---
title: "Research team developing software to distinguish life from non-life"
description: "It's life, Jim, but not as we know it."
type: News
tags:
  - News
date: "2019"
generated:
  by: "process:scripts/port_legacy_pages.py"
  at: "2026-09-10T00:00:00Z"
sources:
  - id: carc-web
    resource: "https://carc.unm.edu/news--events/News/life-in-space.html"
    title: "Research team developing software to distinguish life from non-life (carc.unm.edu)"
    author: "team:unm-carc"
---

# Research team developing software to distinguish life from non-life

<p class="carc-byline">2019</p>

It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.

One of the most convenient science fiction technologies is the life-sign
detector. It quickly alerts the characters to the presence, and even type, of
life as they explore the galaxy. In reality, the hope of eventually detecting
life elsewhere in the universe is a driving factor in space exploration. Every
probe that NASA sends out into the solar system comes with a pressing
question. Will this probe discover life beyond the Earth for the first time?
It turns out that this is a much harder question to answer than many thought.

When the twin Viking probes landed on Mars in 1976 they looked for certain
gasses known to be associated with life on Earth, and they both found what
they were looking for. Whether life was detected or if the results were due to
non-living chemical reactions has been hotly debated ever since. It turns out
many processes look life-like. Future probes will be able to directly analyze
molecules for evidence they were produced by living systems. How will we
recognize whether these molecules are the product of alien life or other
natural processes?

![man looking into microscope](/assets/life-in-space.jpg)

Life elsewhere in the solar system is likely to be very different from that on
Earth, and may even require a new definition of life. For example Saturn's
moon Titan has a very complex environment that is quite different from that on
Earth. The NASA Astrobiology Institute LAB team is developing the sensors that
are required to analyze the structure of molecules sampled by probes, as well
as the artificial intelligence needed to determine whether those molecules are
the product of life. The majority of chemical processes that we call
Life-on-Earth, convert carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements
into carbon dioxide and energy. But there are a lot of other ways to generate
energy from different environments (metabolisms). We have already discovered
life around volcanic vents in the depths of the ocean that take in sulfur to
extract the energy they need.

At the Center of Advanced Research Computing, Computer Science Research
Professor Matthew Fricke is part of a team developing software to tell life
from non-life. The effort is twofold: first Fricke is using supercomputers to
evolve the many different metabolisms that can exist in vastly different
environments from the Earth's. Secondly the team is developing artificial
intelligence techniques for recognizing the products of those metabolisms
should they be detected by future space probes.

Fricke first became interested in the problem of defining life beyond that
found on Earth after hearing a lecture by Stuart Kauffman on the future of
biology in 2004 at the University of New Mexico. In that lecture, Kauffman
pointed out that the life we observe here on Earth is probably just a single
example of all the possible versions of life that could exist and that
eventually a new biology would have to be developed that generalized beyond
our particular example.

The team is headed by Sarah Johnson (Georgetown University) and consists of
Eric Anslyn (UT Austin), Pamela Conrad (Carnegie Institution of Washington),
Leroy Cronin (University of Glasgow), Andrew Ellington (UT Austin), Jamie
Elsila (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), Peter Girguis (Harvard University),
Heather Graham (Goddard Space Flight Center), Christopher House (Penn State),
Christopher Kempes (Santa Fe Institute), Eric Libby (Santa Fe Institute), Paul
Mahaffy (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), Jay Nadeau (Portland State
University), Barbara Sherwook Lollar (University of Toronto), and Andrew
Steele (Carnegie Institution of Washington).

Photo: [OIST (Okinawa Institute of Science and
Technology)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/140436993@N06/41601326732){target=_blank}
via [photopin](http://photopin.com/){target=_blank}
([license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/){target=_blank})