Watch this space: expanding our imaginations and our world
I find myself living at a very particular point in the
almost 4 billion years of the evolution of life on this planet. I feel lucky,
no extraordinarily privileged, to be alive right now, when for the very first
time, we are able to investigate terrestrial life on scales smaller than the
size of atoms, as well as look to the skies for evidence of extra-terrestrial
life many hundreds of light years beyond Earth.
This beauty, this complexity, this body of knowledge that we
are creating as humans flies in the face of the second law of thermodynamics, which
describes how things tend to become more rather than less disordered as
time goes on.
In spite of being participants in this physically unlikely
era of human information creation, I believe we are often not open to seeing
the bigger picture. Perhaps because in this age of information inundation, we feel
more comfortable forgetting how much we still don’t know…
I want to be the most improbable human that I can be. I am
prepared to give up my life on Earth for the unprecedented contribution I would
be able to make to the sum of human knowledge from a new world. I would like to
become one of the first citizens of Mars, and today I would like to talk about
why.
Quantum mechanics is our most fundamental theory of
reality- a description of phenomena occurring in systems on scales millions of
times smaller than the resolution of the human eye, consisting of objects such
as photons, electrons and atoms. To get an idea of just how small…
Micrometer-sized objects, like an individual human hair are
visible to the naked eye. A thousand times smaller than that is the width of
the DNA molecule, just a few nanometers, the helical structure of which was
first observed only in 1952 using an x-ray imaging technique. And atoms are another
ten times smaller than that, best observed with a microscope that uses a beam
of electrons for imaging.
Quantum biology: You may wonder what connection these
fields may have- biological objects like elephants are things that we can see,
while quantum theory deals with objects that are far smaller that the
resolution of the eye. However, the idea that quantum mechanics may play a role
in living systems is by no means a new idea.
On this very day, the 15 August, in 1932, quantum physicist
Niels Bohr delivered a lecture “Light and Life” at the International Congress
on Light Therapy in Copenhagen, raising the question of whether quantum theory
could contribute to a scientific understanding of living systems. In attendance
was an intrigued Max Delbruck, a young physicist who later contributed to the
establishment of the field of molecular biology. Both of these brilliant
scientists won Nobel Prizes for their contribution to our understanding of
reality.
The most developed area of quantum biology is the study of
the very early stages of photosynthesis- up to less than the first billionth of
a second. Only recent developments in an experimental technique called
ultrafast spectroscopy have enabled us to image processes that happen on such
quick timescales. This very early part of photosynthesis is almost perfectly
efficient and we would like to understand how Nature does it so well. It turns
out we have to use quantum physics to do so.
Understanding photon by photon, molecule by molecule how
photosynthesis works, is a necessary step towards designing and engineering
biologically inspired artificial photosynthetic solar cells, with the ability
to harness sunlight energy with greater efficiency than is possible with
currently existing technology. Quantum biology promises to contribute to the
kinds of green renewable energy technologies essential for our continued
existence on this planet (and possibly others…)
But in my opinion the greatest possible contribution of the
field of quantum biology would be to help us in some way to answer the question
that we have asking since time immemorial: What is life? What distinguishes
a living system from the matter of which it is made, and how did it come about?
While we are instinctively good at telling the difference between a living
creature and bunch of inanimate molecules, a precise scientific theory of what
distinguishes the two, and how life emerges in the first place from these
molecules is something we are still working on. I think it’s funny that this
ethanol molecule looks kind of similar to this horse, but I don’t think this is
a clue…
I think the fact that we have identified quantum aspects of
photosynthesis, one of the earliest living processes to have emerged on Earth,
suggests that going down to these tiny scales may help us understand how life
emerged in the first place.
What would be really helpful in the quest to understand the
fundamental principles underlying the emergence of life would be to find just
one other example of the phenomenon… We have not yet discovered any other
location where life exists and all organisms on Earth appear to have evolved
from a common ancestor.
Astrobiology is the study of the
origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. And the
universe is a big place- we measure it in the distances that light travels in a
given time, light being the fastest thing that we know of in our current
understanding (with a speed of almost 300 000 km/s ). While Mars is just a few
light minutes away, light takes around four years to travel to the nearest
star, over a thousand to travel to that intriguing recently discovered Earth-like
planet called Kepler-452b, millions of years to reach the nearest galaxy
Andromeda, and nearly 50 billion years to reach the furthest edge of the
observable universe.
There is a theory with a crazy name, panspermia,
which says that life on the Earth originated when the chemical
precursors of life present in outer space reached this suitable environment.
The theory is not so crazy when you consider that many meteorites found on
Earth contain a range of building blocks of life- for example over 70 different
amino acids have been detected in the Murchison meteorite that fell in
Australia in 1969. Furthermore, we think
that quantum mechanics may provide the tools to understanding how these
precursors of life emerged in space…
If you’re feeling mentally taxed, you
should be, I’ve taken you on a journey from the tiny scales where atoms exist,
out to the furthest edge of the universe many billions of light years away, on
the quest to understanding life. That’s a big picture! And a picture I spend a
lot of time inside as a researcher in the field of quantum biology and more
recently in a field I would like to call quantum astrobiology.
The point I want to make is that so far
as we can tell, what we are doing here on Earth as living systems and in
particular as humans, is very improbable. In a vast universe, so far, we
represent the only instance that we know of, where collections of molecules,
because that’s what we are, have observed reality, made sense of it through language,
and finally found ways to record and communicate this information, which has
culminated in the Internet, in my opinion, one of our finest moments. This is
an unlikely time and place in the universe in which we find ourselves!
What I find perplexing is that in
spite of living in this improbable era of human existence, and even in spite of,
for many of us, having the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips, rather
than rejoicing in the hugeness of the picture we have of reality, and in the
spirit of exploration and discovery of the vastness of what still remains
unknown, many people are overwhelmed, unnerved and indeed find it incomprehensible
that I want to move to Mars, on a way-way trip. Although some people may have
an idea of who they would like to send on such a trip…
Billions
of years of evolution of life on Earth have culminated in the possibility of us
calling another planet home for the very first time. Untold discoveries lie in wait, including the
possiblity of finding evidence of life there, which would be a giant leap in
terms of understanding who are we, where we come from and where we are going. I
have applied and been short-listed along with 99 others from around the planet with
the Mars One Project, to go and live on Mars because I would be prepared to
sacrifice a lot for this idea, this adventure, this achievement, that would not
be my own, but that of all humanity. Even returning to Earth.
What I would like to point out immediately is that we are
all survivors of one-way trips, wherever on the surface of the Earth we happen
to currently live. According to the fossil record, homo sapiens emerged in
central eastern Africa around 200 000 years ago, and we have been exploring the
surface of the Earth ever since. My ancestors made the hazardous 5 month trip
from Europe to the Southern tip of Africa in 1688 without any intention or means
of return- I am the 11th generation of descendants of Huguenot
refugees from France, now proudly South African. And 500 years from now there
may well be human Martians telling tales of the perilous one-way journey their
ancestors made in the early 21st century from Earth.
All the observations we have made and information we have
gathered is the result of having explored the unknown. The technologies that
many of us consider so indispensible in our daily lives are often the
unexpected result of investigating something new. I like to think of the
invention of the heat engine as the eventual technological solution to the bad
weather the first African explorers encountered on discovering Europe.
In the same way I hope that the relatively hostile environment
on Mars will lead to new technologies that can help us on Earth- to tackle
climate change, poor resource management and the poverty in which so many of us
live. Life on Mars will be a precious and fragile resource, and I believe that
an attitude of deep appreciation for life and all that is needed to sustain it
will charactise morality on Mars, and also, I hope, influence the way people think
on Earth.
This is what we have always done as humans and what we will
continue to do- we observe, we dream and we expand our horizons through the
realisation of these dreams. I want to make the best contribution of which I am
capable to this grand and improbable era of human information creation.
I want to be one of the first conscious minds to know what it is like to
live in a totally new world. I want to add to the sum of human
knowledge by contributing to the establishment, and possibly the discovery of
evidence of, life on Mars.
To conclude, I feel privileged to be living at a time when
the opportunity to expand our imaginations and our world further than ever
before, is within reach. Why I want to go to Mars is simple: to me the allure
of the unknown has always felt far more powerful than the comfort of the known.
A presentation of these ideas at TEDx Cape Town https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MryDEd7CE0
