We had to do something. So if you put a greeting in the chat, remember that little button down at the bottom. Make sure it says panelists and attendees. It defaults to just panelists. And I think that more than just me, Vivian, Dave and Kathleen would like to see what we have to say. And Vivian, you did it. I just put it in there while you were talking. You can have panelists only. Yeah. Oh. Oh, man. Fooled. Let's try that again. So what do you guys think about the water on the moon's discovery? Is it just an increment forward? Or do you really think it's something new and big? Let me know. I would like to know. They asked me about these things in, haha. Hi, Daniela. They asked me about these things here all the time. And some people here are divided. They're like, oh, it's just the same old, same old. And others are like, no, it's a brand new thing. It's really great. So what do you think about water? I haven't read it yet. Oh, gotta read it. Read it. You know, every time NASA says we have a big announcement, everybody's like, we found him. We found him. I think it's going to be a let down every time. I think it's very cool, but it's not aliens. Good answer. I'll be on the radio about it here for like 15 minutes. And that's a long time on radio or TV. So I, they want to, I want to use it to talk more about exploration of the solar system because people here are really interested. We have a space agency here now. We have rocket lab, which is really successful. And rocket lab wants to get out of low earth orbit and delivering satellites and wants to go to the moon and Venus. So I think they're going to do it. So New Zealand is right on the map. And so people want to know. And they ask and, you know, I'm excited, but then when you find out how hard it is to get the water out of the dirt that's on the moon and stuff like that, it's like, ooh, there's more, more, more work to do here. Yeah. I remember when I heard the announcement, I just, we found something. I just, I assumed it's like, did they like just find a water molecule where they weren't expecting it? And then it's like, kind of, yeah. It's like what in like a meter of soil would have X amount of water. And the other thing was that they had found hydration, you know, evidence for hydration, but they couldn't tell. Whether it was hydroxyl, which is Oh, eight. Oh, H sorry. Versus H2O. And now they know for sure it's in the H2O form, which was great. But I thought, well, does that make it easier to turn it into stuff you can drink or rocket fuel? And I haven't found the answer yet to that. I'm looking through the internet looking for that. So we'll see. Gateway. It's gateway. Yeah, exactly. So that's the interesting thing and starting to spend more time and insist lunar orbit or, or thereabouts is all really interesting. And I've been, you know, dying and waiting for the James Webb telescope to be launched. And that's going to be it. I forget what the name of it is. You guys probably know there's, there's one side of the moon is called one thing. And the other side.  Well, we're at the top of the hour. And so let's get started. It looks like we're getting a good crowd here. And just another quick little reminder. And actually let me hit the record button before I forget. I'm sure to forget if I don't do this now. So just a quick little reminder, please make sure on that chat window that you have. Go down to the bottom and select panelists and attendees. And so we had people trained earlier, but then we had a whole lot of people show up after we had that announced. But so hello everyone and welcome to the October NASA night sky network. Webinar. We're hosting tonight's webinar as usual from the astronomical society, the Pacific in San Francisco, California. We're very excited to present this webinar with our guest speaker, Dr. Kathleen Campbell from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, where it's tomorrow. And we also have with us Daniela Scalise from the NASA Astrobiology Institute. And so Daniela might have a chance to say hello here at some point as well. Thank you.  We're very happy to have you with us. These webinars are for members of the NASA night sky network. Though we look forward to seeing everyone else on YouTube. For more information about the NASA night sky network and the astronomical society, the Pacific. I'll see if I can convince you, David, David, David, David, David, David, David, David, David, David, David, David. I'm going to forward you to the Pacific. I'll see if I can convince you, David or Vivien to pop a link into the chat so that you can follow it and learn a little bit more about what we're doing. Before we introduce Dr. Campbell, here's David prosper with just a couple of announcements. Dave. Okay. Hi there. And in case I type anything. beautiful gentleman here who was walking on my keyboard. But yes, what do we have for announcements? A couple of things I don't they're very fresh so I don't have links for anyone yet. These will be in our newsletter coming out in the second week of November. First of all, NASA is looking for folks that are want to host watch parties for the Perseverance landing on Mars this February 18th. So when we have more information that'll be put into the newsletter and distributed out to all of our members and you'll undoubtedly hear more about that opportunity soon. And in more news there we of course have the annual award pins and the design is almost ready. So with luck we'll be able to start the order process for folks in probably late November and early December maybe a little earlier maybe a little later depends on how logistics work out as we all know it's a little funky. So we've made a few tweaks to the pin the pin designs and program itself based on your feedback and we're really excited about these very excellent changes but since it's all not quite done yet you're gonna have to wait for that announcement. Also in the newsletter in the second week of November but I do have a little hint about the design just that there was a pretty nice surprise for Stargazers earlier this year and that may be a factor and that's what I got for y'all. Back to you Ryan. All right thanks Dave now I'm really curious I haven't even seen the pin I have no idea what's on it and so now I'm really curious. We got just two folks so far and the designers that's three. Okay all right so for those of you on zoom you can find the chat window and the Q&A window at the bottom edge of the zoom window on your desktop. Please feel free to greet each other as you've been doing in the chat window and making comments about our various customs tonight. So thank you for that and also to let us know if you're having any technical difficulties you can also send us an email at nightskyteinfo at astrosociety.org. If you have a question for our speaker this evening please type it into the Q&A window. It really helps us keep track of them and lets us know if we've answered your question or not. So please put those in there and not the chat window and so we'll put a couple reminders about questions to go in the Q&A window. So again we want to welcome everyone to the October member webinar for the NASA Night Sky Network. This month we welcome Dr. Kathleen Campbell to our webinar. Professor Kathy Campbell is a geologist and an astrobiologist who investigates extreme environments as analogs for early life on earth and possible life on Mars. She studied at UCSC, the University of Washington, USC and NASA Ames Research Center before joining the University of Auckland in New Zealand. In NASA's Mars 2020 landing site selection her team's proposal was one of the final three with the aim to collect samples possible and possible Martian biosignatures from over three billion year old hot spring deposits in the Columbia Hills in Goose of Crater which were and also to revisit the Spirit rover and see whether or not it's been buried yet I'm sure and their eventual return to earth in a future mission. So please welcome Dr. Kathleen Campbell. Yay, thank you so much. Nice introduction Brian. Thank you. It's great to be here. It's in the afternoon in New Zealand tomorrow but let's not think about that too much because it gets a bit confusing. But I'm here yes I'm native Californian. I was born in the Bay Area and I studied as you could see overseas where you are and then moved in 1997 to New Zealand where I have been teaching at the University. So I'm really looking forward to this talk tonight for you and I'm just going to share my screen here and pop this up and see if everybody's happy with this. Brian you guys can see okay? I think you can. Yep looks great. Thanks guys just double checking because we've already had a check on that. Well you know I know I'm sure you've thought about this question like any almost any person on the planet that this idea of are we alone and I thought we might talk this evening about this idea of searching for extraterrestrial life in the solar system. So much is going on in fact in this space that I just taught an astrobiology course this semester. We're just finishing our second semester so our year finishes in December. We have a calendar year and we finish in December not mid-year and we just finished talking about all these topics in my course astrobiology which is across my university. It's got philosophers and students who study Korean and engineering and every possible discipline and it's been really exciting. So I want to and every week we had new discoveries of which we'll talk about a few of them here this evening. So there's some night sky in the southern hemisphere here over either the southern Alps which are in the South Island and that's a very beautiful photo taken by superfessional photographers here in New Zealand which they allow they allow us to use these photos and they're fantastic. So the other thing I just point out is that I'm the director of a Center for Fundamental Inquiry known as Teal Marama which in Maori means coming into the light and it's it's in regards to the Faka Papa or the genealogy of creation that Maori believe as well as the first it's also alludes to the first light that a telescope sees and we've got a research center here that we have people in computer science, physics, geology, chemistry, the business school, a whole bunch of different people involved with this this group and it's been pretty exciting because our space program is taking off here in New Zealand literally and we're really excited to be a part of the foundation of that. We haven't had a NASA as long as you have but we've got something that is up and coming so I'm excited about that being here. Now so I want to talk a little bit about what's going on in the solar system in terms of searching for life and most of you probably know what astrobiology is but it's I thought I'd just have a brief reminder that it's in a way it's kind of about everything in the sense that it's the story of life in the universe and into the sort of fundamental questions about you know who we are and where we come from and it has three parts it's basically everything to do with the origin the prebiotic or chemistry of different planets or worlds the origin of life itself and it's and its evolution and that's sort of one part and then another part is searching for life beyond earth which will be a fair amount of our conversation this evening in terms of habitability and where you might look for life you just don't go out and randomly look around and then considering the future of life on earth and elsewhere and I think you've already realized that it's we use of tools from almost every discipline including philosophy social sciences and all the sciences and engineering so it is very exciting and we have to try to learn to communicate with each other across these disciplines and that's something that that my group's quite keen on here so we're very uh very happy to I'll be very happy to highlight a few things about uh searching for life here in the solar system but let's step back just for a moment and remember that we're asking these really big questions about you know are we alone in the universe and the latest estimate I've seen is if you count the galaxies that we can't see but how we can estimate those galaxies it's something like two trillion galaxies in the universe and a question about how many might have earth-like planets back when the Drake equation was postulated by Frank Drake in 1961 they didn't really know the answer to that question and we're getting closer and closer of course to being able to answer that question now with extra solar planets so this is a spectacular vision uh through the Hubble Extreme Deep Field campaign and just looking in one tiny teeny portion of what looks like blank sky and this is what you see when you look for a while so I'm really a keen uh proponent of observation and we're going to be looking at some of the work that we do in the earth sciences area around supporting our search for the origin and earliest life on earth as well as the possibility in particular for life on Mars but I'll also refer to some other places in the solar system and why we search the way we do what we're actually looking for so another really big question here and we use earth as our model of course is how did life originate and what was early life on earth like and some of you will be familiar with this giant mural in the Smithsonian uh painting of what early life might have looked like back in the Archaean Eon something like four billion or 3.5 billion years ago you could see the volcanoes and here we have these little mound-like things in a hot spring this is basically what I study here in the foreground but also these little mound-like things growing out in the in the shoreline area and those are known as stromatolites they're layers of sediment and microbes and they are the holy grail we find anything like that on Mars I'm not even sure we have to bring a sample back to prove it but but we can we can discuss that afterwards if you like now 900 million years ago which seems like a long time to us really isn't so very long in the history of the earth and these are some fossils uh described from Australia that are 900 million years old and nobody has any uh qualms about saying that's life that's fossil life but when you want to go back to billion two billion three billion three and a half billion years old that's where everything gets uh a bit controversial at times and in fact in New Zealand we would say everybody has a big bun fight which just means they all start to argue about whether or not they're you know when somebody says we've got the oldest life um usually there's a whole bunch of other people who say well hang on a minute and then there's a lot of debate and that's really important because if we've got this problem on earth imagine what it's like when you see something on Mars for example with a rover and you've got the instruments on a rover and you're trying to prove that you've got something like this which is on the scale of microns and a micron is one times 10 to the minus six meters um then you can imagine why people are now really starting to get serious about sample return so we'll come back to that a little later and of course we want to know if there was any life on other planets where would you look for it let's not just look everywhere we need to have some sort of constraint around that around maybe habitability maybe around um some other questions and then make sure you know that we have some ideas of what it might look like because we don't want to step over it and step across it and not even realize that we might have discovered it so I think we all uh know that we haven't found any signs so far of intelligence life from space um there have been no visits yet that we know of either through the radio or any other way that we know of for sure so a question that then comes to mind is well what about uh microbial life and that's an area of huge exploration we've got life on earth just about everywhere we look and the environments are even in the most extreme environment so very hot very cold very salty very deep and sort of every oh just about everywhere we look we find it and so this is just one example here of some purple sulfur bacteria they are purple colored and they eat carbon dioxide and they eat hydrogen so that's around and they give off you see these bubbles of methane gas and they live in a salty pond where nothing else can live which is why they haven't been eaten um and that's for us that's really strange life um I know that's anthropocentric of us but that is we do think and feel that that's you know rather extreme and so we use uh to try to understand what was going on in the early earth back when there was no oxygen in the atmosphere um back when there were the volcanoes and the blavas were hotter the sun was weaker we try to use what we call an earth analog environments or extreme environments to try to get an idea of where life might have originated or where we might find it somewhere else and so these are across a bunch of different kinds of environments and some of the ones illustrated here are hydrothermal vents in the deep sea uh living inside of rocks in the dry valleys of Antarctica where there's really not much rain or or anything else for them to eat in the rocks and here the largest hot spring in Yellowstone National Park with a walkway and tiny little dots are people just to give you a scale and most of the colors you see there are different microbes adapted to different environmental conditions or extremes out away from the source of the hot spring vent so we work a lot on these things and people are certainly very actively searching for microbial life throughout the solar system and perhaps of course beyond now in terms of the temperature extremes of life which is something we can measure uh relatively easily uh we're up to about 121 122 degrees Celsius so far in hydrothermal vents in terms of life uh being able to survive and thrive and uh close to that temperature even on land in hot springs and we do all this because we want to try to imagine you know where we might find life elsewhere so out beyond earth for us anyway it's pretty extreme in terms of the conditions but you know microbes and even some eukaryotes like tardigrades which are very strange looking little water bears you know those can survive some time in space so we are looking at these extreme environments and extreme organisms and they're and they're settings to help us search narrow the search for life elsewhere and so when we talk about hot water in particular or hydrothermal environments and the origin of life we can find these little pink stringy things are from Yellowstone microbes in a hot spring on land or in the deep sea here which is where the record holder is for the hottest temperature of anything alive so far we can look at the Tree of Life and this is one of many versions of it and go down to its deepest roots here are the three domains of life bacteria eukaryotes archaea these ones in the bottom here are all single celled and then here in eukarya we're way up here in this corner but if we go down to the most primitive living things we find that those branches are purple and in this chart purple means heat loving or hyperthermophilic microbes and so there's an idea that the deepest roots and maybe even luca the last universal common ancestor maybe that whatever that was was also hydrothermal and maybe just maybe that some kind of reflection or remnant on the early bombardment of the solar system when we were the solar system was full of rubbish and debris left over from formation of the planets lots and lots of impacts and so we had that heavy bombardment period and maybe life arose under high temperature conditions early in the history and it's reflected in our most primitive living things so that has been a hypothesis that people have been quite excited about for a very long time however new genetic work shows that that hypothesis or that idea is has been questioned because it turns out that the heat loving bacteria have got up to 24 percent of their genes from the archaea so here are the bacteria over here here's the archaea and there's been some horizontal gene transfer so if you look at vertical evolution as you know Darwin's evolution but there's also this horizontal gene transfer so it's now a little bit up in the air whether luca was a thermophile and that's very active area of research now I did want to point out being a geologist and a paleontologist that in fact there are fossils real fossils that people think are legitimate back way back in what we call the archaea and eon which is you know between about four billion years ago and about two and a half billion years ago and life definitely took hold somewhere in that window in the older part of that window and so we're quite interested in how did life evolve on earth will it tell us something about life elsewhere so these are just a couple of examples of some rocks these from uh the west western australia and these from uh south africa where we have bits of super old continental crust that preserve really old rocks in north america we have them up in michigan and the canadian shield and and uh well also here in south africa and uh western australia so here we have some filaments in a deep sea hydrothermal vent fossil and this is a fossil biofilm uh the the gooey stuff that microbes exude into the uh into the environment and so biofilm is a product also of this has been turned to stone through silica mineralization and now it's quartz quartz mineral and so these are real uh bonafide examples of fossils as not quite as old as we know but pretty far back and things older than this start being rather controversial so this is where we come in uh ever since my postdoc at nasa aims uh back in the 90s in the mid 90s i was introduced to hot springs in particular by the team at nasa aims and the exobiology branch i had already been working on extreme environments that i started working on by accident as a graduate student in western usa i was working on uh undersea cold springs basically and uh so they invited me to come out and study microbes and how they get preserved in stone through time and when i moved to new zealand nobody was really doing this kind of work so we started working here and then we expanded our studies into argentina uh where i would have been this december if i could have been we we were planning to do more work out here in december uh as a stepping stone into deeper time so millions and billions of years we go further back trying to understand the preservation of biosignatures and how that might look on another uh celestial body as well but next week right here in new zealand i will be going to this site here fangapa oa spring to do some filming and other sampling so at least i can get out in the field which i very much appreciate so we work on these younger hot springs as analogs for early life on earth and possible life on mars trying to understand how they turn to stone basically and using geological time and the age of these deposits these different agents like a movie almost like a snapshot as we go back in time trying to understand their preservation potential because most of you would might recognize this as a spring but most of you probably wouldn't recognize this as a spring this is 150 million years old in patagonia so here's probably my favorite place uh orake karako i'm also going there next week a stunning location this is a fault scarf for those of you who are not geologists there's a fault here that's offset these rocks there's some steam here coming out hot steam and these are some hot springs down here and all these different colors are the microbial mats that are growing in summertime they grow all over the place here and the white material is silica it's a mineral that comes out of the hot springs it's dissolved in the springs and the key to preservation of biosignatures is how rapidly you mineralize those microbes and it'll be the same on mars in the hydrothermal environments and deposits on mars it'll be the same on early earth when we're trying to understand how life took hold so we're looking at extremophiles extreme environment loving organisms microorganisms and their rapid mineralization in what what we call opaline silica which is amorphous it's not crystalline like quartz and that's going to be important in a few minutes when i talk about mars so an example of our marching through time of some of the work that we've done is we might go to the edge of that beautiful orangey pool and we might look down into that pool and what do we see in there but living stromatolites so microbial mats they're growing upwards up to the air water interface and then growing along the edge the mats are growing in the summertime they grow along the edge and where it's drying out where it's white you can see that silica so they're turning to stone right in front of our very eyes so i had a student a few years ago grow these things uh with a weather station and slides every hour every week every week every month and she showed very clearly that these features known as stromatolites which are layered build-ups of the mats which shown here with this type of microscopy is shown in green it's false color and that's where the carbon is and then the orange here is quartz or silica and this one is 150 million years old in the lower left corner and this one's forming last week you can see the microbes and then a film a biofilm known as exopolymeric substance or EPS this becomes solidified and makes a very smooth silica material but it's actually biological in origin so this entire deposit can be tens of meters thick or more like a yellowstone where the hot spring deposits become very very thick and almost all of it is made out of uh solidified or silica infused life and this is very important for looking for life elsewhere the question is can these features form in the absence of life can this form this feature in the absence of life because the textures if we saw this on mars we'd be very suspicious and say this looks really promising it's a potential biosignature but the question that is still unanswered um which has to be done in a laboratory is can you grow stromatolites abiogenically and the answer without life and the answer is maybe yes so we have to be very careful when we're searching for biosignatures it costs a lot of money to go into space and we want to be sure when we find something and bring it back that we think it's a pretty good candidate for biosignature so these are really spectacular really beautiful so here we've got the modern hot spring and then this one is just 60 years old and you can see here filaments growing and this is a rock thin section through a microscope and you can see that it still has its pigments so all these colors are at sunscreen so these turn orange in the summer because they have carotenoid pigments which is the same thing that's in carrots carotene that is like a sunscreen a natural sunscreen and this uh 60 year old hot spring deposit made out of silica in tombs the microbes in life position and you can still see their pigments and then you can step back in time and this one's 150 million years old we have special microscopy here on the right that tells us where the carbon is which is shown here in green and the rest is all turned to quartz so we go from opal to quartz in 150 million years or less and if you want to really step into deep time this is our recent work we've drilled the western australia out in the pilbara last year thankfully not this year with one of my students and we've been looking very carefully at some of these layers and we're finding very similar textures when you are talking about three and a half billion year old rocks even though something might look very much like a microbial mat um i can tell you that most of the scientific community wouldn't believe that this was a microbial mat so there's heaps of other work we have to do to try to characterize this and why am i going through all of this well three and a half billion years old starts to put us into the time frame of when mars had water and volcanoes and water and volcanoes certainly in new zealand make hot springs so you need environments habitable environments if you want to be looking for life and not just driving around a bunch of volcanic plains and wondering why you aren't finding anything so the fact that we've got now preserved possible microbes three and a half billion years old on earth at the same time that mars was and in anoxid conditions etc similar to mars then you're really starting to get close to the idea that maybe life could have originated on mars as well so we use the stepping stone technique to go into the deep time geological record so that's what we do in my little neck of the woods so the drilling campaign found very important things like when you have a vent area in a hot spring it forms a very funny little bubbly type of silica known as geyserite because it comes from geyserine and so here's a very recent example in new zealand and here's the three and a half billion year old example from western australia so telling us that life might have been on land and life was forming in hot water at this time so we're working on that drill core now and it's been pretty exciting even though it's been a little bit hard we can send samples anywhere we want we just can't send people now you may have heard about this hypothesis because you might have had a Bruce damer come talk to you a little while ago about the hot spring origin of life tonight so i won't spend a lot of time on it but the idea is this that you can get organics raining down from space the mercheson meteorite for example or interplanetary dust particles that are full of carbon and that carbon isn't alive it's just a building block for life and then you have some stuff going on at least on land here that's pre-life where there's pre-biotic chemistry going on you accumulate and concentrate those materials that you need phosphorus sulfur etc and then somewhere in all of this protocells will form and you you actually can create early life somewhere in this cascade of hot water moving down through the landscape and you know they say that Darwin in 1871 imagined some sort of warm little pond he didn't say hot spring but one could stretch the imagination and then you get a diversification distribution adaptation and finally colonization of the shoreline of the sea which is the extreme environment of that time because you don't you aren't able to concentrate those nutrients in the vast big huge ocean so the place where you can concentrate the nutrients and dry things out and then form a protocell boundary is actually possibly on the land not in the sea so here's the old idea the origin of life going from the sea to the land and that's been the idea obviously forever and so I'm part of the team that is exploring this idea that maybe life originated on the land and then went to the sea and of course we would have walked out of the sea when vertebrates came back on the land about 508 sorry about 350 million years ago so land to sea and then back to land again so that's what we've been working on with a bunch of different people so now when you take these things that we've learned about earth and early life which is ongoing and lots of debate then you want to go out and explore the solar system for life elsewhere and we're kind of well past the point of thinking there are canals and little green men or women on mars we're really looking for microbial life or earth you know version 2.0 did it evolve on earth and mars around the same time three and a half four billion years ago well the setting was right because we've got water here's the very large largest canyon in the solar system we had big huge volcanoes and lots of evidence for running water and in fact evidence for hydrothermal or hot water so that's important because if we go to these places and we find nothing and then we go to other places like where perseverance is going and we find nothing and i know we can't turn over every stone on mars but when you start looking at the habitable environments and you find nothing which means they're uninhabited habitable environments then you really have to begin the question whether we are the rare earth or the mediocre earth and you might wonder well maybe it is rare maybe it is hard for life to take hold so that's really the big sort of reason behind doing this kind of work and doing these kind of searches so here we have spirit rover and in 2011 steve ruff and a team steve's at arizona state university and is a collaborator of ours now they were driving spirit around in gooseup crater around in the columbia hills around home plate which is this deposit here of ash here 80 meters across and here is spirits final resting place right here and then the area that's dashed shown here is a very important area because they accidentally discovered opaline silica on mars now people knew there was silica from orbit that there was silica on mars but this was finding it on the ground with a rover and i'm sure most of you will know the story that the rover one of its wheels got stuck so they turned the rover around drove it backwards and it it was dragging one of the wheels was dragging as it moved and i would if i were in the audience right now jump up and do an imitation of that but i won't i won't do that here but there so it drove over this red regolith and the soil and then gouged out by accident this white stuff and of course everybody stopped and went back and the rest is kind of history they realized started to realize what they have so if we look over here on the left we see that this silica when they looked at it with thermal emission spectroscopy on the rover so for example this black line they found these different wavelengths in this pattern that really matched hot spring silica deposits both at yellowstone and in particular in chile in the high andes at el tatio and they realized they were looking at opal and halite which is salt and opal on mars you know three and a half billion or more years old is incredible because on earth all of that stuff transforms through pressure and time into quartz but no on mars it's opal and these features when you start really taking a look and mapping them out around home plate you find that they actually have a form or a shape or texture and that texture is knobby and digit eight which means finger like and so they're really strange looking and so here you see at different scales on mars the digit eight silica that they found with that rover and over here in chile steve and others have been doing work in the high andes which are really a great analog environment for mars because you've got hot springs got volcanoes you're at high elevation so that is equivalent to a thin atmosphere and you have a rigidity so these springs don't pour out lots of water like at yellowstone and in 2016 steve and his colleague jack farmer who happened to be my mentor at nasa aims they found that these are actually micro stromatolites so they've got microbes solicified into these finger like features and so the question of course is are the martian examples stromatolites and despite the fact that they look like stromatolites i mentioned to you that you can have things that aren't that are pseudo morphs that look like but aren't stromatolites and so they that that really kicked in a lot of excitement but it also put the spirit rover and going back to uh home plate and columbia hills on the map for the mars 2020 mission so where these things form in modern hot springs if you look at a cross section and this is all the work we've been doing you know what kinds of microbes are found where under what conditions under what temperatures and they're found in channels so shallow channel deposits you can see here in el tatio or in new zealand and we're going to that spot next week where do they form but in shallow outflow channels and hot springs and now if you went back to columbia hills you might want to also drive around and go to pioneer mound which was seen by the rover but they never really had a chance to visit it and so pioneer mound is another location that might actually be a hot spring vent they actually found that the reddish rock that's part of the top of that mound is actually silica rich and the other rocks which are here in false color blue are actually basalt the saltic igneous rocks or volcanic rocks so um they've actually wondered because now they know this is this mound is made out of silica was it a hot spring and here at the same scale out in chile is an extinct hot spring mound made out of this silica known as center so that's another place to explore and you see that where they're active you get the hot springs and the mats so maybe yes so briefly then in 2017 when i joined the team uh they were uh they just narrowed the search for the mars 2020 rover landing sites i think they started with oh something like two dozen and they ended up with eight and then when i joined it was it got down to that year it was brought down to three so there was jezero crater columbia hills and northeast serdes um you can see uh where are we here yes so here's the curiosity rover over here and here's uh our location number two columbia hills so um as you well know uh they they were looking at other things they ended up choosing this beautiful poster child image of a delta in a lake over here jezero crater uh anybody who does geomorphology would love that and certainly want to go there but there's also uh water-laid deposits water-laid minerals and so they're going to look for organics on the edge of the delta and as you know that was launched and we have perseverance heading to mars right this minute so briefly other ways to look for life in the solar system uh we can actually uh find meteorites from mars and there are annual meteorite hunts all around the world including in Antarctica uh this one here was found in 1984 alh 84 is the year 001 is the first one of that year and alh stands for allen hills in Antarctica and it was in 96 they realized it was martian in 93 and in 96 they claimed that it contained signs of past life i was at nasa then and i never saw my postdoc supervisor again after that he was busy like in washington dc giving testimony about going to mars uh and other things because of this but it's very controversial and there are many things that i can't get into here but one of the controversial aspects is that these features here in the meteorite uh are really tiny they would have to be nanobacteria 10 to the minus nine meters and so people wonder whether they might be pseudo fossils because bacteria on earth are much larger and there are other reasons that this meteorite is controversial but it got people to study for biosignatures in a very in-depth way that maybe hadn't been done before this so it is good idea to look at meteorites but it was inconclusive at best whether there was life on mars that was trapped in a meteorite so here we are now 2020 um there'll be the mission uh and they will cache samples so they'll drill and then throw samples on the ground somewhere and then uh in 2026 ish they'll start heading back and anyway by 2031 they hopefully will have a sample return mission back home we ourselves are working on a sample return mission but not with nasa we're working on a sample return mission for columbia hills with japan so keep uh i'll keep you posted on that and then human missions to mars well when you read the literature it says 2030s to 2050s and no that's not me because i don't want to go to mars i'm happy to send a rover but not me i like being here so that's what's kind of coming up now i did want to spend uh so that's a lot about mars because that's kind of what we focus on but i wanted to just point out to you all a few things about our our the rest of the solar system and where else to search and when we do that we talk about habitable zones and this is the solar habitable zone where you actually are relying on the luminosity heat of the sun and that has changed over time so habitable zones also change over time so you want to know whether you're too hot too cold or just right or it's okay for the conditions to be harsh because life could be lurking somewhere and in the outer solar system that certainly is on the different moons of jupiter and saturn that or have ice that's insulating watery oceans underneath so you can get out beyond the warm part of the solar system if you can create heat and uh and liquid water another way so uh here we've got some an artist rendition on europa a moon of jupiter the ice on the surface is moving around because it's all cracked we call that ice tectonics and underneath there's water here's a imaginary probe that's opened the door and that driving around and finding a hydro flume event or some kind of event on this moon i know that's all made up but there certainly is an ocean under there and uh people are very very interested in exploring the outer solar system going back and doing more work and then of course the geysers in space from enceladus the small little moon of saturn first imaged i think really with Hubble but uh kassini um did some incredible work out there and the idea there is that because of what they've been able to fly through this geyser and get some information about what's going on underneath and there was silica in that uh in that material as well as some other elements that made them think that water and rock are interacting down on the bottom of the ocean on enceladus and that there may be life down there not whales not fish but maybe microbes and so a great analog for that would have to be Antarctica where we have sub glacial lakes uh and circulation and sediments and possibly life in these sub glacial lakes in fact from drilling they have found microbes uh down underneath some of these lakes so that's the analog on earth for looking for life in the outer solar system i did want to mention Titan briefly um very cloudy when we look at it with this visible life it's hard to really see anything on Titan because it's got this very thick atmosphere and so it's now um we know from Cassini and the Huygens probe we know from orbit that there are actually lakes not in shorelines but not of rocks as we know it or water as we know it it's too cold but in fact uh the this watery area this is false color is methane liquid methane and ethane so it's methane which is a gas on earth it's so cold it can actually flow like water on Titan and when the probe was released and floated down through the atmosphere and used um different it was um I can't remember how they photographed this you guys will know not me but here what I want to point out here is the shorelines that you can actually see and rivers made out of methane so there's shorelines and lakes and methane and the rocks when it landed this is a picture from the probe these boulders are in fact um it's water ice but it's so hard they're pretty much rock so the um dragonfly mission has been approved New Horizons just recently and so they're going to explore these hydrocarbon dunes so they're sand dunes but they're made out of hydrocarbons and they're going to send these different probes these quadcopters around to explore Titan so that's a mission coming up and of course you've probably all heard about this idea of the dark streaks in the clouds of venus could they harbor microbes um the idea behind this is that venus was in the Goldilocks zone for the first two billion years of its history until everything got too hot and the sun got too hot so are there microbes living in the clouds of venus green clouds so to speak are they there now as a remnant from this time in the past that's the question and so we know that astronomers actually turned a couple of different big telescopes on earth towards venus and discovered phosphine in the spectrum of venus ph3 which on earth is produced by life mainly but it could be weird chemistry on venus and then very recently in the news maybe they didn't measure this signature correctly it's just one line on an absorption spectrum so that's very new news about whether there really could be life in the clouds of venus looking maybe not so good at this point and then I can't you know finish without because I'm getting towards the end here not quite but I I got a finish with talking about the extra solar planets and the discovery of extra solar planets which was kind of in the realm of science fiction 20 25 years ago but now of course we're on the cusp of finding something that people have dreamed about for thousands of years and that is another earth and there's a great history to all of that including people being burned at the stake back in the back in the olden days for thinking that there might be other planets out there and now of course we know there's more than 4,000 and there are a much smaller number of that artwork like the way we search is biased toward finding jupiter sized planets that's all changing with new telescopes coming online in the next few years and this is super important because now that we know there's quite a lot of exoplanets it means that gosh there's a whole lot of places in the galaxy alone our galaxy alone depending on how you calculate the drake equation you could range from somewhere like 20 planets that are like earth and should have civilizations to in the millions so where are all the aliens right okay well in 2015 breakthrough initiatives came into life um listening for sounds of extraterrestrials is one part of the breakthrough initiatives it's breakthrough listen and uh it was Yuri Milner an entrepreneur who studied physics in university he's russian but i know he has a big house in los altos hills because i've been there and he's uh now spending his money on funding the search for extraterrestrials and one component of that is breakthrough listen and so there's a lot of very famous people here i won't go into i don't have time to get into who they all are this is when they announce breakthrough initiatives they give away prizes for all kinds of inventive things uh and they're doing they're doing lots of different things so that's given a big boost to radio telescopes in this case and they've just finished a three-year uh stint renting time on some very expensive big telescopes around the world and so far nothing but they have improved vastly the search and the way to search and the way to process the search and so they're increasing all the time their ability to scan more and more of the sky the other thing that breakthrough is doing is breakthrough star shot where they want to go to the next star alpha centauri 4.37 light years away and they want to send tiny little nanocrafts teeny tiny little things uh and with solar sails using a laser pulse to get them off the earth at about 30 the speed of light they're going to try to do this and then go over there and do something and I guess doing something means maybe take some pictures of these exoplanets which are in their star's habitable zone and so I think Yuri wants to be alive for this so he's really pushing the the envelope and there are a lot of people in the San Francisco Bay Area in particular but other parts of the world working on everything from the solar sail to the chip to the laser and I don't know if they've made a lot of progress lately I was going to go to the meeting this year but hopefully I'll get to go see what they're up to next year so in summary then we've got a solar system here with a lot of celestial bodies moons and asteroids and planets and a lot of potential for finding signs of microbial life we're looking for life in habitable zones and we use what we know about extreme environments on earth to help us narrow the search so on that note I will wrap up and happily take questions and just want to say thank you very much for inviting me to to present right well thank you very much then we have a lot of questions that have come in and so we'll see if we can get to as many as we can so maybe we could have you stop sharing your screen okay we can see you I know I'm going back to earlier so Elizabeth was she noted that the spirit rovers of final discovery was the silica on Mars in the possible hot springs or any future rovers equipped with instruments that could identify biosignatures on Mars that is a really exciting topic thank you Elizabeth and it's hard to answer because of this it's because biosignatures we've learned from that Martian meteorite that I talked about that you do need different lines of evidence like extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence as Carl Sagan said I'm paraphrasing and so if you just have something that looks like a micro stromatolite or it or even if you get an organic chemistry signature and a lot of the rover instrumentation is around geochemistry so it depends on what you think is a biosignature is the answer and I have really watched from mainly afar that the geochemists think that they're signatures which are organic chemistry so compounds with carbon that those are better biosignatures and more robust than textural biosignatures like the ones I've been showing you the best answer is to have both and because you need to know the context and you need to know for example how these things grow and and and if they're showing lifelike growth patterns as well as them being made out of carbon that as we well know from curiosity when they found the organic carbon on Mars they really couldn't tell you where that carbon came from and it's in some mudstone which is fine but that could have rained out of space it could be exogenous outside of coming not even from Mars so what we're talking about here is looking for signals that come from Mars and so that's really important and so you need to actually combine all of these things so there's a list of biosignatures and some of the Mars instruments can can characterize some of those things and other things will have to be characterized back on earth with return samples and so this debate is near and dear to my heart because people are publishing papers in the scientific literature ranking what they think are the more important biosignatures and I I sort of take issue with that being a geologist because it depends on what discipline you're in in terms of what weight you put on a biosignature and I think the best bet for the best science is to consider all the possible potential biosignatures and then get those samples back to earth. No substance to having the rocks in hand I'm an ex geologist myself so. So you should know. Luca I just see a question I'll just jump in because it's right at the top and then you guys can go on but I do see one that I can answer and that is that Luca is the last universal common ancestor so the ancestor from which we all came and and would have maybe never even had a fossil record so it might be something we never even can see but people are trying to understand was Luca a thermophile did it like hot temperatures or was it a mesophile did it evolve in cooler water cooler water we know we need on earth we need water for life and we need certain elements that are in all living things so Luca kind of would have had to have these things it would have had to evolve or come to come from non-life to life and that's Luca right and then we move on as Steven was in reference to perseverance would it have to find definitive evidence of the current life on Mars perhaps sub draining to prove life exists elsewhere since structures on the surface could mimic biological processes and not necessarily be a sign of life itself well you know the the Viking missions were trying to cook up with a bit of you know soup chicken soups quote unquote they were trying to see if the Martian soil would you know show give off signs of life like gases some kind of biogeochemistry and and the results were either depending on who you talk to either inconclusive or maybe not and we now know that the surface is really harsh right it's got perchlorates which destroy organic material and and of course the atmosphere is thin there's a lot of radiation and so then you've got a drill to answer Steven you've got a drill to get down below to find that subterranean life and how far can we drill well the exo Mars rover for that ESA European Space Agency will be launching in a couple of years I think I can't remember it's 2022 I think they are going to drill but you know how it's not a hundred percent certain we you know how far will the cosmic radiation go are they going to drill into anything that might be a habitable environment I mean we don't really know till we get there and and insight lander which is there to do among other things measure Mars quakes I'm sure the insight was trying to drill into the Martian regulates and it turned out to be harder than they thought and so there are just if we could just send geologists there I could tell you with a rock hammer you'd solve all these problems in about two seconds but we can't yet send geologists to them to Mars with a rock hammer but so we are really limited actually to be totally honest with the technology that can go there and also what we can measure so my feeling is look for signs of past life and certain places on Mars will be good for that and go ahead and look for you know living things as well but they will have to be sheltered from the current situation on the surface and of course we always have to worry about us contaminating Mars so the whole idea of planetary protection is quite important since the planning to send humans there supposedly in the 2030s how do we protect the native wildlife I don't know yeah I think that that's that's an interesting thing with the with the limitations of sending the robots to Mars is that if we send you you could probably do it a week what the rover does in a year or more so exactly and the other thing too Brian is that you have to they're landing on all these really flat surfaces and what do we usually do we go to the place where the rocks you know give us a window on time which is stratigraphy so we want to go to the very places that rovers don't go yep but yeah we can't do that yet somebody I I'm sorry I know there's questions below this one but I'm just seeing one right up at the top so I'll just quickly answer Kevin's question about trying to make life in the test in test tube since the 70s that's true I don't think I know there's no real success except for incremental like being able to encapsulate something like a protocell using lipids so fatty type molecules or you know taking stuff from a meteorite that's got bits and pieces from the solar system that are the building blocks of life and being able to create parts of protocells things like that there is a Hady and there are a couple of places there's one in the US and there's others being built that make a Hady and atmosphere which is the first atmosphere of the of the earth and then trying to do experiments under those atmosphere conditions it's quite tricky though so no no and we would have heard about it by now you know if anybody actually made life intestines it might be hard to make life I wonder whether it was just certain situations or circumstances that just worked out despite all those exoplanets out there maybe it is really hard to get just the right combination where does Enceladus get its heat to melt its ice into liquid water super question both Europa Enceladus and some of the other moons it's that gravitational pull of Jupiter or Saturn it is and there's a huge amount of radiation coming out of those planets so my understanding is that it's the gravitational tidal massaging like much worse than on earth with the moon and that's keeping things warm under the ice if anybody else knows anything more go ahead and add to that so you can help me out yeah well we can go to the next one here so Darian says that based on what we've experienced with COVID-19 if we find the life in the solar system brought back would a virus be very likely and how easy could it wipe out human and animal life what precautions could be taken to prevent this or relaxing knowledge of how to protect her so which is actually kind of interesting I just I actually wrote my most recent column for Mercury magazine had to do with Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a book called Aurora where they go out and there was an unknown prion that discovered that ended up killing everyone that went down there and so this is a real very real concern isn't it it is it's just a question though whether there are those things out there but I know it's in sci-fi but a lot of weird a lot of things in sci-fi are actually possible we just don't necessarily know how to create them things like warp drives and wormholes aren't just science fiction they they within the laws of physics it's possible but we just don't know how to create them yet so you know i'm not a virologist but we probably are lacking knowledge of how to protect ourselves at this point and back you know when we brought astronauts back from the moon we all know that they just sort of they were walking to their isolation chamber out in the open and things like that or whatever they did wasn't very secure we now know that probably the moon is no threat but it is a great question I know people work on this for their careers so we do need people to be considering this every time we go anywhere outside of earth even here on earth as we well know this year all right so will you wonders why is there so much or why does it appear that there's so much blue soil and rock in the red planet I'm not totally sure where that question comes from but the photo that I did show that had blue rock was false colored to show the difference between a volcanic rock of assault and the red was a more silica rock so a lot of times you have to be a little bit careful and check those photos and make sure they're true color we often use false color even in my work to delineate things like here's where the carbon is and stuff like that but I don't know if there's real blue soil there but I know that the photos I showed were false colored all right so I know we're getting close to the end here so let me jump down here and get kind of a little more speculative so Gordon notes that astronomers were humbled to find that using our solar system as an analog for extra exo solar systems was way off base do you think astrobiologists will be similarly humbled when or if life is identified elsewhere in the universe yes we will I think there's heaps I think there's lots more that we can't even that science can't even like like there's what we can do with science but then there's just got to be so much more that either our science hasn't got to yet or that just somehow is outside of science that we just are not going to be able to observe and I don't even this is just a feeling I have so I think we really we we are trying to imagine something and then it's going to be something way more surprising than we ever thought so I totally agree with you we're going to be very surprised by all that I'm sorry there's somebody who asked can you comment on your current or near future collaboration with Japan Space Agency so we're in the so I've not been I was at NASA many years ago as a postdoc and then I left and came here so I didn't stay in NASA so I don't work with space agencies that much but what's happening is that Japan there's a bunch of young there's a bunch of young engineers in Japan who get a little tired of the institutionalization of space exploration and the giant unwieldy programs that sometimes happen out of big institutions and so I don't know if you follow what's going on with Japan but they are really good at at launching cheap and efficient and successful missions and so there are a team of engineers over affiliated with the Japanese Space Agency who we've been interacting with mainly through Australia, New Zealand and a few other countries over this side of the world and we're actually pitching a light it's called life spring it's a mission that isn't doesn't exist yet but we're working on the early phases of it to go back to Columbia Hills and sample those silica deposits and bring them back to a world-class laboratory in Japan that does that is about to receive the samples coming from Ryugu the asteroid that was sampled by Japan many months ago and is about to bring it's sampled back to earth and they are postulating that it's full of organic material and unlike the hype around the NASA mission that just sampled an asteroid NASA wasn't the first to do it and I know NASA has not ever said that but the US media really likes to say it's the first time that anybody's ever sampled an asteroid like that but Japan is amazing the more I see the more I learn I am astounded by how cheap their missions are how good they are this this little probe that's bringing the sample back to earth from that asteroid is not even done with its mission it's going to drop it off send it down to us and it's going to go back out to look at another asteroid that's just amazing to me so anyway we're astounded by it so we're hoping to work with them on an actual mission that she cost I hope a fraction of perhaps what's being postulated for the sample returns through NASA I hope well we've got a few more questions and so you can see them there and so I'm going to let you choose what and and I know that we're at the top of the hour and so we want to you know I don't know whether you're willing to stick around and and then everyone else can just kind of you know take off when they feel like it but it's up to you well I'm happy to hang around for a little while because I'll talk to one single person who might be interested in listening or telling me their ideas so if people want to disappear and I know some of you it's late for some of you I'd be happy to go off just to do a few more questions that people are okay and Brian just stop me please because I don't want to overkill I do myself personally have a meeting here in my own office in a half an hour so okay well my window is well we'll keep it we'll go for a couple more here okay and so let's go back up here to the top so Elaine said besides Mars where would you suggest would be the second best place to look for microbial life here in our solar system yeah I mean this is personal now not you know not necessarily the best scientifically but I just think I'd really love to go back to one of the moons of either Saturn or Jupiter and really take a look at those geysers and and I know it's really the ice is thick but if there were a way to take a heat probe down right through the ice and then send out little you know swimming autonomous vehicles that's what I would do I think it's really exciting I don't know about per yes you can use perchlorates for rocket fuel but that's as far as my knowledge goes so yeah that's okay let's see what else all right so if the search for extraterrestrial life assumes that there are civilizations that would have already evolved in past what signs are geological or biological flags that you might look for that would be their footprints well oh gosh you know um well a layer of plastic maybe I'm being a little facetious there but yeah you know what we leave to the future here so I don't I'm thinking uh you know in the sci-fi world there are really a lot of things about that and it's probably a bigger topic than we can really get into here but there I guess what I'd focus on is that the solar system is uh sorry the universe is 3.13.7 billion years old plus or minus and so other civilizations could have evolved and passed absolutely I just think we're everybody so far apart from each other it's hard for me to imagine us getting anywhere where we can see any of this I almost feel like they really have to come to us with much more advanced technology rather than us being able to go to them so I'm more waiting to hear from them than me going out and saying what should I look for and all those radio signals and nothing um it is a little discouraging but it's also still really exciting I mean I'm both discouraged and excited about it at the same time which I know is a little weird um somebody asked about a t-shirt of my last slide which has a bunch of microbes that have been covered by actually some kind of storm event and then all solicified I'd be happy to donate that but I want a t-shirt too so you have to mail me one to New Zealand and I'd be happy to give you my my photo if somebody could make me a t-shirt thank you all right thank you so I guess that you know that that last comment that you made it kind of points out the the difficulty of fossilizing things at all we have a hard enough time deciphering the history of life and then um if all of a sudden we don't have we're not renewing the human presence on on the earth and you have all the erosion take place how much of it is actually going to get preserved and so you know it's actually somewhat unlikely that there would be a whole lot of us left over a couple billion years from now for someone to actually buy yeah the only comment I would make because it is a really good comment is that on Mars what really as a geologist what really blows me away is that the hydrothermal silica at home plate is opal and opal doesn't hang around that much in the geological record here it transforms to courts which is good and bad if you've if you've solicified something like a microbe early on then usually it's fairly well protected uh and even if it goes to courts quite a lot of the time it preserves well relatively well so what's really interesting to me is that the opal on Mars is still opal and that means that there's not much of a water cycle uh going through now the whole place could be buried under under a bunch of you know dust right now I don't know but uh it is fascinating that those little digitized structures um Steve and others have done experiments to windblast silica on earth similar silica on earth and they can't produce the same kind of structure so it's not a windblown feature so um interesting a that it's so opal and secondly that it's now exposed there's been a bit of ash that was over it and it's been eroded out but um it doesn't seem like those finger-like things could be formed just by windblasting well one of the things that I was wondering too is that if it's still opal after all this long time and I wonder if there are some other minerals that you can kind of use as a check on the process at which and so I'm thinking in terms of on on earth olivine tends to kind of you know go to glass in basaltic rocks and so the dominant rock type on on Mars is a basalt basaltic composition and so presumably there's an olivine or the olivine maybe we don't know because we don't have a thin section of it there are the olivine still olivines or they um you know turned into something else like they would here on earth some of the oldest life here on earth has um so there are these beautiful stromatolites have been published recently that are made out of pyrite which is fools gold so the organisms didn't make stromatolites out of fools gold it was replaced and sometimes that's a good thing because then it preserves the material and sometimes of course it's a bad thing because then it preserves it destroys detail uh somebody here has actually said what if the abundance of heavy elements has only just now in the last few billion years got high enough for advanced life with enzymes with catalytic centers based on chelated heavy elements we might be the first if that's the case then we're definitely very lonely because you know we got to wait around for the others so yeah of course that's possible uh and and we don't know I mean the the thing that is incredible as you all know because you're all interested in astronomy is how much we actually don't know the more we learn the the more we find out that we don't know a lot of things so yeah so let's make this the uh the last question and so Spencer wants to make uh take the martian opal and make a ring out for you it's not the pretty it's not fresh it's opal though unfortunately but let's make this uh the last question uh alan asks how limiting our assumptions of life on earth carbon-based recording water defining life elsewhere in the universe well they're limiting for sure but when you look into it in a little bit of detail and i'm not a chemist but i i've looked into this a bit and that is that if you like you want to base life on silicon look at silicon it's no wonder that the earth's materials are made out of silicon and life is made out of carbon carbon can make so many different bonds it can make so many different kinds of organic molecules that are so flexible and so what i've read about things like silicon is it's just less i mean it sounds uh stereotypical to say it's it's more rigid because yeah it makes more it makes rock better but it's not as flexible for evolution of biological systems from what i understand so you start to kind of limit yourself and then when you look at other solvents not water say ammonia or methane or something like that well you know them being in the right form being you know uh liquid at really cold temperatures and then when you're at really okay so you've got methane and you're at really cold temperatures can you have life like at 100 minus 150 or something well then catalytical processes go really slowly so then you're stuck with that and so every time everywhere you turn you end up back with carbon-based life and water so that's what i've seen in my um studies this year on astrobiology as i've been learning about it while i've been teaching it is that it's hard to come up with other materials that aren't as awesome as what we've got here and of course we are in the habitable window of liquid water so it just seems pretty fortuitous that we happen to have everything all lined up just right that's why i wonder whether maybe we're a rare earth all right well thank you so much this is that's all for tonight thank you kathy for joining us this evening and thank you everyone for tuning in and hanging in there for a little bit longer here so you'll go to find this webinar along with many others on the night sky networks website in the outreach resources section you can also find it on the night sky network youtube channel each webinars page also features additional resources and activities and so it's already up there but we will refresh things probably tomorrow so that we'll update at least the night sky network website join us for our next webinar on november 17th when carl hergenrother from the university of arizona's lunar and planetary laboratory will bring us up to date with the osiris rex mission to asteroid benu and they have you know the excitement from last week of actually grabbing several ounces i think of material so keep looking up and we'll see you next month thank you so much kathy and this this is fantastic thank you for hanging in there for another 10 minutes or so to the questions and and we never really let daniella introduce herself to the group but


Last year I made the college degree tier list and this video absolutely blew up but the most common comments I got on the video were saying why didn't you include this major or that major and there's actually over 900 different majors that you can graduate with in the United States so of course I couldn't include all of them but in this video I am going to include a lot more we're going to be doing the top 50 most common majors and we're going to be ranking them from S tier which is the best all the way down to F tier which is the worst if you're someone who's trying to choose the perfect college degree for you or you just want to get the most out of college with the least amount of time effort and money or you're looking to get your first entry level job right after graduating college then check out my college 101 course down in the description below this is basically my life work up to this point it's without a doubt the best product that has to do with getting a good college degree it's basically a very convenient streamline step-by-step guide on answering all of your college related questions but anyways let's get to ranking individual degrees I'm not going to spend very much time on each one of these because then the video is just going to be way too long but let's go ahead and start off with accounting this one is really good extremely flexible there's literally millions of different accounting jobs out there so if you get into it and let's say you want to do tax for instance you decide you hate tax there's so many different careers that you can pivot to accounting is asked here actuarial science this one is very math heavy a really good one I'd say the only problem with it is you can probably become an actuary just by getting a mathematics degree and then taking a few extra classes but overall when you look at the statistics it's really good I'm gonna go ahead and put that one in A tier agriculture big issue with this one is it's one of those skills that you can't really learn in the classroom in my opinion you know how the heck are you going to learn how to be a farmer from in the classroom that's just that doesn't make any sense this one goes into D tier animal science very similar issue as the one before very very bad statistics if you look at the numbers on this one it's going to go into F tier anthropology one of those subjects that is extremely interesting to a lot of people you know I think anthropology is great unfortunately very difficult to get a job in anthropology especially with a bachelor's degree to even have a chance you pretty much have to get like a doctorate numbers are really horrible with this one this one would fall under the category of one where if you are really passionate about anthropology figure out a different way of making money from it you know do some kind of side hustle this one goes into F tier architecture another one very interesting also very difficult surprisingly difficult you know when I was doing research on how hard they are and you also surprisingly don't get very much out of it for how difficult it is now architecture students actually study more hours than any other type of student in college even physics or engineering so this is one that in my opinion you could make it work but it's going to be very difficult I'm going to go ahead and put it into C tier next one on the list is biochemistry and I think this is one of the better biological science degrees a lot of the biological science degrees aren't that great in my opinion they're very overrated compared to the other stem degrees but this one I'm going to actually put into B tier biology is next and even though it sounds very similar to biochemistry this one is actually not nearly as good when it comes to the statistics and your ability to get a job with just a bachelor's so this one is going to go into C tier next one on the list is going to be business administration and business administration is a business degree so there are a lot of positives there because business degrees in general are pretty good however I'd say it's one of the less good business degrees still if you look at the statistics it's okay I'm going to go ahead and put it in low B tier next on the list is going to be chemistry this is a physical science and better than biology not as good as biochemistry I'm going to go ahead and put this one in low B tier all right so communications degree is next and this is one of those degrees where it falls into the category of a very valuable skill it's just learning it in school isn't going to help you all that much and it tends to be just too general like you know everybody communicates just like everybody breathes when business owners hiring managers recruiters are looking for people who can actually help companies they want you to have specialized skills not just general skills so communications is going to go into C tier next one on the list is computer science s tier this needs no explanation next one on the list is criminal justice and this is one of those degrees where you know a lot of people think they're going to get a criminal justice degree and then go into some sort of law enforcement either becoming a police officer or a detective like someone that you'd see on csi however what most people don't realize is you don't actually need a criminal justice degree in order to get a job in law enforcement however it might help you in some rare occasions in certain states or certain districts and with certain careers so for that reason the statistics are not great on this one but I'm going to go ahead and put it into D tier criminology is basically just a worse version of criminal justice the statistics are even worse with that one so I'm going to put that one in F tier economics is next on the list it fits in very similarly to the business degrees however it's a little bit harder for you to get your first job right after college and it's not quite as flexible a lot of the time with economics degrees the career progression that you see is you know it's very difficult the beginning but once you have some years of experience under your belt you can actually make a lot of money it's also relatively flexible teaches you a lot of skills that are valuable in life and it might help you to become an entrepreneur later on so this one is going to go into A tier next on the list is education and unfortunately teachers don't get paid all that well the one positive to education is if you do get an education degree you're very likely going to get a job pretty much no matter what education degrees have some of the lowest unemployment percentages but a lot of the other stuff involved like job satisfaction and everything else like that like how well you can progress up the career and a lot of other metrics that are important when it comes to evaluating these college degrees are bad so education is going to go into C tier engineering is next on the list and this one has fantastic statistics across the board pretty much any type of engineering degree is going to be relatively good if I put all the engineering degrees on this list it would be like 20 different ones so you're just going to have to watch another video if you want to see me rank them individually you know engineering is extremely high paying pretty flexible has decent job satisfaction there's just a lot of positives to engineering I'd say one of the negatives to it is it's extremely difficult right it's going to be some of the most challenging years of your life a lot of people don't end up finishing in four years sometimes it takes them five or even six years just to get a bachelor's so that is something you want to keep in mind but overall engineering is s tier next on the list is going to be English and this is one where I think it does teach you some valuable things because it's almost like communication where you are going to learn some good soft skills right formulating an argument writing essays kind of organizing your thoughts delivering whatever your argument is so you know English does have some positives but overall the statistics just aren't great on this one so it is going to go into D tier next on the list is exercise science and this one actually has some of the worst statistics on the entire list and I think the reason for this is because most people go into exercise science because they want to become personal trainers the only problem with that is most personal trainers don't actually need a degree the biggest thing when it comes to personal training is motivating people to work out and then basically just knowing the basics now I'm not saying that's right maybe people should know more about you know working out that would probably prevent a lot of injuries but that is the way that it is right so exercise science goes into D tier next on the list is finance and I see this one pretty similar to accounting it's less flexible than accounting is however you can if you are a very hard worker move up to higher positions right finance is one of those degrees where it's high risk high reward and it's very similar to a law degree for instance where you know people who are you know the top like five percent or even one percent of the people who you know do finance or law are going to make really really good money but if you're not in the top five or one percent it's probably not going to be as good as something that's a little more flexible but overall for the right person finance is fantastic I'm going to put this one into S tier next on the list is food science and this one kind of interesting the statistics here are decent they're not horrible by any means I mean there are a lot of jobs out there could work for coca-cola for instance or any number of other food companies it's just also not amazing so I'm going to go ahead and put this one into C tier next on the list is going to be forestry and this one when it comes to the statistics again not amazing it's going to go into D tier next on the list is a general business degree and although it's probably one of the worst business degrees when you look at the statistics it's still okay and the fact that most of the business degrees are just good in general they're extremely flexible makes this one pretty decent it's going to go into low B tier next on the list is going to be general studies and I'm sorry but this one is just an absolute joke right like you go to college to learn specific skills to get educated in specific areas general studies is just like sampling everything if you want to sample everything use Google I mean there's so much free content out there on the internet you could almost argue that even the specialized content right now is better free on Google or for a very low price than it is in college so there's absolutely no need whatsoever for you to pay money to learn just general content like this that you can just find anywhere on the internet alright this is like Wikipedia studies or something it's just ridiculous this one goes into F tier geology this is a science degree scores relatively well when it comes to the statistics a lot of the time people get geology degrees and they go into the natural gas industry and that can you know fluctuate somewhat we've seen you know with the pandemic and everything the natural gas industry got absolutely rocked so that is something you want to look at right now it's probably not that great but hopefully past the pandemic geologists will be able to find more jobs and so this one's going to go into B tier next on the list is going to be history one of my favorite subjects now one thing I will say about history is when you look at the statistics it's not horrible I think that a lot of smart ambitious people tend to take history and philosophy and that's probably why they end up doing better later on in life and it probably doesn't have too much to do with the history course itself but you could make an argument that I'm wrong there totally open to that but overall this one goes into C tier next on the list is going to be human resources and this is one of the business degrees that again isn't amazing however business degrees in general are pretty good overall so this one is going to go into low B tier as well next on the list is information technology management and there's like five different degrees that are very similar names there and they all score relatively well when you look at the statistics I'd say the one downside to some of these technology related degrees is sometimes there are alternative routes in order to get your degree right so sometimes you can just do a certification or something along those lines in order to get your you know foot in the door and so you really want to do your research because in some cases a degree isn't necessary but overall when you look at the statistics this one goes into S tier next one on the list is going to be interdisciplinary studies and another one that's pretty similar to like general studies I mean what do I even need to say anything about this F tier if you are going to spend $80,000 on a college degree go $40,000 in debt on average you need to make sure that you learn specific skills that are employable next one on the list is going to be international business and this is one that kind of surprised me it did really well when it comes to the statistics I would say this one is pretty much like high B tier actually I'm going to put this one into A tier it's pretty good a very similar sounding one is international relations and this one doesn't score as well not even close right so this one actually goes into D tier it's why it's really important for you to do your research don't go into something just because it sounds good next on the list is going to be journalism and this is one where you do learn skills that are valuable there's a lot of journalists out there however it is pretty saturated a lot of people want this job it is an attractive job to get into the news business and so for that reason it's going to go into low C tier next one is a liberal arts major yes that is a major it's just it's not just a type of degree and it's basically a general studies degree of liberal arts so I think you probably know where I'm going to put this F tier next one is management information systems this is a great combination of technology skills and business skills I think this one is going to be even better in the future I'm very bullish on this degree I think it's a great degree and so this one is definitely going to go into S tier next on the list is going to be marketing this is a business degree traditionally probably one of the better degrees out there I do think that lately it has gotten a little bit saturated but with that being said marketing is going to squeak into a tier next on the list is mathematics degree and this is one where it's extremely difficult one of the hardest degrees out there however it doesn't have as much upside as an engineering degree for instance but it can still be a really solid option if you're someone who's really passionate about math you might want to supplement it with some other skills that are a little more easily you know integrated into the real world something that a hiring manager business owner would want you to have but overall mathematics is going to go into a tier neuroscience is next on the list this is one that has relatively decent stats again it's one of those science degrees that is probably pretty disappointing compared to where you think it would land this one actually goes into C tier next one is philosophy and this is one of those degrees I said it a few minutes ago basically it has relatively decent stats but I think it has a little bit more to do with correlation than causation but I could be wrong about that this one goes into C tier I think one of the reasons that it has such a good statistics for instance is a lot of philosophy majors and history majors end up becoming lawyers and of course if they get a master's you know or doctorate level degree in the case of lawyer they're going to get paid more next on the list is going to be a physics degree very closely related to mathematics I would say this is actually the hardest degree on the list and it still doesn't have the upside of an engineering degree you know you pretty much have to be a genius to do a physics degree but with that being said if you can do it more power to you this one is pretty decent it's going to go into a tier next on the list is going to be political science this is one where I do think it has some upside it's kind of a dark horse candidate kind of like finance where some of the you know top one percent or top five percent people who graduate with this degree might actually get in positions that are really good but I just don't think it has the same upside as a finance degree for instance so for that reason I'm going to go ahead and put political science into C tier I'd say strong C tier almost B tier next is going to be psychology and this is a degree that's just extremely saturated I believe this is the most popular degree like the most amount of people graduate with this degree out of all the different majors out there very very saturated extremely hard for you to get a job at a bachelor's level also very interesting I understand why so many people like it but with that being said when it comes to the statistics this one is going to go into D tier I would say pretty strong D tier and if you know what you're getting yourself into you know that you're going to get a doctorate you know I'd say I'd move it up to like maybe a C or a B tier but a lot of people do not know what they're getting themselves into and in my opinion it's one of the most overrated degrees next on the list is going to be recreation and leisure studies the statistics here are awful as you can imagine I mean unless you can work for some type of you know parks and rec type crew then you're probably not going to be able to get a job doing recreation and leisure studies so this one goes into F tier sales slash business marketing is a business degree a little bit less well known than marketing but still has pretty good statistics and so for that reason this one is going to just barely squeak into a tier next one on the list is going to be sociology this is a social science degree again very interesting stuff but when it comes to the statistics it's just not that great I'm gonna go ahead and put this one into D tier speaking of statistics statistics this is a really great degree actually out of statistics physics and mathematics I almost want to put this one into S tier because the the stats are pretty good for this I think I'm gonna just barely squeak this one into S tier I could change my mind tomorrow on this one because it is honestly pretty close but I think I'm gonna put statistics into S tier but like very low S tier it's just very practical and useful in the real world whereas mathematics and physics can sometimes be not as practical and more theoretical next on the list is going to be supply chain management this is a business degree of course and I'm gonna give this one strong a tier status almost S tier and then the last one is going to be theology slash religious studies and this is one I've talked about before you know most preachers out there don't have theology or religious studies degrees you know they just study it on their own and they go to church growing up and then they become preachers naturally right so you definitely don't need to get one of these degrees I think it's hilarious I did an entire video on this and I was doing research and all of those television preachers that make like 10 million dollars a year pretty much none of them have religious studies or theology degrees however almost all of them have their own schools which they charge you know good tuition money for teaching people religious study and theology so I mean I'm just gonna leave it at that I do think that if you get this degree if you were already going to be a preacher you know it's gonna set you back a little bit but you know not horrible you can definitely make good money as a preacher as you see with the the ones who make like 10 million dollars a year I just think that you could very easily do the same thing without this degree you truly do not need it and so for that reason it is going to go into F tier before you leave check out my other videos right here I made them just for you and go ahead hit that like button hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc that you have on the video and I'll see you in the next one