the-BA : Perspectives Award Winner 2005

by Wendy Barnaby

This year’s perspectives winner was Nicola McLoughlin, a PhD student from the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford University.

Her poster highlighted the central role geologists will play in ethical and theological questions that will follow if we find life on other planets.

‘Are we a superior life form to what’s out there? Was life on Earth seeded from elsewhere? How special is our planet? How unique are we? These are some of the questions finding life on Mars would raise,’ said Nicola.

‘And that reflects on the way we’re polluting our planet and the way we treat it. Should we really be going and mucking up another planet when we’ve done such a bad job on our own?’ she asked.

‘I think more money should be going into looking at Earth’s earliest rocks than into the space race,’ she said.

Perspectives is a poster competition in which young researchers explore the social and ethical implications of their science.

When geologists are able to bring rocks back from Mars – perhaps in ten years or so – they will have to look very carefully for signs of life in them. They will use the methods they employ in similar quests on Earth.

For Nicola, that means working on the other side of Earth. ‘My research looks at three and a half billion year-old rocks from Western Australia, and is developing criteria to tell the difference between the earliest fossilized life-forms and fake fossils,’ she says.

‘We should be communicating the uncertainties and how difficult this process is of proving life or not-life,’ she adds.

Nicola’s group has been skeptical of previous claims to have discovered fossilized life-forms, but now thinks it may have discovered traces of life in fossils from Western Australia. The work will be presented at the Royal Society next month. ‘We have to be so cautious – we assume that the burden of evidence is proving life,’ she said.

Nicola’s research is supported by NERC and the Geological Survey of Western Australia.

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