"You may have heard the phrase “we are star stuff”, but that’s not entirely true! Most of us is star stuff, but some of us came long before stars and some long after. All of the hydrogen and much of the helium in our universe formed during the Big Bang, and there’s a good chance that not all of that hydrogen ever went into stars. We likely have some primordial hydrogen in us that was never inside of a star at all. Also, while many of our elements came from the nuclear processes within stars and during stellar phenomena like supernovae, we also have some amount of carbon in our bodies that was formed very recently from cosmic rays striking nitrogen in our atmosphere (this is also why carbon dating works). Finally, there’s something called Bomb Carbon — this is carbon that forms during the detonations of nuclear weapons. It’s saddening but also intriguing to think that all of us have some amount of carbon inside of our bodies that formed during the detonations of two nuclear weapons in Japan at the end of World War II."
Where did you grow up, and how much did your upbringing have an impact on your pursuit of biology and space exploration?
I was born and raised in south central Pennsylvania in the USA. Where I grew up was a mix of urban and rural life, so we could drive 20 minutes one way and be in the city or drive 20 minutes the other way and be around lots of farms and wilderness. It was a fun place to grow up as I had a mixture of diverse people around me and lots of things to do but also lots of ways to be outside and explore nature. One area I loved to spend a lot of time in as a kid was close to a nearby river — I loved seeing all of the living things that dwelt in and around the river. I also spent a lot of time on boats in the river — it made me feel like a young explorer taking to sea to discover new things about the world and myself.
What was college like?
I spent a long time in college (nearly 13 years in total). I’d started off studying biology and chemistry at a small college called York College of Pennsylvania. We only had about 5,000 students there. While in that college, I became the President of the Biology Club and the Vice-President of the honors society for biology students called Tri-Beta. I also did two internships, one studying marine molecular biology at the Graduate School of Oceanography and the other studying aerobiology through the NASA Academy at NASA Ames Research Center. After college, I took some time off to focus on my martial arts training and teaching before then moving to Boulder, Colorado, USA to start studying astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder. After a few years, I then transitioned into a doctoral program in geological sciences and astrobiology. I earned my PhD a few years ago and have been working as an astrobiologist and communicator of science ever since.
Can you explain Astrobiology to a middle schooler?
Astrobiology is our human exploration of the nature of life. We want to know how life begins and how it evolves through time on Earth and maybe even on other worlds. Astrobiology is a field of study that’s great for any of us who’ve ever looked at the stars at night and wondered, “Are we alone?”
How does astrobiology benefit space exploration?
Astrobiology has become a super important part of space exploration. Many of our missions to explore other worlds in our solar system and to develop better space telescopes include our search to understand the nature of life. Since astrobiology isn’t just about looking for alien life, but also is about understanding the context of the cosmos in which life can form and evolve and learn more about itself, nearly all of our work in space exploration can be said to have some relevance to astrobiology.
There are plants on the International Space Station. Are they the only living organisms that are always onboard the ISS? What purpose do they serve?
There have been other organisms on the ISS and on exposure experiments (like BIOMEX). We’ve also had proposals and even instruments designed for sending organisms on missions to Mars and returned back to Earth (like the LIFE disc from The Planetary Society — however, it was unfortunately destroyed along with the failed Phobos-Grunt mission). I imagine we’re going to be seeing even more plant growth experiments on the ISS for learning how to better feed astronauts and provide for future human explorers on Mars.
What was it like leading high school students at CERN and MIT, teaching them how to communicate difficult physics concepts?
Leading trip for the New York Time Student Journeys and National Geographic Student Expeditions programs is a lot of fun! Working with students as they learn about complex topics in particle physics or robotics and even how to communicate ideas in that realm falls well into my background. I was supposed to lead trips this summer to Iceland to study geological processes as well as on a journey from Washington D.C. to Houston, Texas, to learn about space exploration, but the global pandemic has made it so that we had to cancel the trips for this year.
What was the most interesting question you were asked on the SAGANet show “Ask an Astrobiologist”.
Fortunately, for me, I host this show, so I get to ask the interesting questions! However, one of the coolest things that came up during an episode that I had never thought of before was during my episode with Dr. Hiroyuki Kurokawa of the Earth-Life Science Institute in Tokyo, Japan (Episode 29). Hiro is a researcher who has studied a lot about planetary processes and is involved with the upcoming Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission. One thing he brought up was that MMX will be taking a sample from Phobos and returning, and it’s quite possible that ancient Martian rocks potentially bearing ancient Martian life that had been blasted from the surface of Mars and crashed into Phobos in the past could be collected in that sampling as well, and that means that there is a potential chance that we might have our first detection of life from Mars found in a rock from a Martian moon! It’s a small chance, but still something incredible to imagine.
What do you do at Blue Marble Space Institute of Science?
I’m the Director of Communications and Marketing for Blue Marble Space (BMS) and a Research Scientist with the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science (BMSIS). I handle our internal communications and programming and even social media for BMS. I also am finishing up a paper right now on how some geological features in the Arctic may help us look for life on Mars. Also, with BMSIS, I’m a mentor for students in our Young Scientist Program. Currently, I’m overseeing two projects — one of them has students doing summer research on biosignatures to contribute to the Center for Life Detection Science and the other project has students working on tasks in the realm of science communication and sharing complex ideas in Earth and space science.
Right now is a somewhat scary time for a lot of people. We have a novel coronavirus impacting families and economies and even driving a large loss of life in this global pandemic. 2020 started off with massive wildfires devastating Australia. We’ve had massive swarms of locusts devastating fields and agriculture in Pakistan and western India. Current protests against racial injustice in the U.S. have led to movements against racism in other nations as well. And even with all of this, a large proportion of people in our world go each night unsure of how they may get enough food to eat the following day. As our global climate continues to change, more people are in potential danger from drought or displacements due to storms. A large number of industries are still polluting and contaminating our cherished Earth, leaving heavy metals to leach into aquatic ecosystems or dumping their rubbish in the oceans for later generations to deal with. Even with all of this going on, everything appearing to have gone so wrong, there is still hope for a better future for all of us. More young women around the globe are joining the battle to argue for access to better education. People around the world are connecting in ways we’ve never seen before thanks to the internet. We’re learning to share our viewpoints and experiences with each other and together building on the visions of great people before us who knew that we could become more, as a species and as a biosphere. As more people travel to space and look down from above, the Overview Effect and the realization that we are all in this thing together is becoming more impactful and widespread. We have hope. We may be on the verge of discovering that we’re not alone in the cosmos, we may soon send human beings to walk on another planet, we now know of thousands of confirmed exoplanets and that tells us that there may be hundreds of billions to even a trillion planets in our galaxy alone, and we’re learning more and more that the grand view from the outside is deepened by the individual and community view from the inside. While we have a lot of reasons to be afraid and uncertain, we still have hope. I personally think that right now is a pretty awesome time to be alive. The future is ours. We can take the negative and tragic occurrences happening right now and use them to motivate ourselves to do better, to be better. I think we have a future in space as well as a better future here on Earth. I think sharing in the quest to understand the nature of life in the cosmos is one way that we can work together to build that future.
More about Graham: http://cosmobiota.com.
Ask an Astrobiologist: https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/ask-an-astrobiologist/
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