- 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
- 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
- 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