AbSciCon 2008

On April 15th-17th, the SETI Institute sponsored the 5th conference on Astrobiology, called AbSciCon (Astrobiology, Science, Conference). It was held at the Santa Clara Convention Center. There were 600 conferees from 28 countries. The simple fact that there is such a convention with so many people and hundreds of presentations is remarkable. This is an area of science that was unheard of a generation ago, was effectively banned in the early 90’s, then gained a lot of attention in the later 90’s. The first such conference was in 2000.

The conference was set up to have a morning and an afternoon plenary session and then most of the rest of the time was spent in topical sessions. As many as 9 sessions were proceeding at the same time and the talks were 15-30 minutes long including questions. Beyond these talks there were also poster displays split up along the same lines as the topical sessions. Then add to all of that some other talks and “birds of a feather” sessions and it was a very full 3 days.

Simultaneously, the convention center was also hosting a MySQL conference. I was so chagrined to know that there were two very nerdy conferences going on simultaneously and I could have gone to either one.

Most of the talks were readily accessible. For example, Chris McKay gave a short talk that argued the proposition that an outpost on the moon makes sense because we need the practice before going on to Mars. His model is McMurdo station in Antartica.

A number of talks were either directly or indirectly related to ALH84001, the Martian meteorite that may or may not demonstrate that Mars had life. See page 5 for an update.

It was interesting to see so many tags with the same names as the authors of articles that I’ve referenced in my own articles. SJAA members will recognize many of these names: Seth Shostak, Jill Tartar, Chris McKay, Scott Sandford, Andrew Fraknoi just to mention some local notables.

At conferences like these I often take note of the diversity of the population. Sadly, it wasn’t very diverse. The male/female ratio was actually very good for a scientific conference but racial diversity was missing. One of the poster presentations addressed this problem directly.

There were very few times where I felt I was just so out of touch that I could not understand the subject matter. But then I skipped some of the talks that struck me as the most arcane: “A Monoclonal Antibody Approach to Detecting Lipid Biomarkers and Assessing Their Syngeneity”, “Near Infrared Spectroscopy of the Nitrogenated Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Cations from 0.7 to 2.5 microns.” Some of the least scary titles were: “The Atacama Desert as a Mars Analog”, “Habitable Zone Limits for Dry Planets”, “‘Who’s Looking at you Kid?’: SETI Advantages near the Ecliptic Plane”, “Astrobiology from Europan (sic) Orbit”, “Biomedical Effects of Lunar Dust.”

Here are some of the highlights as I saw them:

1. Charley Lineweaver’s severe dismissal of the idea that evolution converges at intelligence.

2. Terrence Deacon described how something like the Babelfish all-language translater from “The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” might actually be attainable.

3. Steve Kilston making the case that SETI should look for intelligences in the ecliptic plane because that’s where there are stars that might already know about us (assuming they can detect us via solar transits).

4. A statistical evaluation of the Drake equation that demonstrated that the “average” distance to the closest ETI is 2670 light years +- 1309 ly.

5. The case was made for considering M stars as habitable planets. Within 10 pc there are 4 A and F stars; 54 G and K stars but 227 M stars. Also, M stars with planets tend not to have hot Jupiters which might be bad for life.

6. Expect to hear of planets around Alpha Centauri B by 2011. A new search will be made of that star which has many ideal features: 91% solar mass, habitable zone is close to the star, quiet in the X-ray part of the spectrum, metal rich, and the companion A is at least 30 AU away.

7. Just as today we detect hot Jupiters based on how they perturb their star, so future detections may find Earth-like planets that perturb their hot Jupiters.

8. David McKay reiterated that abiotic processes cannot account for the kind of magnetite found in Martian meteorite ALH84001. Another talk specified that abiotic processes can’t produce the shape of the magnetite found on that rock.

9. In a tribute to Leslie Orgel (he died last October), Jerry Joyce discussed The RNA World. This body of work has progressed to the point where it can be shown that abiotic processes can possibly lead to replication. It is becoming more generally accepted that life started as RNA before evolving to DNA. Joyce also said that he believed that life would be created in a test tube before it is discovered on another world. An interesting bet.

10. Another tribute, this time for Stanley Miller, recalled the Urey-Miller experiment which created organics from a primordial soup that was electrified. This experiment was done in 1953, the same year that Watson and Crick published their findings on the double helix nature of DNA. It was also the year that a protein was first sequenced.

The conference was very well run for the most part. The supplied box lunches were awful and there was some confusion about which talks were held where and at least one meeting room was way too small. But I had a good time, learned a lot, and wouldn’t mind going again some time.