Astrobiology Through an Anthropological Lens: Field Insights

[00:00:00]without further ado thinking anthropologically about astrobiology so how do you define astrobiology this is one of the most important questions i asked during my interviews while conducting my fieldwork and while it may seem very general when scientists would start to answer this question it kind of spurred conversations about you know maybe a moment they had in their graduate student training where they had to come up with the answer to this question or a recent experiment in which they had to think about the question of astrobiology a little bit differently and so this question also gets at these multiple scales of what doing astrobiology is you know as a science as an institution and as an individual practice so i started my research back in a long time ago the 2018 was the first kind of like moment when i started thinking about you know these astrobiological questions at a plantar protection training session and then i moved on into the archives at nasa hq in 2019 and i'm sure you won't find it really difficult to imagine that their definitions of astrobiology are vastly different you know related um but what they um wanted what they kind of contextualized astrobiology as and how the implications for doing astrobiological work was was different um and as i'll explain a little bit later these differences across different institutions as i've been doing my research nasa ames to the archives have different reverberations of how the practice of astrobiology is actually done so if you know because every talk should have a participatory element if you feel like sharing or feel like participating i encourage you to write in the chat how you define astrobiology based on these kind of three questions either examples from your work how you do your work or what methods you use or how you inform yourself about astrobiology and i promise i will remember to come back to it at the end of the presentation so i am speaking from the anthropology of outer space and this is a field that has been gaining more attention over the last 20 years anthropology has had many manifestations and particularly over the decades it's become more attuned to the practices and processes that people engage in as well as these like living experiences of institutions or are interconnected with interconnections and interactions with non-humans or the environment or technology and in the case of my work the interplanetary in defining these and it has implications for defining important aspects of our human or earthly experiences so i'm going to take a while and so bear with me here to kind of explain the abstract theoretical foundation of my work before diving into the more exciting examples and so for the purpose of this talk the facet of my research question that i want to focus on is the one you see right here what are the effects or implications of the doing of astrobiology on the unfolding of astrobiology as a scientific discipline and for a bit of background really quickly in anthropology uh in order to complete your degree you have three years of coursework followed by a comprehensive exam and a thesis proposal and then we have and then we're let loose into what we call the field which is the locations where our central research question may be addressed usually take about one to two years to you know be in the fields gather as much data as we can before we go back to our universities to write our dissertations and so over the course of my research the central question that you see has gone through multiple permutations as the ideas that i had initially in coursework shifted as i met scientists participated in workshops and conferences and had the experience to actually know what astrobiology was in the doing and so i'm going to take you through this journey with me as like these different experiences have shaped what i've come to think about astrobiology um so as i mentioned i did eight months of field work at the nasa hq archives in the library of congress and there i was trying to trace like these early historical efforts of exobiology and it was in finding these like slightly snarky correspondence between scientists at different nasa facilities along with these polite arguments or assertions about the best decontamination methods were or these like massive organizational charts of who responded to who and who was in charge of what department as well as many many many technical reports that i be that i wanted to start to focus on this question of epistemology is the accepted knowledge about what astrobiology was and how it did it and to poke at how astrobiology was configured how these configurations and reconfigurations happened across time and space and what the experience of it was and in recognizing that there's a relationship between questions and the sites i had access to and the people i collaborated with i also asked about these implications of how these relational trends are expressed and in so doing i like ask several different questions um such as what are the methodological strategies that underpin astrobiology and allow for astrobiology to be considered science what questions about for example like what questions about the search of life are sensible to ask or what factors or constraints are expected to be considered what missions become acceptable what perspectives are deemed less popular and then something else i'm interested in which is how does this knowledge about astrobiology become expressed and circulated who has authority over this circulation and who has access to it on the other hand as i'll go into i also attend to what i call the lived experience of science the iterations when you're going over hypothesis um in a proposal the different times it changes in order to get closer and closer to what you want it to be or the in a discussion discussion of let's say biosignatures the topics that reach really quick consensus versus the ones that have a lot of debate um and which experiments become more validated than the other these instances of pause creativity speculation assertion and doubt are just as significant in the progress practice and process of science as the reports or decadal survey white papers or meeting minutes so let's move on to the field i had the wonderful privilege of going to the atacama desert with a group of scientists from nasa ames and johns hopkins university and the purpose of this trip was to download data from multiple sensors in the uh that they had planted previously in halites or salt rock that were known to host microbial communities powered by these photosynthetic microbes and the data from within these sensors would be compared with previous trips from the atacama as well as analyses run on environmental data such as the air what dry cycle patterns slight duration so forth in addition these scientists wanted to gather samples of these microbial communities in order to run rna analyses and to look at the different pathways that could be tied to microbial community such as membrane repair so i understood these halites and their significance to be twofold right they were one of the last remaining locations and environments in which life ecked out in existence in the driest hot desert on earth and that studying these communities could tell us about the relationship between three core life requirements energy nutrients and water and two if understanding the relationship between environmental conditions their extremity and how limited microbial life was could be discovered then this could perhaps help ask questions about other environments such as mars or you know other places on earth where life may have utilized similar strategies or thing like that and a part of getting to this data was through sampling and so one of my favorite moments in the field was learning how to sample properly so we had the switchblade and we had to scrape out the headlights and the inside in order to remove some of the material and i learned how to twist a knife in order to get more material i learned how to use my body as like a windshield because at one o'clock every day the wind would pick up and if you weren't campbell careful your sample would spill out all over the place um and i also learned you know how to find this like greenish hue you tell where the microbes were kind of hiding out as i like to think about it um and how to like approximate what 30 30 of grams of sample was and this was part of the tactile experiential knowledge that i picked up while doing astrobiology at the site while scientists were gathering data to address questions about activity of microbial communities i was collecting data about these methods they were employing and i often did it through these different types of foundations publications you know explanations of scientific data or how to sample as well as these experiential textual moments such as sampling you know finding halite sample sites because the the sensors were very difficult to find or reading these scribbled maps at um in the back of a car as we're driving along these endless roads and this was all part of my understand like of gaining this understanding of you know what actually goes on in the atacama so lingering on this question of methodological strategies the data from the field from the atacama as well as what i picked up in the archives conferences my time at nasa ames workshop such as pc3 or the knowledge base have begun to fall into two different categories there's crafting definitions and setting of detection thresholds and um definition making like how do you define a biosignature or a habitable environment and then detection limits such as you know what measurements do you need in order to get a proper reading or what is the signal noise ratio and these various methodological methodological strategies were utilized in order to craft these definitions or definition detection thresholds um and doing so touched on these following questions how should a definition of x be made how is it being defined and what are the boundaries of those decisions in the desert for example there's the question of what balance of water energy and nutrients allowed microbes to survive and how did you define that balance oftentimes field work would also you know in making these definitions you'd have to rely on certain publications or experts to invoke um to justify or give way to how a definition or threshold should be set and so forth in observing these activities another set of data also arose about the implications of these definitions or detection thresholds exemplified by these questions these implications included what instruments should be selected that fit most effectively with the particular scientific goal or the measurements that had to be taken that would be effective for answering these questions or thinking about the instrument also required thinking about how it would be constructed by whom and with what funds so again thinking with the atacama the placement of the sensors and the ability to sample enough of the halite for rna analysis are themselves derived from efforts to define the parameters of microbial survival and these have implications for where the research with the halite will go next thus the movement between the definition being made and the ways in which it's defined and then the implications of both its opera operationalization as well as the shifts that may happen as it's occurring uh in terms of let's say suddenly you now need to think about sample availability or the particular sensitivity of an instrument all reverberate in the space of conducting astrobiology what these patterns and feedback loops of activity lead me to ask is this final question what do definitions and detections tell me about science and action and narratives about science and what is this relationship between the two and of course this movement between answering or addressing this final question also reverberates back into this feed loop of you know what are the methodological strategies of defining or detecting let's return again to the desert one of the most popular topics of conversation was how did these communities microbial communities survive there was an extreme limit of water tons of sunlight and unknown quantity or access to nutrients so how did they do it and at the time i wasn't particularly well-versed in previous research done in the atacama i'd done as much reading as i could but i didn't really understand it and one of the most powerful ways that i gained this understanding are through these following stories so during a conversation the microbes and the halite were described to me by one scientist as living in an ocean-like environment and you know i've never really thought about microbes in such a way and i know it seems like a really simple story at the end ocean environment but um that had the effect of kind of shaking me and reorienting my perspective so i can think about the microbes in the halite on a different scale also um during one of our lunch breaks we had this speculative conversation in which um someone asked if we could build any instrument that would that you can make that was not restricted by the laws of physics what would it be and one of the scientists said that they'd make a machine that could shrink you to the size of a microbe and you could see what's happening at their level of course with the proper protections of they don't get caught up in you know nutrient wars and these imaginative conversations were just as effective at least for me to decenter this human perspective that i had about microbes and reposition myself into a frame of mind that could better translate this microbial existence into something i could relate to and then i was able to take a step back and begin to ask okay so what about the microbial environmental relationship should i pay attention to how important are these interactions for kind of understanding these larger questions of survival in the desert so for me to put together scientific sensor data the theoretical debates about microbial survival and the speculative musings about what actually goes down in the microbial community and to begin to understand anthropologically meant holding not only these events and processes in the field as data but also keeping in mind as i spoke about before these relationships and implications of the data to each other and to the scientists producing it and then also to astrobiology at large so what does this mean it means something called um in anthropology building the assemblage and for me i define an assemblage as the interconnections between people events objects interactions processes that congeal or coalesce around anything in this case the atacama and building an assemblage of what constitutes astrobiology in the atacama i had to i held all these tensions and stories and questions together so i had in this assemblage thinking from the perspective of microbe i also had you know my experiences in the field of driving to the different sites of sampling of looking for these sensors the assemblage also includes movements or patterns that emerge from efforts to set definition and detection limits as i've spoken about as well as the people who are involved in producing this knowledge about the halites the utility of the assemblage rather than say listing a list of factors or drawing lines between one person and one object is that the assemblage is dynamic lines from one factor to another may change or affect each other differently the assemblage asks us to consider the context that these actions are taking place so for example the context of the atacama and how the context itself is shaped not only by us or you know the scientists who are taking samples in the field but also other researchers who may be there or the mining activities or any number of people who are passing through that space and so the power of thinking of the assemblage is that you can take these relations betwixt and between and kind of put it into the context of what i described as this movement of you know crafting definitions and or these larger questions about astrobiology which leads me to my next fieldwork example which was a phenomenal experience of orbylander so from january through july 2020 i had a really wonderful opportunity to work with a group of scientists from apl ames goddard and jpl on what became the enceladus orbilander flagship mission concept study for the decadal survey and orvillander was one of four spacecraft architectures that were constructed during this time um to do science at enceladus and orbi lander was selected as a mix of an orbiter and a lander because it was deemed most effective and for achieving the science goals and this image you see right here is the fact sheet of the completed report and i really can't emphasize this enough each title that you see each bold text each bullet point and the two images of the orbiter and of the lander you see here were the culmination of hours and weeks and months of discussion and email exchanges and individuals taking the lead on a certain characteristic and doing a deep dive and reporting back to the group and i'm sure you can empathize if you've ever written a report or are coming up with a grant proposal having to minimize or simplify an immense amount of data into a bullet point is you know quite an effort and what i want to highlight in this is these science objectives so i can't tell you the number of times i heard the phrase during these couple months let's go back to the science or what does this measurement or have to do or becomes affected by battery constraint or mass constraint and how does that address the science question and these kind of constant referrals back to the science objective science questions science goal flagged for me not only the underlying principle of the researchers i was working with but also you know um alerted me to the different practices that allow for those science objectives to become prominent or allow them to happen in the course of you know constructing this missions concept study and a lot of the other aspects of let's say power or battery constraint or data um enough having enough data to send back to earth were negotiations that happen in the the trade space or the space of the mission and all this to say and i am vastly oversimplifying this experience and how exciting it was to kind of think through these questions was that with working with the orbi lander science team and then observing how that science became translated into an actual payload and spacecraft design with the engineers was a chance for me to see an another assemblage come into form that around orbeelander and the relations that happened between those nodes at epl or aims or goddard or jpl and it's the work of my dissertation to bring the assemblage around orvillander and the one around at a comet together which brings me to this lovely and complex chart which um is i know it's hard to read but it is the heart of what i'm building towards in as one of my central theories and so from the perspective of my field work what i'm calling gravity wells is essentially an assemblage in space-time because the space metaphor is too good to pass out um and it's this idea of the everything i've observed in the field from the archives the atacama to you know different online or in-person conferences back in the day as well as the planetary protection workshop the decadal survey reviews my sit-ins on the exobiology branch meetings at ames the pce3 workshops cld town halls or smd town halls all of these have a different mass and a different pull and are connected to each other in different ways the space time element recognizes that all that i've observed occurred across different spaces and different times and so for instance something like defining a potential measurement to take on mars has occurred repeatedly throughout time and space for viking in the 1970s and is happening right now with perseverance and i see gravity wells as a productive way of seeing how the many threads to astrobiology and its configuration as a science come together and become coherent ish and how that seemingly coherence in the moment is made up of a lot of moving parts that are not necessarily temporally or spatially bound so take the very simple example of defining a biosignature it has as this slide is showing it has multiple different kind of pulls between previous publications to field work and analog sites like the atacama to nominal and planned uh missions like orbeylander as well as sampling requirements planetary protection protocols different other contaminant contamination issues ongoing or or missions technological innovations in both the commercial sector as well as at nasa and all these kind of pull and morph and shape and orbit around each other and is something that i think is important to kind of grapple with in order to see this larger picture of ash biology and you're in there too now that i've done this talk or i'm doing this talk and of course i am there which gets me to more of like the anthropological perspective that i um always bring with me which is that part of the gravid well um we can't exist it can't exist separately from the people who are enacting these practices or these missions or what have you to be situated what i refer to here as situatedness is something that scholars like donna haraway recognize is as the lived particular context that we are in that we embody that we experience and our perspective comes from our position in this case for me i'm an anthropologist i'm a grad student i'm a woman of color more often than not i'm pretty zoom fatigued and i'm picking up astro biology and biology as i go because i don't have formal training in the science but i've taken a couple classes and i've learned a lot from being in the field and i can never have an experience or a perspective that is encompassing of all human or non-human experience or the or their identity and while my experience may expand as i encounter different people or different contexts i can never know any everything so being situated means also always having a partial perspective and it's with this partiality that we experience and navigate the world which brings me back to the chat which i'm not actually sure i'm gonna be able to see so maybe i'll hold this conversation for something later but i imagine that you know entries were you know in defining astrobiology may have been similar uh in some cases you know maybe defining it as a search for evidence of life or in the context of your lab or a particular project and what i intended to highlight with this was that while we may have similar training or be in the same project in defining astrobiology and maybe those definitions look really awfully similar the experience of it is different and distinct for each of you and i think that over time those differences are what those small shifts in astrobiology over time are indicative of and i'll i'll talk more about that very shortly i do want to mention what i meant call here multi-sided my research is multi-sided it took place in a lot of different places and kind of decentralizes what something that anthropology is kind of founded on which is you do work in one place of one people and i don't necessarily see that as something that is true so being multi-sided means that i can decentralize the location from which astrobiology is quote-unquote defined or determined there are flows and frictions across these different hubs and you can see that by how different nasa facilities or different universities may talk with each other about different issues or different questions or how astrobiology may be conducted in an academic setting versus a nasa setting versus commercially and each site offers a different perspective so notice these images the first is a picture of the nasa ames visitors center tent and it was the closest i could get to ames in april of 2020 when the center closed with the pandemic the second image is of the salah grande in the atacama and literally what you see are miles and miles and miles of halite stretching into the distance it was unreal and this was in march of 2020 the nasa archives in the main hq building is the third image and um located in the basement if you don't know uh two two rights from the elevator and it is a really wonderful interesting place and i believe the fold i was looking at was probably from the 1960s or 1970s and then the final image is of a conference in the dc convention center and to be honest i don't remember what conference it was i do know that it was in dc because of the carpet it's kind of distinct and you don't forget it and that was probably in january of 2019 when i did a lot of my conference visits and all this to say is that you know from each of these locations i gained a different perspective of astrobiology and each of these had their own assemblages that now are kind of floating around or are situated in this gravity well that i call my research and finally theory from the ground and i'll only briefly touch on this is my kind of theoretical claim that i am making as i begin to write and it's essentially that since i speak from my own perspective and i've only had access to certain locations from which i've gained their perspective on astrobiology why would i turn around and then go to a french theorists or anthropologists to use their theory from the 1970s to analyze my data and while i won't completely cut off all theory from the past because there is a lot of useful things that i've learned from anthropologists or science and technology scholars about how to do an anthropology of science i am going to put it together with a lot of the theories and patterns i've observed from conversations or experiences in order to create this balance of theory from the ground and theory from previous scholarship so stay tuned it's something i'm thinking a lot about right now so i didn't want to touch on lessons in learning because one of my kind of stakes in the ground as a scholar is discussing methodology and kind of making sure that we have these discussions of what it's like to do our work and instead of just hiding it behind the results of of what we're working on and i learned a lot in the field and i was speaking to aaron about this before the talk but my phone is filled with because i got tired of writing recordings of myself talking about these moments when you know suddenly something in the field makes sense and i'm out walking and i have to make sure that i don't forget it or you know ruminations and reflections on what i could have done differently in an interview or what i should go to next as the next seminar or zoom conference and so one of the lessons i've learned a lot is in making these field notes you know these compilations of notes about the field and usually these notes help me to contextualize events or interviews or observations by taking note of the shapes and colors of a room or the patterns in the carpet right the expressions on people's faces whether people are secretly on their phone during a conference or falling asleep um but in the zoom world that has offered some really interesting questions because i'm now looking into someone's living room which is not at all part of the research questions that i was hoping to answer and it's made me think a lot about what is the how far does the field reach what are my responsibilities as a researcher and how do i kind of balance the demands of what i'm expected to deliver as a dissertation with you know the the conversations i have with scientists who i you know really admire their work or things what they're asking is really interesting and i don't want to have any sort of broach and privacy because you know zoom world offers a mirror into everyone's background and personal life so um this is something that digital ethnographers think a lot about and i'm sure other people do do but uh it's something that i've thought a lot for how methodology i should i should write about this in my work and you know it's also made me think a lot about in-person react interactions um i started my work in california at ames in march and so a lot of the people i've met and spent time with over meetings over the last several months i probably won't meet in person or at least not anytime soon and that's a weird realization to have when uh everything that i've been taught about anthropology is that you are in the same place as a person you have conversations with these people and you get to know them so this has also been something i've been grappling with as you know i still was able to conduct my field work what are the implications for how anthropology should be shifting and changing to accommodate you know different points of access and in the world the state of the world uh and then finally kind of going back to this idea of this theory of partial perspectives is as it pertains to my own work um so when i was beginning research i had this constant worry that i wasn't talking to enough people that in order to justify what i was doing to my grants i had to make sure that i spoke to everyone and possible went to every single zoom meeting and you know having a partial perspective made me realize that i can't talk to everyone can't be everywhere and i think that's a really powerful thing because it it it re-centers scholarship around not this abstract perspective of like what can this question answer but you know what can this question answer from the perspective and situated positions that we occupy which i think is a lot more realistic so finally uh my preliminary conclusions and they're very preliminary and very partial the um as i was kind of putting this talk together i began to see that astrobiology as a science can be splintered into at least two different kind of assemblages right there's this science as an authoritative or coherent institution that is configured by reports and bureaucracy and sample requirements which in themselves are lived experiences and messy and come together at the last minute but in going towards the narrative where institution of science seemed to gain um this this coherent picture or this coalesce congealed picture that then become a reference point for others who are aren't coming up with missions or experiments and then as i've discussed before there's this lived aspect of science and action and the activities and conversations and debates that happen around the zoom table as scientists try to define a bios signature or how best to go about detecting you know this particular measurement based on considerations or constraints and this is what i've kind of termed try to visualize in the gravity well that science is mutable and partial and is only um only emerges through interactions and it's i think there's this really interesting space in between that as scientists are going about defining or detecting they have to mold it into a publication or a proposal for a mission in order for it to be funded or selected or approved and this is kind of um expressed with this final question what is the space between this coherent or coherent i should probably say narrative of science and the gravity well of scientific activity and going forward in my analysis i will see if and what my data tells me about the shape of the space but i think for now what i want to kind of leave and this talk with is like highlighting the this tension between narratives and institutions of science and histories of science with this gravity well experience and how productions in shifts in what becomes sensible astrobiological questions what becomes validated or what something becomes that we aspire towards kind of produced in this in between space as you tag between the narrative and the coherent with the mutable experiential and this in between space i believe is a way to start understanding you know the patterns that we see in the past of astrobiology at least partially because we don't know all the factors and we never can um you know such as like what people were thinking at the moment but also maybe we can start to understand the patterns going forward as people like you are doing astrobiology for a future you know what questions are you bringing to your work what perspectives and new methods and ways of writing proposals may be ever so minutely shifting the field so that the astrobiology that you are experiencing today may be slightly different or ask for certain different partners maybe like anthropologists um in the future and i think that's yeah that's where i'm going to end it so thank you everyone for listening thank you georgia tech and aaron and dr schmidt for inviting me as well as the scientists i did my work with in chile the overlander mission a lot of feedback i got with enfold and then my vendors so any