{"id":379943,"date":"2026-04-07T18:00:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T18:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/379943\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T18:00:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T18:00:09","slug":"the-questions-that-keep-scientists-up-at-night-harvard-gazette","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/379943\/","title":{"rendered":"The questions that keep scientists up at night\u00a0 \u2014 Harvard Gazette"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are a lot of good ideas floating around about the conditions necessary for life to develop, said Peter Girguis<\/a>, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and co-director of the Harvard Microbial Sciences Initiative.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What\u2019s not known \u2014 and perhaps not provable \u2014 is whether life began on Earth, or if it arrived here from somewhere else. It\u2019s an idea known as panspermia.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a \u201cfar out\u201d hypothesis Girguis acknowledged, and one that makes a lot of scientists uncomfortable. It\u2019s theoretically possible that some proto-microbe or bacterial spore hitched a ride to Earth on a meteorite billions of years ago. But science requires reproducibility, and with a data point of one, it\u2019s difficult to prove either way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re running into the very edges of our ability to use science to address some of these questions,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Without a time machine, it\u2019s unlikely we\u2019ll prove panspermia one way or the other. But the broader question \u2014 whether life exists beyond Earth \u2014 is perhaps easier to tackle. In September, NASA reported<\/a> that a Mars rover discovered chemical compounds that could be evidence of microbial life from billions of years before. It\u2019s the closest sign to date of life on other worlds, but it\u2019s far from a smoking gun.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t assert that life exists on another planet because I have no data to support that,\u201d Girguis said. \u201cBut as a curious and open-minded person, I would strongly argue that I have no scientific data to refute that, either. So if we\u2019re talking about life elsewhere in the solar system or in the universe, I personally lean towards, \u2018Yeah, maybe.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Also interested in the question of life\u2019s origin is David Kring<\/a>, the 2025-2026 Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a principal scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute of the Universities Space Research Association.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kring is a principal author of the impact origin of life hypothesis, which suggests that heavy asteroid bombardment about 4 billion years ago created hydrothermal environments rich in the kinds of chemicals that could lead to life. His team found the remnants of a microbial ecosystem in a hydrothermal system beneath the floor of the Chicxulub impact crater in Mexico.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But, he said, it\u2019s one of several reasonable hypotheses.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t champion the idea. That\u2019s a notion in science that I find offensive: It means you no longer have an open mind. I just want to know what the right answer is; whatever nature did is going to be interesting.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Between about 4.4 and 3.8 billion years ago, Earth and other inner solar system planets experienced a period of bombardment heavy enough, in some cases, to vaporize entire oceans. The impacts would have churned the Earth\u2019s crust and created subsurface hydrothermal systems and chemical environments conducive to early life.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Kring explained, \u201cThat period in Earth history is largely erased from the geologic record on our planet.\u201d But there may be another way to get some answers: The same asteroids that bombarded Earth also did a number on the moon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBy collecting samples of impact craters or impact basins on the moon, we can determine their age and the types of asteroids or comets hitting the Earth-moon system,\u201d Kring said. \u201cBecause those impacts jettisoned pieces of early Earth toward the moon, we also have an opportunity, if our minds are open to it, to find bits and pieces of early Earth history there.\u201d\u00a0 Kring has his eye on NASA\u2019s 2028 Artemis IV<\/a> mission, which is expected to send a crew to the surface of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are a lot of good ideas floating around about the conditions necessary for life to develop, said…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379944,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[7205,114,165,8456,377,1541,85,46,4718,376,1360,141,172685,540],"class_list":["post-379943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-a-i","tag-business","tag-cancer","tag-computers","tag-genetics","tag-health-care","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-microbiome","tag-quantum-physics","tag-research","tag-science","tag-space-astronomy","tag-womens-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379943\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}