- Jim Lattis: Thank you, I'd like to introduce tonight's speaker,
we're glad to have Lena Vincent
who is a third year graduate student
at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.
And she's a pioneer in a new field.
She's come to Wisconsin from California
to lead the University of Wisconsin
into the field of astrobiology
and she's going to explain her role in this to us,
but she's part of a program that's called OoLALA.
One of the best acronyms anywhere,
Origins of Life, Artificial Life and Astrobiology.
So help me welcome Lena here.
[audience applauds]
- Thank you Jim,
so I just want to do a quick mic check for recording.
Sounds good, okay great.
Well I'm really happy to be here.
So Jim invited me a couple of months ago,
actually right after OoLALA came on the map.
So we've been thinking about creating an official presence
for astrobiology at UW-Madison for quite some time.
But that didn't really actually happen until last spring,
with our inaugural research showcase
which I'm going to talk to you about.
But when Jim invited me,
I thought it'd be a really great idea
to walk you through
the establishment of this new initiative,
the OoLALA initiative.
But to do that I'm going to need
to talk a little bit about what astrobiology is.
You may not know.
And even if you had heard about it,
you may not be familiar with what the latest
and greatest in astrobiology is right now.
So that's what I'm gonna start with today.
I'm actually gonna start with a brief introduction
to what astrobiology is as a discipline.
And then I'm going to transition into
what UW-Madison is doing in this context.
So examples of research that are being conducted
by scientists and thinkers
at different levels on our campus.
And then from there I hope that
the OoLALA initiative will kind of justify itself
and walk you through what the OoLALA initiative is,
what we're doing, and what our hopes for the future are.
So let's start with a series of questions.
So I think like any science,
like any discipline, astrobiology is driven by questions.
But I happen to think that
the questions that underlie astrobiology
are some of the most exciting
and some of the grandest we can ask as human beings.
And those include what is life?
What are we?
Why are we different from nonliving things?
How did life get started here on Earth?
How did that happen?
It's really difficult to conceive,
and yet it keeps me up at night, it still does.
Does life exist on other worlds?
And if so, how can we detect it?
How can we go to Mars to some of the icy moons
or even beyond some of
the exoplanets we're now discovering,
and figure out if life
is there or has been there in the past.
And then finally what is the future
for life here on Earth and in space?
So I think that those questions do a pretty decent job
of summarizing the core of astrobiology.
But if you like definitions, here is a popular definition
that is often cited
and is put forth by the NASA Astrobiology Institute
which is the leader in coordinating
and funding astrobiology research,
at least here in the U.S.
And it states that "Astrobiology is the study of the origins,
"evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe."
So you can see it's just the little questions.
So that is astrobiology.
Now as you might imagine,
if you try to think of what kinds
of expertise you would need
to try to answer those questions.
You probably wouldn't be able
to come up with a single answer.
And that's because astrobiology
is interdisciplinary to a degree
that is rarely seen in science.
So what I mean by interdisciplinary
is that it requires a concerted effort
from lots of different kinds of thinkers
who have expertises and backgrounds
in various different fields,
both in the hard sciences and in the humanities,
to come together and work on solving
the mysteries associated with the origin of life
and its distribution in the universe.
And I think that's captured there quite decently
in that little figure I've included there,
which just kind of shows all the disciplines
that fall under the umbrella of astrobiology.
But even that I don't think captures quite
the extent to which astrobiology is interdisciplinary.
In some cases, even transdisciplinary.
And also I'll note that the humanities
are not included in this figure,
and I think that philosophy
is a huge cornerstone of astrobiology as well.
So because I'm going to spend the next
10 or 15 minutes or so
going in and deconstructing that definition a little bit,
and zooming in on some of the specific research themes
that are currently being tackled by astrobiologists,
I want to spend a couple more minutes here
just dwelling on how cool this is.
Astrobiology has got to be one of the most exciting fields,
in my opinion,
I'm a little bit biased because I'm an astrobiologist.
But just imagine being able to convert a natural curiosity,
you've asked these questions to yourself before,
maybe you still do.
Being able to turn that natural curiosity,
this deep existential need to understand
where we came from and why we're here,
into a scientific career
where you get paid by NASA
or another organization to pursue this.
Just how cool that is, I can't even wrap my head around it.
Another reason astrobiology to me is so exciting,
especially now,
is that the biggest discoveries
in astrobiology are yet to be made.
So we don't have a second example of life yet,
we don't know if life exists on another world.
There are a lot of optimistic people, myself included.
And the other one is the mystery
that is the origin of life on Earth.
How did life get started on this planet?
We just have no idea.
You might think that that makes it kind
of frustrating for astrobiologists, it totally does.
It means that we as scientists have
an even steeper hill to climb in the scientific process.
We don't have more than one example
of the phenomenon we're trying to observe
to draw conclusions the way you might in other fields.
And then we also don't have the luxury
of being able to watch things unfold in real time.
So unless you know something,
I don't know of a way of rewinding Earth's history
and watching life unfold before our eyes, right?
So that makes it experimentally very different,
but I also think it makes it super exciting.
It means that we're in this phase
where we don't know where we are.
We're at the frontier,
we don't know what lies ahead.
But a lot of people like myself are very optimistic
that we will make those discoveries
and that it's just a matter of time.
And finally, I think also the fact that you get
to work with all these different kinds
of thinkers with different perspectives,
with different backgrounds,
makes it all that more exciting.
So now I'm going to walk you through some
of those different perspectives
and show you some different research
areas within the umbrella of astrobiology.
And so one, of course, is
when we're trying to figure out where life came from,
how life got started,
whether it exists on other worlds,
we have to understand
how those worlds come to be in the first place, right?
We need to know how the raw materials of living systems
at the simplest level,
even at the elemental level,
how those get concentrated on
what we consider to be planetary bodies.
So think of the Earth, this rocky body
that has all this stuff on it,
that somehow, some time in its evolution
led to the appearance of life.
So for that, we need to turn
to this area of planetary science and astronomy
that's dedicated to understanding
how planetary systems form.
So when you have this cloud of gas and a star forms,
how do these different clumps
of matter accrete around that star to create planets.
And what are the processes that drive the formation
of these different kinds of planets?
Some of which eventually will become hospitable to life.
So that's one area of astrobiology
is this broad perspective on how planets form.
How the context for the origin of life forms.
A little bit more zoomed in than that,
so once we understand how planetary systems form,
we need to understand how a particular planet,
in this case Earth formed,
and what its early history was like
if we hope to understand how eventually
it was conducive to the origin of life.
And so here what we have is an artist depiction
of what we think the Earth looked like
around the time when life emerged.
So you may or may not recall
that the Earth is about 4 1/2 billion years old,
we have some arm wavy estimates for when the Earth
became cool enough to actually have water on it,
when you actually started to get plate tectonics,
which is the process by which you have new material
kind of being extruded from the center of the Earth
and creating things like landmasses.
So we have some arm wavy sense of what that was like,
we really have no specifics beyond that.
And so a huge part of astrobiology
is trying to understand the early history of the Earth.
Trying to piece it together in the context of understanding
when some of the major transitions that enabled life,
like the appearance of water or oxygen,
happened on this planet.
So that's one huge area
and you tend to have people with backgrounds in geology
and planetary science and geophysics and physics,
all of that stuff to try to piece
together this long and complex history.
So now, we zoom in even further on the Earth,
and we ask, so once you have this Earth,
once you have water,
once things start to become pleasant
enough for living systems to emerge,
how did the stuff that you need to make life,
how did that start accumulating on a planet?
So in the picture I just showed you,
you didn't see any life there, right,
so we know for sure there were no living things.
But what we're starting to realize is
that even though there
were no living things present on Earth
very very early on,
that the stuff you need to make living things
was accumulating very, very easily
by probably a number of different ways.
So one classic experiment that you may
or may not have heard of in the past,
maybe even in a biology course,
is the Miller-Urey experiment.
So what it showed is
that you could make life's building blocks,
so some of the amino acids,
out of simple ingredients like atmospheric gases
and lightning.
And when you pass this discharge through this gas mixture,
you can start making life's building blocks.
And so this was a really seminal experiment
to show that the building blocks
of life could readily be made under early Earth conditions
in the complete absence of life.
Now since then, we've found
many other ways by which this can happen.
So it turns out if you go down to
the bottom of the ocean at these hydrothermal vent systems,
they're basically just giant factories
for these building blocks.
And likewise maybe even more elegantly,
I find this so exciting,
we're realizing that this stuff
is being flung at us from space all the time.
So that's a comet right there,
we've had numerous bodies impact our planet.
And we go and analyze them
we find so many of life's building blocks.
Amino acids, some fatty acids that could form membranes,
some nuclei bases, some precursors to some of
the nucleic acids that we have in our cells today.
So not only are there paths by which you make
the stuff on a young planet in the absence of life,
space is also just loaded with it.
So that is really exciting,
I think it inspired a generation of scientists
to really look into this question
of how you now take these things,
these Legos if you will, and start assembling
them into living systems.
Now what I just showed you was a bottom-up perspective.
So how do you go from the raw materials of the Earth
that are not alive and you start
incrementally approaching the complexity of life?
There's another approach which is more deeply seated
in the biological sciences, which looks backwards in time.
So it starts with a life that we know
and see and understand today,
and works backwards to look at life in deep time
as it may have looked like in the early history of life.
And so some of the approaches
that we use as astrobiologists
are based on the evolutionary relationships
between organisms that we see today.
And that allows us to go back further and further in time
and look at common ancestry.
And based on some of the attributes
of those common ancestors,
we can actually draw conclusions about
what environments might have been present on the early Earth
and how they might have been making a living
in that early Earth context.
Then we can also look at analogs
for early environments on the early Earth.
Many of which were probably much more extreme
than we'd be comfortable existing in.
So here's a picture of a hot spring.
So there are many astrobiologists who do fieldwork
who go out in these extreme environments
and look at the diversity of living systems that live there
and figure out how they make a living
to try to infer backwards
what the earliest ancestors
of life might have been doing as well.
And then another approach for looking at life in deep time
is actually looking at the rock record
and looking for physical evidence that life left behind
throughout its history.
And so what you have on the right hand side there
is actually a very famous microfossil,
some UW-Madison researchers actually helped
in elucidating around what time,
when this organism might have been alive.
It turns out it's about 3 1/2 billion years ago,
which is a very long time.
But you can see that that's still fairly complex,
it looks like a string of cells,
almost looks like a worm.
That's a pretty complex life right there
and if that was already present 3 1/2 billion years ago,
we have to imagine, when was the actual origin of life?
It might be anywhere between 4.2 to 3 1/2 billion years ago.
So very, very far back.
And so that's an example
of physical evidence that we can look back on.
Now there is one limitation with this.
It turns out our rock record is limited,
so I mentioned plate tectonics
and the fact that it kind of recycles
and creates new crust
by extruding material from the interior.
It turns out that that's a giant recycling system,
it basically draws down all
the stuff that was at the surface
and buries it.
So our rock record only extends back
to about 3.8 billion years ago.
So that means that between 4 1/2 and 3.8 billion years ago,
we have no idea, we have no record,
it's basically a blind spot in our record.
So those are the life in deep time approaches,
but as I just mentioned they have their limitations.
So then there's a complementary approach,
and I'm partial to this one because this is the area I'm in.
And this is to again work from the bottom up.
So as I mentioned, we don't have
a second example of life yet.
And if I had to summarize artificial life in one sentence,
it would be that it's trying to make
those second examples of life here on Earth.
Why would we want to make second examples of life?
It's kind of a fringy area.
You might associate it with weird experiments
and I'm sure there are a bunch
of sci-fi plots based on similar approaches.
But our rationale is that by making
second examples of life,
we can, along with the example of life as we know it,
we can come to some generalities
about what makes living systems the way that they are.
And it allows us to see how exotic life can get,
what, are there different ways of being alive?
And if so, what characterizes them,
what do they have in common?
So when we go to look for life on other worlds,
we're not just constrained
to our perception of life as we know it, right.
We might catch forms of life that seem very exotic to us
because they are very dissimilar from life as we know it,
and yet are alive by our definitions.
So that's the rationale behind artificial life,
and there are lots of different ways
of doing artificial life.
So you may have heard it associated
with artificial intelligence.
So a lot of artificial life is in silico,
so it's based on computer models and computer simulations.
So what you have on the far right side there
is an example of a cellular automata,
so it's actually a computer algorithm
that creates these little cells that obey simple rules.
And you can get really complex behaviors out
of them like evolution.
So in some ways they can imitate aspects of life,
and yet be in this gray area between alive and not alive.
And then you have the wet A-life or the experimental A-life,
which is literally trying to go into
a lab and make second examples of life.
So that's the artificial life perspective.
Now I just mentioned that we really need
to understand life as a general phenomenon
to really be able to hope to detect it on other worlds.
Because there is a chance
that if we did find life on another world
it would be very similar to life as we know it.
There is also an equally strong probability
that it would look completely dissimilar
to life as we know it.
And if we went to say Mars or Titan,
or on an exoplanet when we have
the capacity to do so in the future,
if we went with our measures
only calibrated to life as we know it,
we might miss these very more exotic forms of life.
So this is all part
of this discussion around biosignatures.
So biosignatures refers to artifacts
or phenomena or objects that are smoking guns for life.
And that involves sampling material
from a planet for example,
and deploying these measures and these observables
and coming to some conclusion about whether
those observables were the product of life or not.
So biosignatures is very tricky,
because it turns out, a lot of the biosignatures we have
can be confounded by nonliving processes.
And so that's what a lot of biosignatures research
is really trying to tackle,
is finding smoking guns for life
where we have almost 100% certainty
that they must've been produced by life.
It turns out that's very hard to do,
to my knowledge we don't really have one of those yet.
And then if you add the layer on top of that,
which is that life might exist in very exotic ways,
then what do biosignatures mean in that context?
So there's a big push in astrobiology now
for what are called agnostic biosignatures
where you try to detect life based
on some fundamental processes that life does
without focusing on the specifics
of what that life looks like,
and that's very hard to do as you might imagine.
So that's the biosignatures aspect.
And now we look outwards again,
now that we have the problem of biosignatures in mind.
What do we do with it?
So as you may or may not be aware,
we are not alone by any means,
and that may be true in terms of the life question,
but we know for sure that we are not
the only planetary system.
And so this is a map,
and I'm actually not sure how current this is,
so we have a new exoplanet satellite
that's currently collecting data, TESS,
and I don't think that that data
is reflected here in this map.
But this right here shows 4,000 planetary systems
that have been found in our surveys of the sky so far.
And multiply that by the number
of planets in all those planetary systems.
So we have a lot of potential planets to play with here.
And one of the ones that you may have heard
of in the news was this Trappist system,
and it kind of made headlines because it was found
that some of these planets might actually be very similar
to Earth in terms of their size and distance
of the star that they orbit.
So that's really cool and that's really exciting,
and I think it motivates a lot of people to do astrobiology,
just because when you look at this map,
it's hard to not be optimistic about the likelihood
of life being somewhere else beyond Earth.
But there's still so much we don't understand, right?
So I put the Trappist I system there
not just to show you the systems that show a lot of promise,
but also to caution you,
because there's a lot of hype
about this habitable zone discussion,
and I just want to say right now
that there's still so much we don't understand
about what makes anything habitable.
And these systems look very different
from the solar system we understand relatively well.
And so there's still so much we don't understand.
And we're also limited by the fact
that we can't actually go to these places yet,
so these are all observations
that we have to make from very far away.
And so that you can imagine that
the biosignatures problem
becomes even harder at that stage.
So anyway, maybe I've dissuaded you a little bit
about what can be done in astrobiology,
because we're faced with all these problems,
but I think it's really exciting.
I just think it shows that
we still have a lot of work to do.
Like I said, it's really hard to look at this map
and not be optimistic about the chance of finding life.
We just have to be smart about it.
So with this in mind,
I'm now going to transition over to what researchers
at UW-Madison are doing to tackle some of these questions.
And with their permission, I gathered some information
about what they were doing, and I tried
to pick a selection of researchers
that really represent the breadth of astrobiology.
So I'm going to highlight five research groups
and before I do that, I just want to pause and just mention
that for a long time here at UW-Madison, until recently,
we had the Wisconsin Astrobiology Research Consortium,
which was a decade-long research consortium
funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute.
And it was a team of 14 investigators,
many of which were here at UW Madison,
mostly in the Geological Sciences Department.
And their main objective was
to study methods for life detection.
So not just look at the history of the Earth
and how life influenced different Earth processes,
but then how those can be used
to design life detection methods.
So I've summarized here their goals,
and if you want more information about this,
you want to see a collection of papers
and the findings that came out
of this decade-long initiative,
I've put a link to the website there
and I can definitely share that
with anyone who's interested in learning more.
So this is no longer ongoing,
so the funding for this expired about a year and a half ago.
However, I think it created a strong legacy at UW-Madison,
especially in the geosciences department,
to continue in this line of research.
And that brings me to Dr. Annie Bauer,
who is an assistant professor
in the department of geoscience,
and what she's interested in
is reconstructing key transitions in Earth's history.
So if you recall, I showed you
that picture of the early Earth,
and her question is really how did we go
from this really hot, inhospitable planet
to this really pretty blue marble we call home?
And the particular transitions she's interested in
are the appearance and the evolution of crust,
so landmasses.
The oxygenation of the Earth and plate tectonics.
So how did those happen, when did they happen.
And the key message she uses is geochronology.
So she basically dates rocks.
And she does that by looking at these zircons.
So zircons, you may be familiar,
they're this very beautiful gemstone.
But in their raw form, they are a really cool mineral,
because it's one of the hardiest minerals you can find.
So that means that when these zircons formed,
even 4 1/2 billion years ago,
they're going to stick around.
The cool thing about zircons is that the way that they grow
tends to trap material inside the crystal.
And they therefore lock in a bunch
of really interesting geochemical information.
So what she does she actually looks at these zircons,
she collects them from different localities,
so she was kind enough to share pictures
of her working in the field.
So this is a gneiss complex,
so gneiss is a kind of rock.
And she extracts zircons from those,
and that formation is actually
3.9 billion years old.
So she collects these zircons,
and then she uses a method called laser ablation
to kind of peel back the layers of the zircon,
and then uses isotopic methods
to actually date those layers.
So if you're not familiar with isotopes,
you basically look, in a very general sense,
just look at the distribution of those isotopes
and based on the ratios, you can tell
when and how particular processes
might have been happening.
So that's what she's doing,
so she is using these zircons and these analytical means
to study these transitions
and reconstruct them based on her data.
So then to shift gears a little bit,
we also have this question of life in the clouds of Venus.
Now, this is an area that is being spearheaded
by Sanjay Limaye, who's a research scientist
at the Space Science and Engineering Center at UW-Madison.
So Sanjay has been working on Venus for a long time,
and he has this really cool hypothesis
that the clouds of Venus might
be hospitable to microbial life.
So this is actually not a new idea,
it's been around for a long time, dating to the late 60s.
But there's these mysterious dark clouds,
you can see them there on that image,
and they're very mysterious,
they think that they're mostly made of sulfuric material,
but the height at which they are in the atmosphere
and the temperature that characterizes them
and the kinds of materials you find aerosolized
in that layer,
make it kind of hospitable to microbial life.
And so Sanjay released a paper last year
where he compared some of the light absorbing properties
of different microbial proteins
and the light absorbing properties of these clouds
and they're oddly similar.
So he has this cool hypothesis
about life being possible in the clouds of Venus.
And this is a concept here for a platform,
a maneuverable platform that would go to Venus
and actually sample these cloud layers
and see if there's life there.
So this is called the VAMP.
And so I just thought I would note that a graduate student
who is actually involved in OoLALA, Jaime Cordova,
will be going to Moscow later this year
to try to pitch this VAMP concept to
the Venera-D mission to Venus.
So that would be really cool.
Okay, so then we're going to switch gears a little bit more
and now talk about the origins
of biochemistry of life as we know it.
So John Yin's group over at the Wisconsin Institute
for Discovery has been doing work on this,
and here I'm highlighting Hayley's work,
who is a graduate student
in the chemical engineering department.
And what she's interested in is figuring out
how the complex processes of life got started.
So we know that cellular life today is a very complex thing.
It requires this orchestration of really complex processes.
And the one she's particularly interested in
is the information processing
and the energy processing features of life.
And she is particularly interested in those
because it's this chicken and egg problem.
So you need energy processing to transfer information,
but you also need that information to feed back
and influence those energy harvesting processes.
So she's interested in how that got started.
How could you get one or the other,
was that a sequential thing,
did they have to emerge simultaneously?
So what she's doing is she's looking
at a particular process in cells,
which is peptide formation,
so proteins are kind of a cornerstone of biology.
They do everything in the cell,
and the way that they form is
by stringing together these amino acids,
these beads if you will.
In cellular life today, that's carried out by very
very complex processes, things like the ribosome.
But she's interested in how this process might
have gotten started on the early Earth.
So what their group is doing is they're looking
at a process that happens in natural environments
as a driving force for the creation of these peptides
in the absence of complex machinery like the ribosome.
So what they found is that wet-drying cycle,
so that repeating dehydration and re hydration that you get
in something like a hydrothermal pool,
might actually drive the formation of these proteins
in the absence of complex life.
And so I won't go into this in detail
because it's a little bit beyond even my comprehension,
but being able to show that using this wet-drying process
and by adding different conditions
and different energy sources,
that you can create these chains
and that you can actually encode information in them.
So you actually get biases in the kinds of proteins you get
depending on the environment that they're formed in.
That's really cool work.
And then again switching gears,
so Simon Gilroy actually came
to give a talk here a while ago,
but I thought I would highlight his research again.
So Simon is a professor of botany,
and what he's interested in is basically
this question of surviving in space, right?
So we have the ISS right now,
but we also have all these plans
to maybe go and colonize Mars
and set up long-term colonies on the moon,
and then eventually go farther
and farther out in the solar system.
But there's this big question of how will we survive,
how will we sustain ourselves?
And wouldn't it be cool if we could
actually grow crop-producing plants in space?
And so he's been studying how space conditions
actually affect crop- producing plant growth.
So he was kind enough to share the slide
about some of the upcoming missions that they have
on the ISS that are due to launch I think
and he said about nine months from now.
And so y'know they have all these tests
where they're actually going to analyze
how cotton grows in orbit.
Develop new kinds of chambers
and instrumentation to enable this.
So I think that's a really cool sampler
of the different ways in which UW-Madison researchers
are contributing to astrobiology.
And of course because I'm here and I have the opportunity
to plug my own research,
I'm just going to talk about our group a little bit.
So I've shown here our PI,
principal investigator David Baum,
who's also a professor in the botany department.
And then our team of really
talented undergraduate students.
And I've chosen to highlight here our collective expertise.
So you can see the extent to which we are interdisciplinary
even within our own research group.
And the question we're trying to ask by the way
is a pretty-- is not a trivial one,
we're interested in the origins of evolution.
How did evolution start?
So we have a model that we've built
where we think that evolution starts very early,
it's probably one of the earliest processes
to have arisen at the origin of life.
And so we're conducting laboratory experiments
that, summarized very briefly, are akin
to just creating mini early Earth conditions.
And then looking for evidence that evolution is occurring.
And so we have some sense of what that should look like.
And I'm not going to spend too much time here,
but if you have questions about that
please feel free to ask me
because I'd love to talk more about it.
But all I want to say is
that we're finding really, really cool results.
So we mix minerals and prebiotic soups,
and we look for evidence of these cool processes happening.
And we have some really exciting tantalizing results.
So anyway, now with that,
I hope that you get a really good sampler
of different kinds of astrobiology research
that are currently being done,
and that is a small subset by the way.
I only had time to go over five.
We currently have 22 self-identified groups
that are doing astrobiology relevant research
at UW-Madison, and the list keeps growing.
So with that now I want to talk about the OoLALA initiative.
So what is a OoLALA?
So you know it stands for origin of life,
artificial life, and astrobiology.
So I cannot take credit for that acronym,
that was actually my PI David Baum's idea,
which is a superb acronym.
And so you OoLALA is an initiative that's centered
at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery,
which is a public research institute.
And our goals are to organize
and support this community
of astrobiologists here on campus.
And we are doing that by creating programming
and resources to help coordinate
and highlight research on campus
and to draw awareness to astrobiology
and the fact that there are so many people at UW-Madison
doing astrobiology research.
And we're also trying to provide resources and support
for students who are coming into science
and who are seeking out UW-Madison
because of their interest in these fields.
Which is kind of a new thing.
Most astrobiologists that are in business today
either made careers doing something else,
and this was an interest that they developed later on.
Or they're like me,
and they're joining astrobiology relatively early
in their careers but started
out doing something fundamentally different,
in my case I was a stem cell biologist before I did this.
But we now have undergraduate students
and young students who are coming into science
because of their interest in these areas.
And we find that not just on this campus,
but in general, there are a lot
of resources lacking to support them.
So those really were the three missions
that we were trying to accomplish
with the establishment of OoLALA.
So the first concrete way that we decided
to do this is by launching a website.
So this is our website, astrobio.wisc.edu.
It's hosted by the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery
and it's still under construction,
so we're still trying to find different kinds
of content to put on there,
so if you have any suggestions
that you feel would be helpful,
I'd be very open to hearing those.
So this is our website here.
And our goal, very generally, was to consolidate
all of this amazing research that's being done
related to OoLALA under one roof.
So when I was a graduate student,
when I knew I wanted to pursue grad school,
I knew I wanted to do astrobiology.
But there are very few places,
there are very few institutions
where there are dedicated astrobiology departments.
In fact, I don't know of any.
So that makes it very hard
to find out who is doing astrobiology research.
And so what we thought would be really useful
is to create one place
where you could go and find that information,
even if there was no formal department
to which it was associated.
So that was a main motivation.
And so one of the things that we decided to do
was create an about page.
So you can't read anything here
but I encourage you to go check it out.
It just has a summary of what astrobiology is,
what astrobiology at UW-Madison means,
and how to get involved.
So giving some pointers to young students
who are maybe interested in pursuing astrobiology research,
but aren't sure how to do that.
This would be a place to start.
And then of course we have our research page.
So we have compiled a list of research profiles
of UW-Madison faculty and research groups
that are doing astrobiology relevant research.
And we have organized them based on
the kind of discipline that they belong to.
As I said, we currently have 22 listed on there,
but the list keeps growing.
And so this is a really great place for someone
who has a particular area that they're interested in,
say atmospheric science.
Who wants to find what researchers at UW-Madison
are doing atmospheric science with an interest
in astrobiology relevant questions.
And so then one of the other concrete ways
in which we are trying to accomplish
the goals of you OoLALA is through programming.
So this is a research showcase that took place last spring.
It was funded by the Women
in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute,
and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.
And our goal was to highlight advances
in astrobiology research
through the lens of these four researchers
who came from off-campus,
and who gave hour-long public lectures
at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery
and who stayed here two to three days to interact
with members of the UW-Madison community.
And so that was extremely successful,
again we try to have speakers come in
who represented the diversity
of different fields and perspectives in astrobiology.
So we had Dr. Sarah Walker from ASU come
and give a really awesome talk on the physics of life
and trying to elucidate the general physical rules
that underlie life and its emergence.
Then we had Dr. Amanda Garcia
who is a postdoc at the University of Arizona,
who uses reconstruction methods to study ancient genes
in bacteria and microorganisms
to study the co-evolution of life on Earth,
particularly in the early stages of life's history.
Then we had Dr. Kate Adamala come,
who does really exciting work
on building basically fake cells,
synthetic cells for a number of different applications,
including studying what
the first cells might have looked like.
So trying to make artificial life.
And then finally we had Dr. Sarah Horst come,
from Johns Hopkins University,
who gave a fantastic talk on her research
on Titan's atmosphere and some of
the really cool prebiotic chemistry that happens on Titan.
And as a special bonus, Sarah is actually a co-investigator
on the recently selected NASA Dragonfly mission,
and so she talked about that even
before it was selected by NASA,
it was actually a few months before that.
So that was really exciting,
I'll get back to that in a second.
So this is just to show that the showcase
was really successful in terms of its reach,
so we actually got a lot of attention
including from the NASA Astrobiology Institute,
who took great interest in this series.
And overall, we thought it was
a really successful and useful way
to connect these pioneers in their fields,
interact, and make contact with the UW-Madison community.
And hopefully inspire some young students
to consider pursuing careers in this area.
So then again I just want to boast this,
because we had the privilege of having Sarah Horst
come talk about the Dragonfly mission
before it was even selected.
So the fact that it was selected is even more exciting.
So this is basically this quadcopter
that they're going to send to Titan,
and it's going to travel to a dozen different locations
and sample different areas
for pre-biotically relevant compounds.
So this is truly an astrobiology mission
and it's due to launch in 2026 I believe,
and we'll be getting hopefully the first stuff back in 2034.
So more than a decade away,
but still really exciting to think
that we're going back to Titan
and so very high hopes for that.
And here's just a closer look
at what that quadcopter is going to look like.
So it's basically going to fly around,
so it's going to take advantage of the fact
that Titan's atmosphere is much much thicker,
it's basically just going to glide around and move about
and find all these really interesting sites
and then sample them.
And then I also want to mention
that if you want to learn more about Dragonfly
and more about all the talks
that happened as part of the showcase,
you can go to our website and all
of the recordings are posted there.
So even if you couldn't make it,
or if you know of someone who might be interested,
please feel free to navigate there.
All the talks are for a general audience
and they were all really cool,
and I think they did a really good job
just representing just how broad astrobiology is.
So that's actually all I have.
But I just want to plug again our website,
and I just wanted to put our email addresses here.
So that's me, and that's Jaime Cordova,
so that's his email there.
So he's our social media director,
we have a Twitter account,
and he is also a great resource.
He is also a JPL Solar System Ambassador,
so he knows a lot about upcoming space missions,
so if you're interested in that, he's a great contact.
And yeah, so I'm happy to take questions now.
[audience applauds]