Peter Ward's "Life" Books

"Life as We Do Not Know It", Beaverton Library 576.839 WAR 2009, Viking

The NASA Search for (and Synthesis of) Alien Life

"A New History of Life" with Joe Kirschvink, Beaverton Library 576.82 WAR, 2015, Bloomsbury

The Radical New Discoveries about the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth

Peter Ward (co-author of "Rare Earth" with Don Brownlee) is an optimist about extraterrestrial life, and a pessimist about life elsewhere resembling current Earth life.

Ward is hyperoptimistic about sending scientists to look for life on Mars and Titan. But resources are limited, and resources allocated for manned missions cannot also be spent for robotic missions - we must choose. Between 1972 (Apollo 17) and 2016, robots have gotten exponentially better; even resource-challenged India can afford to send one to Mars. As I write this, the world has only two human capable space vehicles - the International Space Station, and the Soyuz spacecraft. New vehicles are promised Real Soon Now, but they will at best be shuttlecraft, not multiyear habitats capable of independent operation for the 13 year round trio journey to Titan and back (presuming Cassini-Huygens travel times). Humans will go there sometime - to robot-prepared habitats on an already-explored Titan. That said ...

Life as We Do Not Know It

• p05 Alvin in late 1970s, black smokers in deep Pacific, 600℉ water, sulfide chimneys, extremophiles
• p11 Life: metabolizes, complex and organized, reproduces, develops, evolves, autonimous
• p18 Virus alive, domains "Ribosa" and "Ribovera"
• p22 Margulis/Sagan: life is cellular . . . Carl Woese. John Baross (+Ward): add protocells, naked genes, organic molecules, etc.

|| 250 to 65 || Mesozoic || Dinosaurs || Cretaceous ||

• p29 4.4 GYa first liquid water, 3.9 GYa, full volume oceans, 500km bombardment, millenia of steam
• p30 Norman Sleep Stanford 1989 giant impacts vaporize entire ocean, sterilize surface
• p30 10 hour day, dim sun ... p39 dominion Terraoa - Earth life ... p40 Woese "progenote", simpler than cell

• p63 1980 Feinberg Shapiro "Life Beyond Earth" ... Silicon life, lost sight of box

• p65 solvents, hot to cold: sulfuric acid, water, methane (Jupiter/Saturn), LN2 (Uranus), LH2
• p73 Benner, ammonia/carbonyl life
• p75 Silane life with carbon side chains
• p83 Cyanobacteria "true living fossils", at least 3.5 GYa says Kirschvink, then of Cal Tech
• p92 RNA/ribose difficult, can form with borates
• p95 Dyson dual path, proteins and replication separate, garbage bag world, RNA as parasites
• p103 cellular life driven by the needs of viruses
• p103 early life simple, horizontal gene transfer (part swapP common; complex life tuned, parts not interchangable

My take: Reliable complex parts requires DNA, DNA requires complex parts.

• p113 Woese origin in very early cloud droplets
• p115 Kirschvink and Weiss, formations of downhill steps, linked impact craters on dry land, Mars
• p117 no evidence of continents before 3 billion years ago

• p121 Robert Shapiro Origins, skeptical of Miller-Urey

• p126 Mycoplasma genitalium, 480 genes, 580Kbases, 130 to 215 genes may be not essential, Venter
• p129 Jack Szostak, Harvard, synthetic selection on RNA,
• p131 Szostak, too many errors, but 100x polymerization 10x fidelity is replication, "alive"

• p136 2002, Debbie Kelly UW, mid-Atlantic Lost City white vents

• p138 Venter seawater samples, 148 new bacteria types, 1.2 million new genes
• p139 Identified bacteria phyla 1987#12, 2003#52, 2004#80 ... == Venter types???
• p141 Panspermia p148 revived microbes from 250 MYa rock salt
• p149 Melosh spallation p150 Charles Breiterman viable two-way microbe exchange with Mars (no ref, no Google Scholar)

• p163 Fossils on Moon p164 Armstrong/Wells/Gonzales "A-W-G" p165 Cretaceous ejecta on Moon

  • Note KHL: Icarus paper seems to contradict Melosh, that ocean contained all ejecta . . . Still researching this

  • p166 200 kg/km² of "moon's surface" . . . A-W-G Fig. 3 suggests burial depths to hundreds of meters before 3.2GYa

• p182 Viking, no organics in regolith, surface UV
• p185 Harvard's Andrew Knoll, look for fossils on Apollinaris Patera volcano summit, Dao Vallis channel deposit
• p185 2003 closest opposition, ... KHL mag -2.88 (typical -2.8 to -1.2), -2.78 @ 2018 July 31 will be 10% less bright
• p197 Europa: rock, 80 km ocean, 20 km ice, 86-132 K, Jupiter radiation p214 "too cold for CHON, not enough energy"
• p221 Titan radius silicates to 1800km, 500km ice/ammonia, 240km ammonia/water, 35km ice p234: non CHON life?
• p237 Jill Tartar SETI Institute seeks $12M, hustles Paul Allen (sister Jody Patton) away from Ward
• p247 to 253: send scientists to space - er, Dr. Ward, is it better to spend money on this rather than universities?

A New History of Life

Harder to read - a catalog, not a story

• p11 Figire: New Geologic Timescale (Ediacaran from 635 GYa to 542 GYa)
• p15 Figure: Which is earthlike? Most uninhabitable by humans
• p20 Figure: PCO2, with unexplained gray bands. Relative to now, dropping over time, 10,000 times more at 3.5GYa
  • KHL Brainfart: greenhouses. As the Sun heats, why would we permit "wild" CO2 to heat the whole planet?