA just passed through the actually the ion nanopores which uh they are already used for sequencing so they are quite good enough to analyze metag Genome of a um of any field uh sample or actually it was used on ISS as well to analyze the bacterial loads they have there right so so you're not necessarily going to be getting the you know you're not going to be doing the actual scan of the DNA you're not going to know the the C's and the t's and the A's and the G's but you are going to know okay a molecule that is roughly this many mole this many atoms long just pass through the the pore or with a profile of this big and there are very few molecules that going to match those kinds of profile yeah so there are two two kinds of pores right you have the biological nanopore which can do the sequencing and we can actually try to apply that as well but the mineral nanopore that's just a whole in a in a membrane which which will not tell you the sequence of the DNA but from The observed data we can make educated guesses what just passed through that pore so these are two instrument we are proposing as well as mass spectrometry but our part of the work is to just develop the concentrator uh to pull those polyelectrolytes out and then we will pass it on to other teams to design those someone else's problem the we put them all together but at current phase we are making sure that we can actually pull the DNA from the stream yeah yeah that's really interesting I mean I like this idea that you're you're taking this water concentrating it down trying to pull the most interesting most lifelike molecules out of it now obviously PE whenever we talk about the search for life we are saying this is Life as we know it that this is some kind of life that maybe uses DNA that that uses water as a solvent and so on and so forth do you think there are characteristics that are sort of more generalizable like for life that maybe could pick up Life as we don't know it right that's that's what I trying to mention in the in the beginning um uh because it's called agnostic life finder um the assumption is that different kind of Life uh could have uh different genetic polymers uh we already know it that on Earth we have some bacterial phages that instead of adenan in their DNA they are using Amino adinin and they were escaping our metagenomic searches for a long time because when you run PCR you are using uh uh you you are not accounting for that so DNA which contains regular DNA regular adinin uh basically overcomes that signal so if martians contain DN like molecule which is very similar to DNA but the some of the bases are little bit different we would not be able to find them with for example PCR technology we would to use different techniques that don't don't rely on enzimatic amplification so that's that's what we are using another reason um why we prefer larger samples is to we expect that life on Mars will be very SPS um from Earth analoges on uh we study here in atakama desert we know that actually no instrument on Mars right now would be able to detect Organics uh in a sparse soil environment where you have a like a red stone in a in atakama desert which is analogical to sediments we are now collecting samples from the jzer crater with perance so when you have larger samples and doing the prec concentrations from litus instead of milliliters you ensure that you are you have much better chance of actually finding something and yes even if you have very sensitive technique and but you are simpling just one milliliter and you have concentration of bacteria less than one bacteria per milliliter you would miss that right so larg simple is always better when you are looking for life it's interesting you know there's this idea of the Shadow biosphere on Earth that there could be other life that we just don't see because as you said you know the PCR methodology is designed to look for exactly DNA and so if it's not exactly DNA then it's just not going to show up and and I wonder if this more uh you know if you if you're not so concerned about exactly what kind of life it is I wonder if there is an opport like would you detect those fages in passing through your your nanopores well yeah uh through nanopores yes uh because nanopores would be able to detect uh right that doesn't changes the DNA enough to not allow it to pass through the nanopore and yeah the alpha is exactly uh built to to extract these poly electrolytes by the way you mentioned Shadow biosphere we had a Carol cland who was uh author of that term here in a foundation for Applied molecular Evolution couple of months ago so I had a chance to discuss with her uh uh definition definition of life and uh how how useful is definition of life for search of uh life in the universe I'm quite radical on that that uh it doesn't help basically at all that's that's another story well I know i' I'd love to hear it so so give your position on a definition of of life um yeah because uh whichever definition we make there are so many exceptions all the time uh that uh when you are searching for something which is transitioning from not being life to being life it's a uh it doesn't make much sense right you can have piece of RNA that replicates itself only under very specific condition is it life or not you don't know because it does not fit the description of self- sustaining system but then many other things don't so the idea we agreed on with Carol and you can read more about that on our blog Prim primordial School uh the idea is that uh you need to search for interesting anomalies and always Define what you mean when you search for life so our Al actually searches for uh for systems that are capable of replication and evolution so that's that's what we are looking for so if if it's a able to uh replicate and evolve it must to have genetic information so it contains Life as we know it but it might contain Life as we don't know yet right right um yeah I mean it's sort of like you you know you see it right I think I think about like you know people say viruses you know our virus is life and like they're not but they're but they're indicative of life like they're life adjacent and so if you see them then you know there's life around that's that's my argument like virologists uh don't need to have uh don't need to know whether viruses are Al or not to actually study them so the same is like we don't need to know whether martians are alive or not to look for them right you just need assumption and declare what you are exactly studying right now this is a phase one Grant which means that you have sort of propose the idea and now you're going to create some kind of deliverable for NASA to then decide hopefully to take this on to phase two and eventually maybe it'll be a piece of Hardware that flies to Mars so so what are you hoping to deliver by the end of this study right so we hope to have a tabletop instrument that can extract genetic polymers from Ice course uh we have at University of Florida uh we are separate organization we are foundation for Applied molecular Evolution and so the idea is to extract uh DNA from Ice cores from anarca which anarca which are known to have very sparse population of microbes so we can deliver that that would be success um and of course we will do some Metric with a with a known concentration of bacteria to make a calibration curves and stuff like that uh what about dead life I mean obviously you know trying to search through fossilized Martian Rock you're not going to find very much DNA but do you think like if it's frozen in ice for long periods of time and partly degraded do you think you know how far back do you think you would still be able to find some presence right so there was a article by bid I'm not sure how to pronounce his name I'm sorry I messed it up but uh some authors found that uh even in the oldest oldest ice we have on Earth you can still find detectable DNA uh and traces of metabolism so and that that ice was 8 million year old so imagine you have Glacier uh at the close to the bottom of the glacier very deep you have pockets which contain cells which were enclosed in that ice for eight million years and you can still find the DNA and analyze it and sequence it so on Earth uh we can it's it's safe to say that 10 million year it's uh still would be detect detectable if martians have DNA other poly electroid might be less stable so we would detect them shorter periods but the thing is if you are deep enough in ice um you are shielded from the cosmic radiation so you should have a similar survivability for DNA as on Earth so millions of years it's a it's the expected time and that ties very well to obliquity on Mars because Mars uh quite recently um on a on a period about 100,000 years Mars changes its obliquity in which case it starts snowing in mid latitudes and you can have those uh ice deposits growing so these ice deposits uh if they are less than 10 million year old they will be sampling the entire surface of Mars because it's a ice and dust uh brought through the dust storm so as we can find life uh delivered to Arctic Isis from from all over the globe on Earth so we assume that the similar case would be on Mars so when you have high obliquity you have moist and wet and a higher a higher temperature on Mars which uh which would allow bacteria to proliferate on the surface and then being deposited in the ice which we want to look for so that's really interesting um and I wonder how far back like what what is the oldest ice you could find on Mars I mean it could be tens of millions hundreds of millions of years old I mean who knows when it it will depend how deep you will go with your rodells for your refueling right that's really interesting all right um now I want to shift gears now because you are working on a lot of projects that are sort of in the same field so so let's talk about let's talk about the the Morning Star Mission and and uh what is that okay so Morning Star Mission it's a mission to Venus uh it's uh led by uh Sarah Seager at MIT um and this mission is basically inspiration for what I'm doing now um because it's a first private interplanetary Mission um so my experience from going with with the private Mission uh is that U it's a much faster than going through the NASA funded project project because as soon as you have something working you can go to Next Step instead of writing proposals as soon as you have something done so back to the mission our goal is to send a small Probe on a on a rocket on a rocket lab uh electron rocket uh which will drop the probe in the atmosphere of Venus it will fall through the cloud layer and as it's falling down it will shoot laser um at 440 nanometers which is green color into the droplets and observe the reflected uh life light and uh also analyze if there is a some fluorescent so the instrument uh which we will have only one instrument on board which is called autofluoresence nephometer we'll study two things one from the polarization of of the light and intens we can deduce was the refractive index of the droplets and size and perhaps shape distribution uh which can tell us us something about the uh physical properties of the cloud um but we are also analyzing fluoresence that's something uh we found in our lab uh that most Organics you put uh in a concentrated sulfuric acid are actually not destroyed they are they are converted into larger molecules that are fluorescent which is very interesting so if we see some fluorescence in a clouds of Venus that's um that's a quite sure indication that there is organic carbon in a high concentrations and that's something I'm working on right this I mean this research I remember this came out a couple of a couple of months ago from I guess the team let by Sarah Seager that that of the 20 amino acids used by life on earth like 19 of them I think are largely unharmed by by being in high concentrations of sulfuric acid which is surprising yeah uh so that's um that's something yeah that that research was factually correct uh but that's something we we have a little fights between between within our group because I claim that if you have these amino acids with with a mixture of other Organics they are not reacting uh so when you have for example alanin it's not going to react with another alanin concentrated sufr acid but if you have other molecules it can react with uh it will cross link with them and make larger molecules so that's something so proteins in general are very unstable in sulfuric acid so if you have individual amino acids it's stable but um in Long longer proteins they are uh because you have large mixure of different reactive molecules um they can cross link and make a basically tar but to not put that down uh just because the Life as We Know It uh is destroyed it doesn't mean that different biochemistry canot exist in concentrated suic acid and that's something very surprising and to be honest when I started working on this project I thought that okay I'll just show that what they are proposing it's a bad idea but the more I work on it the more I think that there there could be something on it the there could be um some organic chemistry we don't know because very few organic chemists study chemistry and concentrated sulfuric acid so who knows that's why you need to do more research normally you work gloves and stay away from it right right or or just put some students on it I'm just joking um so that's really interesting so what do you think is the time frame for the Morning Star mission to to launch So the plan time frame now we are quite sure it's it will fly early next year uh January or February so and then again to remind you about the timeline we start started working on it about 2020 and it will fly in 2025 which is very short period for for a mission when um you know the other missions to Venus uh DaVinci and ver right they were both delayed I remember yeah they're 2031 I think they're not going supposed to fly like 2027 then they and further yeah and the and and Issa has Mission as well they're planning so but they're all in the early 2030s that's amazing that from idea to flight ready in just five years so that's that's a beautiful thing about U the collaboration with Private Industry and also it's a small Mission it's a much lower cost than than the NASA missions but still should provide us with a plenty of information we didn't get a chance to study uh inc2 in Venus basically since a Soviet era right right yeah um but is I mean it's too bad that it that this probe is just going to fall through the atmosphere one time it would be amazing if there could be something that remained and as you say studied in situ for for long periods of time what about sort of bringing your ideas together you know if you could sit around for a while gather more and more of this sulfuric acid do you think or maybe you could dilute it with water or something do you think there's a way to kind of take some of the ideas with Alf and apply it to the venusian atmosphere yeah I think for each problem you need a specific tool and Al will very likely not be adaptable to concentrated s g it and if you had to Delo it you would have to Delo it very substantially which would uh which might destroy the uh biochemistry in concentrated sulfuric acid so that's another interesting thing how to develop tools to analyze concentrated sulfuric acid or the uh Organics in concentrated sulfuric acid so far we have NMR uh and that's about it um because uh the concentrated sulfuric acid is destroying the instrument you want to use to analyze your simplus so nobody wants to put concentrated sulfuric acid in a mass spec right in many substantial amounts yeah the the old problem with Venus that it's just it's trying to destroy anything you to study it it's a problem uh but you're not done yet you've got another mission that you are uh you have some news about as well right so that mission is called impress it's a international Mars penetrator right share system um again very nice acronym to uh get people excited about the mission and the idea is uh yet again um we need to find if there's active biosphere on Mars before we send humans there and study it it's clear to community um I'm not or we are not first to say this um there be there has been a large push towards this but yet still in the latest decad survey um NASA or or Academy of Sciences found that NASA does not have a planetary protection plan on time scales uh consistent with alest posible human missions to Mars which means that well in other words none of the missions we have on mars or plan to send on Mars um before plausible human presence could find Life on Mars or further study it so we already work with Al uh which is the agnostic life finder but um I feel that search for Life on Mars should be like a global effort uh and so inspired by the private mission we are sending to Venus uh and thanks to the modern uh space uh flight to Mars is not that expensive so if we hire um or yeah buy uh Falcon heavy which has a capacity about 17 metric tons to be delivered to Mars um for 100 million we can deliver uh that payload uh the problem with uh with delivering stuff to Mar uh it's mostly um on the on the Descent and soft Landing but if you design a mission which contains only hard lers uh which is like planetary in penetrators or probes which basically just impact the surface uh you don't have to worry about uh deploying space Crane and parachutes and all those complex systems and if you send thousands of these um half of them you still have a you know couple thousands of probes with many different instruments and getting to the cost um per kilogram it's about $10,000 uh of scientific payload you can deliver to Mars which is Affordable for any garage scientists right like I can decide whether to send a deep space two Mission type probe to Mars or remodel my kitchen so and so the idea is to uh engage everybody all over the world uh First Student Competition to propose uh these probes uh many uh planetary penetrators were already developed somewhere already flown to Mars but because they are small probes they usually don't fill the entire payload so they are being add like add-ons to other missions and so many Laboratories or teams have these already we can fly them but we just need to fly them with somebody so instead of flying them with somebody we can just right share everybody and send it off to Mars right share a thousand probes to go to Mars yeah right share make um yeah deploy from orbit thousands of planetary penetrators as War which will communicate and send the results back and because they are so cheap you don't have to use the approach that Nasa uses which is AER is not an option you have to use instruments that were shown to work but those instruments um might not be as Innovative when looking for Life as we don't know it so I think we need to engage all brains uh in the world to actually study the entire Mars so that's there's one way how to do it that's really interesting um how how big is it like a planetary penetrator how big is one of these things yeah uh it it depends so uh in the range what what has been sent to Mars uh so we had deep space to sent in 98 or 99 which is about 2 and a half kilograms about this big the penetrator was very small um and it it was designed to penetrate about half a meter below the ground then Russians in 96 and a mission which was called mars9 6 um and those penetrators were I think about 2 m something like that and they were designed to penetrate about 5 MERS deep they leave antenna behind them to uh transmit the signal back uh to the Orbiter and analyze the subsurface and because we assume that life on Mars will be hiding below the surface because the surface is eradiated by hard UV and bombarded by a uh by particle radiation that's where you want to go so instead of slowly landing and then start drilling which are both hard processes you can just combine it and penetrate right right and so like the the front the impactor has some kind of I don't know like it crashes like a like the front of a car that it sort of absorbs the impact yeah crumble Zone on the on the front of your of your of your impactor and then it so that's that's another uh type of penet well it's not the penetrator uh JPL developed a shield concept I forgot what's the Acron is for but it has a honeycomb uh structure uh which crumbles as it so uh it will have some 5,000 GS upon impact but will stay as a flat disc on the surface after the crash Zone crashed but those planetary penetrators which were flown the deep space 2 and Mars 96 uh they didn't have any crimple zone They just they break in the in the Martian regul so going straight down I don't remember deep space two I remember deep space one but I don't remember deep space two there you go that's an interesting Mission it it actually did it survive no it did not survive uh did not survive because the battery R out ran out uh before so yeah so there're they okay so they were expected to survive an 880,000 G impact yeah and but it's interesting like I think you know a lot has been learned now about operating in the Martian atmosphere thanks to say the Ingenuity helicopter and I wouldn't be surprised if you could get that those G's down significantly now understanding a lot more about how the atmosphere works and different ideas and so uh with crumble zones and and for some instrument you don't need to uh some instruments can survive 80,000 GS yeah some instruments uh would prefer lower G load and then you can design your probe if you make a long a rod that penetrat penetrates deeper it has a longer distance to break so the G Lo is much uh much less than that so actually going deeper of course going slower is the best solution but then you waste your payload on a parachute and stuff like that but that's a compromise uh the idea behind the impress Mission uh which I call for help with the mission design um uh is to have a different kind of penetrators writing in a um in a form so there will be different shapes different designs and you just deploy them from orbit I really like that um so I mean you're talking about Mars as a place to search for life but I think a lot of people are most excited about Enceladus Europa places where we know there's large amounts of liquid water in in the case of Enceladus actually being thrown into space uh you must think about how you could detect life there what what ideas have come to mind for that right now I'm excited about those moons as well um as you pointed out they have these subsurface oceans so there could be there's a I think quite High chance that life some sort of life is there um so I just returned from ayon uh which is astrobiological Mission uh astrobiological conference uh which was uh in a Providence now and so yes many talks were uh uh dedicated to these uh missions to Enceladus and to Europa and there were different kinds of submarines uh analyzing the blooms um right so the same same set of instruments basically you want to study the Organics you want to make sure that you are not detecting the false positive results yeah but what I'm highlighting always with uh with the organization I started the alpha Mars uh is that Mars is the only astrobiological Target that will be affected by human presence in decade so if we wait couple decades for to study Enceladus if we have to make a tradeoff then nothing much will happen and we will have better instrumentation if we wait couple decades to study Mars we will have humans on Mars so you know there are some concerns um it's going to be harder to find the Exon life um and yeah planetary protection it's um something that I mean it it's an interesting it's a big problem and if we do find Life on Mars and we know that human bacteria has a way of getting everywhere um it really is just a matter of time before our bacteria you know tries to exploit the various niches that it finds on Mars and I know that there have been experiments on the International Space Station that have shown that there are certain kinds of Life sign of bacteria things like that that are ready to go for Mars like just send them in they can't wait um do do you think that we stand a chance of keeping Mars as a pristine environment with humans living there no I don't think that we will keep Mars pristine uh I don't think that Mars is pristine anymore because we sent quite a lot of probes there uh but it's a it's uh not yes no question it's on a degree of uh how much bolad you are sending in so although the bacteria can survive on Mars for longer time as we know from uh from those experiments on ISS you mentioned uh we we are not sure if bacteria can reproduce on Mars so I'm not as much concerned about the harm uh we can cause to Mars environment um I'm more concerned about the it's going to be harder to determine um how to look for Martian life if you have a contamination from Earth like on Mars right if we can do the meag genomics on Mars then you can distinguish it but it's um it's hard it's it's just harder so I don't think that we should postpone uh humans going to Mars and once we are on Mars there will be a lot of BYO going back and forth um but I think that we definitely need to focus on a search for Life on Mars before we send humans there and yeah I mean I wonder if if we do find Life on Mars that would dramatically change the way we would explore Mars it would be very much about trying to turn our settlements into a clean room on another world and trying to figure out a way to explore without continuing to contaminate it I don't think that uh it's right so okay first Frank we have two options we can either say that we don't want to find Life on Mars um or it's like I don't want to know I'm just going going there without knowing that's right million people let's go yeah yeah no I'm I'm for it let's go but you know if we have some time let's try to at least try and yes once we have humans there um I don't think you can make a clean room because the procedures of uh keeping right you can limit the exposure of Mars surface to human uh bacteria uh or Earth stow away bacteria but you cannot eliminate because you cannot uh sterilize humans in a out of life right right yeah yeah it's it is too bad it does feel like like we'll get to this point and we will have to decide do we want to live on Mars or do we want to leave Mars as a Wilderness and and essentially contaminate the secrets that it can tell us about the formation of Life on another world I mean if we're I know it's weird it's like if if if we're lucky we find no life and then it's it's just another place we can go and inhabit and who cares it's just rocks and dirt but if there is life there that's a problem both both answers to the question is the Life on Mars uh would be right news like if Mars is completely on the surface then yeah it's a open playground we can treat it just as we do with moon right run the industry as we wish and and if the if there's Life on Mars we can learn much from it right the I think the advances and Medicine we can have from studying completely different life forms that would be great I mean what what do you think about this idea that that you know we only know of Life forming here on Earth and yet if we if we do see Life on Mars then either they're connected somehow through pens spermia or it's an independent life forming event and if it is then there really should be life everywhere in the universe and we don't see it Y no that's interesting question I I want to know yeah yeah I mean I I think that would be the first question like if we if we did find Life on Mars like the very first question would be are we Rel is there common ancestor when did we separate and if it's and so it would be even more exciting to find life that that was completely different from the way life works on Earth and there is no common ancestor that life found a totally different way to form yeah well that that would be great but um because I'm quite strong believer in pun peria uh especially during the during the early stages of a solar system development when we had um like four billion years ago or three and a half billion years ago when we had both Earth and Mars looking very similar with a humid surface with a legs on the surface um and you had frequent exchange of material through impact ejector actually I have a impact ejector over here this is a martian meteorite uh tiny piece so we know that there is exchange happening until today and we know that some of these uh Rocks coming from Mars or from Earth to Mars would if they contained life bacteria as we know it it would survive the travel and then if they hit a war Little Pond they could proliferate in there so I think that there's quite High chance of a similar origin um but still then there could have been couple billion years of separate Evolution which can give us um but still I know it's still hypothesis I still want to know yeah well and then you look at extra you know Interstellar objects umu mua and borisov and things that are traveling from from star to star and you can imagine these various mechanisms where where chunks could be blasted off of Mars and went Interstellar and have been drifting and so like if we do find life is all life in the Galaxy connected somehow right if if you combine it with the knowledge that uh the life the oldest life on Earth uh can survive couple million years embedded deep in ice without any source of energy and especially if you uh freeze uh freeze bacteria completely there's no liquid water you completely still metabolism then they can survive for until well for million years for sure so if you can transfer from solar system to solar system within one million year or so and you you are in deep enough big enough chunk of meteorite to not be radiated by Cosmic radiation then yeah interal p is also possible so yeah yeah I have so many questions I mean I and it's not like you have the answers I mean you know we have the same questions and it's just the only way is to just keep picking away with the sources of evidence that we have uh Yan what are you obsessed with right now well now it's uh it's a work that's that's been for for for a while the project uh Alpha Mars we started uh now it's it's growing Alpha Mars it's a agnostic life finding Association it's um it's an international time team of astrobiologists with the same goal to look for Life on Mars before we send humans there so that's what I what I'm dedicating most of my time on then I'm also still working on the Venus Mission now we are preparing a article where I'm stating that uh basically the droplets forming Venus clouds are as dark as if you collected them in a larger volume it would be as dark visually as a human blood for example very surprising but that's another thing and um what else yeah now I'm trying the impress Mission and I got two rescue dogs uh on top of that and a new house so now I'm obsessed about sleeping right because I don't have enough for that I I know the feeling um well y it's was an absolute pleasure to talk with you good luck with all of these projects and uh I hope to interview you when you uh shift to phase two and maybe phase three so uh so thanks for taking the time to chat with me today yeah thank you frasia and I want to make a shout out if you want to help with any of those projects uh go to alpam ms.org and you can send us um message or I will be answering comments in the below the video oh that sounds great awesome all right thanks a lot thank you very much bye I hope you enjoyed this interview with Dr yanek uh really interesting and I I really want to sort of stress how interested he is in having both the general public and other people who are in the astrobiology community get involved in some of these projects if any of the the things that we talked about sort of struck a note with you uh go to the website he's the founder of the agnostic life finding Association the website is alpham mars. org and you can go there and you can see the various projects and get involved in in some of them now I'm going to talk some more about sort of my thoughts and and feedback on this interview that I just did but first I'd like to thank our patrons a special thanks to Abe Kingston Andrew M gross danis alberty douge Stewart Dustin cable Jeremy M Jim Burke Jordan young Josh Schultz Mark anist Modo Paul robach Steven Kaki Steven fer Munley and Vlad chiplin who support us at the master of the universe level and all of our other supporters on patreon I'm not going to lie I feel a little bit of anxiety about what is going to happen with the search for Life on Mars like on the one hand you've got people who are wanting to send humans to Mars to explore to maybe live you've got not only the plans that SpaceX is going to do but NASA is working on its own plans and you've got the Chinese space agency working on their plans probably by the 2040s we're going to see humans set foot on the surface of Mars and when we do when those first humans walk around on Mars we are going to be beginning this process of potentially contaminating whatever life is already existent on Mars and I'm all for exploration I'm all for sending humans to other worlds and at the same time this question of are we alone in the universe did life form on Mars is is a really important question and the longer we live on Mars the harder it's going to be to get at that answer and we might lose that answer entirely and yet if we could discover another kind of life either that we do share a common ancestor or we don't and life just formed completely on its own in some other environment that would be amazing and so it is a really tricky problem and requires a lot of analysis requires a lot of thinking and care and I don't think that there's you know a lot of people on the space explor ation side of things or the let's colonize Mars side of things who are interested in going as slow as it's going to take to potentially get those answers and yet it is one of the most profound questions that we ask we one of the most profound answers that we could find so I am ambivalent and uh you know I always enjoy being ambivalent all right I hope you enjoyed this interview and uh we'll see you next time