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Search for Morphological and Biogeochemical Vestiges of Fossil Life in Extraterrestrial Settings: Utility of Terrestrial Evidence

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Astrobiology

Abstract

Any veneer of life covering the surface of a planet will necessarily interact with the solid and fluid phases, with which it is in contact. Specifically, it is bound to impose a thermodynamic gradient on all planetary near-surface environments (inclusive of the atmosphere and hydrosphere), which ultimatively stems from the accumulation of negative entropy by living systems. Consequently, life acts as a driving force for a number of globally relevant chemical transformations. On Earth, typical examples of such life-induced chemical inequilibria are the glaring redox imbalance at the terrestrial surface caused by photosynthetic oxygen, or the release of large quantities of hydrogen sulfide by sulfate-reducing bacteria in the marine realm. Also, the dynamic persistence of metastable atmospheric gas mixtures (such as 02, N2 and CH4 in the terrestrial atmosphere), and of isotopic disequilibria (e.g., between water-bound oxygen of the hydrosphere and atmospheric 02), is ultimately sustained by the thermodynamic imbalance imposed by the biosphere on its environment. Conspicuous thermodynamic inequilibria within the gaseous and liquid envelopes of a planet may, therefore, be taken as a priori evidence of the presence of life [1, 2]. Applying this criterion to the present composition of the Martian atmosphere [3], the latter gives little, if any, indication of contemporary biological activity on that planet.

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Authors
  1. Manfred Schidlowski
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Luft-und Raumfahrtmedizin, Linder Höhe, 51147, Köln, Germany

    Gerda Horneck  & Christa Baumstark-Khan  & 

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Schidlowski, M. (2002). Search for Morphological and Biogeochemical Vestiges of Fossil Life in Extraterrestrial Settings: Utility of Terrestrial Evidence. In: Horneck, G., Baumstark-Khan, C. (eds) Astrobiology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-59381-9_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-59381-9_24

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-63957-9

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