Caves that could help us find aliens or become aliens

One of the benefits of caves is that they provide protection from dangerous conditions on the planet’s surface, such as exposure to cosmic radiation or extreme temperatures. For example, caves deep under Martian soil might be warmer, wetter, and more hospitable to life.

“The queen of questions, in my view, is our speculation since 1992 that there could be remnants of a microbial biosphere on Mars,” Boston says.

What is the best way to search for aliens in a cave?

Over the past few decades, scientists have discovered Hundreds of caves On the Moon and Mars, often by looking for “skylights” that reveal cave entrances. In February team Announce the discovery A huge tube of lava beneath the surface of Venus, several thousand feet high and wide.

Scientists have also speculated that water-filled ice caves, known as interstitial lakes, may be common in the frozen shells of moons such as Europa, which orbits Jupiter, or Enceladus, which orbits Saturn. While these icy moons are best known for their subsurface oceans, lake environments could provide habitable pockets that may even receive a safe amount of sunlight, and which may be much easier to sample with future landers than the moons’ deep oceans.

These lakes are “the most inhospitable places you can think of for multicellular life on Earth,” Seabury says. “However, in space, this is quite a protective environment, where radiation from the Sun, Jupiter, or any nearby planet won’t rip apart the DNA. You’re protected from the vacuum of space, so you can actually get the chemistry of liquid water.”

“The worst place to live on Earth is actually the safest place to live on another planet,” he adds.

In order to explore these caves, scientists will need to build advanced robots and carefully plan missions to optimize the best locations for extraterrestrial cave exploration. On rocky planets like Mars, skylights may lead to deep craters with no other connecting passages. With this in mind, it would make sense to target areas with a lot of visible skylights to avoid running into dead ends.

Although enclosed or extremely remote places may be difficult to access, they could be the most promising areas to search for signs of alien life, known as biosignatures. Such hints of life can be very subtle, and we’re unlikely to stumble upon a habitat full of Martian megafauna.

“If life evolved on Mars and still exists as subterranean life forms, it would be microbial,” says Wen, an expert on bats (of the terrestrial variety). “As much as it breaks my heart to say this, Martian bats will likely never be discovered.”

While the dream of finding Martian bats may be dashed, it is possible to detect biosignatures in these cave environments with specialized equipment, such as spectrometers that can detect interesting mineral pathways and complex compounds.

Seabree has used these tools extensively in cave environments, especially Wind Cave in South Dakota, where he first captured a cave bug in 2019. Fortunately, in this case it wasn’t a real bug. “Seeing the cave from the tour route is beautiful, but once you actually have to sweat and crawl to get to a better-looking place, for me, that was an instant addiction to it, and I’ve been doing it ever since,” he says.

Seabree and his colleagues use spectrometers to identify nutrient pathways and other mineral accumulations on cave walls that can sustain ecosystems in the dark. Similar tools could be packed into robots to search for biosignatures in all kinds of extraterrestrial caves.