Alien biochemistry is probably just as complex as it is for humans. And that lesson should help inform us where we should look.
There’s a theory that’s in vogue in astrochemistry called “Assembly Theory.” It posits that highly complex molecules—many acids, for example—could only come from living beings. The molecules are either part of living beings, or they’re things that intelligent living beings manufacture.
Spectroscopy isn’t an exact science. That could leave alien-hunting astrochemists and astrobiologists guessing, for now. “There are a lot of uncertainties,” Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astronomer at Technical University Berlin, told The Daily Beast. Cronin and his team arrived at this conclusion after analyzing 10,000 chemicals that are present here on Earth. “Most molecules greater than [a] molecular weight [or mass] of 300 [are] connected to the existence of life on Earth,” they wrote.
Cronin’s Assembly Theory addresses this problem. The theory “estimates the complexity of a molecule by quantifying the minimum constraints required to construct an object from the building blocks.” In plain English, the theory asks how many times, at a minimum, amolecule would need to add an element or copy part of itself in order to achieve a given structure.
Assembly Theory helps to sidestep a big question in astrobiology, Ligterink added. Life on Earth has DNA or RNA, the nucleic acids that carry genes. It’s not safe to assume alien life would share this basic structure, Ligterink said. “But we can be fairly certain that extraterrestrial life is also chemically complex.”
The challenge with spectroscopy is precision. Imagine each element’s light pattern as a fingerprint. Now imagine a million fingerprints smudged one on top of the other. “Spectral signature… rarely can be uniquely attributed to one specific molecule,” Schulze-Makuch said.
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