Who Wrote the Book of Life?

Looking for life forms in Mars rocks for example, means analysing microfossils - potentially of nanometer-size. So small that 50,000 could fit across the width of a single strand of human hair.

Based on past performance, the Antarctic meteorite (ANSMET) field teams are likely to recover at least 1,000 meteorites over the next three years. Although it is likely that only a small fraction of these meteorites will be of interest scientifically, already AMNSET has discovered 28 meteorites that are often sampled for study. Since 1976, 301 individual investigators representing 24 nations have received more than 10,800 meteorite samples.

To put this scale of computer acquisition and search in context, compare it to the challenge of creating the 1996 animated feature "Toy Story." It took nearly 3 hours for a supercomputer to process each one of that film's 140,000 frames. The challenge of classifying images of life forms constitutes a task exceeding the creation of more than 10,000 high quality computer-animated films.

Life is not an easy thing to define. Even now, we're finding life forms on Earth that we never before thought possible. Extremeophiles (bacteria that live in extreme environments) have been found living in hydrothermal vents and in high salt environments - areas once thought to be completely inhospitable to life. In 1997, Stephen Zinder of Cornell University discovered the existence of bacteria that thrive in the harsh solvents perchloroethylene and trichloroethylene that are used to clean machine parts. An acid-loving bacteria, Sulfolobus acidocaldarius, can live under conditions that would dissolve human skin in seconds.

By using a D'Arcy machine to begin a study of microbial life on Earth, someday remote and automated instruments may be able to identify life elsewhere in the universe - whatever form that life may take.