• what could be the parameters of life beyond earth?
    • energy, nutrients, liquid solvent (to faciliate chemical reactions)
    • balance between these 3 components → diff kinds of life that could be possible
    • decentralizing “earth life”
    • what does it mean for something to be alive? energetic resonances that aren’t individualizing
      • thinking about life as a collaborative ecological process
  • work in ethnography
    • working with scientists trying to understand life in extreme conditions
    • atacama desert - driest hot desert on earth
      • used to be a lake
    • life in the lake had to adapt → salt rock that absorbs moisture
      • if it gets drier, even these microbes will cease to exist
    • life can’t evolve forever
      • at a certain point the environment becomes too caustic to the environment
    • posited that salt repositories / similar environments on mars
      • should we start looking for life there?
    • salt is really good at preserving life
  • personal journey learning about astronomy in tandem with afrofuturism
  • atacama research developed by nasa aimes and jhu
    • setup a year prior in 5-6 locations across the desert that had different life parameters
      • kind of dry, very dry, corpse beds, high altitude
      • salar grande: massive salt flat
        • massive formations
          • some in hexagon shapes
        • transferred halites to diff sites to test the responses of the micro communities inside them
        • sensors in the top bottom of the halites to see changes in microbe communities
        • phototransistor and humidity sensors
        • plug data into bioinformatic software
  • infrastructural aspects of scientific work
    • thinking about science/objectivity
    • narratives of exploration get projected onto projects like nasa
    • she wanted to resituate the human in the context of all living things and “non-life”
    • diff between complex chemistry and biology
    • reframe nasa operations as an unsure/scattered process as opposed to directional/hegemonic process
    • being attentive to difference → where feminism comes in
  • astrobiology - understand the origin, distribution and future of life in the universe
  • office of planetary protection
    • monitoring the exchange of microbes on and off earth
    • death curves - under what conditions they could kill off all microbes on a spacecraft and separating that by species
  • people who she went to atacama with published papers about the research
    • dana can offer the enliving of those with context
  • paper published abt parameters of life - energy balance
    • basis for why biorepositories were made
  • does life life in oceans beyond earth? how do we search for life in those spaces?
  • upcoming projects:
    • working iwth a team proposing for encaladus for a saturn mission
  • most work is still in the atacama
    • lithium mining
    • governmental shift
    • layering it to make it make sense