Profile

I research alien planets from the comfort of my computer. The way this works is we simulate other planets to find out what they would look like through a telescope. We spend a lot of time thinking about the atmospheres of planets, because this is a part of the planet that life affects in a way that could be detectable. For example, think about the oxygen we all breathe in, the carbon dioxide we breathe out, and the methane that we… well, that lots of organisms produce. Those gases are all detectable in Earth’s atmosphere! This means that if similar life forms are present on another planet, we should be able to detect them with a telescope. Being a part of the team that builds and operates that telescope is essentially my life’s goal.

What I worry about is the possibility that there are planets that would “trick” such a search. For example, for about a third of the history of life on Earth there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. This means that if we all jumped in a time machine and went back to that point in history, we’d all suffocate! It also means that we wouldn’t be able to recognize that planet as having life if all we looked for was oxygen and methane. I’ve come up with some other  ideas for (SMELLY!) gases that life would produce on such a planet. The gases you smell in nasty old shoes, for example, are made by bacteria. Those gases could be detectable on one of these oxygen-poor planets. So now I’m trying to convince the people that would design the telescope that we need to not only look for oxygen, but also for the smelly stuff!

I also think it’s my job to talk about all this stuff with non-scientists (that’s YOU). So I put together a blog, which you should feel free to check out. http://paleblueblog.org. I don’t post there as often as I’d like to, but try to whenever I have the time.

I spend a LOT of time writing. I have to write proposals to get funding for my work. If the proposal gets funded, I start working on it in earnest. Once I get some preliminary results, I have to write short descriptions of the work that will advertise presentations of the research at conferences. And once I think I’ve got it all figured out, I have to write it all up in a manuscript! Then… I have to re-write it, because my co-authors will point out some silly mitsake I’ve made somewhere. And then I have to re-write it again because the peer reviewers at the journal will want us to improve our methods or our discussion. And then, finally, when the paper is accepted, I do my best to write a brief description of the work on a blog I’m managing.

So yeah, I write. A LOT.

But I also spend a lot of time in front of computer code. That’s where we try to find new types of planets we haven’t thought about before, and what the implications those planets would have for a future life search. Much of this time is spent debugging. We’ll have this great idea, put it into the computer code, run the model, annnnddd… CRASH. Nothing. The model won’t even run. So then I dig back into the code, and try to find out what went wrong. Eventually, we’ll get it sorted out, and then we start to write. On that note…

Finally, I spend a good part of my day on email, trying to figure out what our next research proposal will look like, talking about the results of experiments with colleagues, planning meetings and conventions, and doing a lot of the “day-to-day” things of progress reports and the like.

It’s a lot of writing, but the reason for that is in a digital era, a tremendous amount of our conversations – scientific and otherwise – take place in written form. Some of that is starting to shift, as videoconference technology improves and some of those conversations take place in that format. (To someone who doesn’t like to write ALL the time, this is a good thing.)