August 20th 2025

Summary of Key Points from The Curious World of Bacteria (Ludger Wess, 2022):

Thiomargarita namibiensis

Currently the largest known bacterium and one of the few visible to the naked eye.
The seabed where they live is particularly rich in sulfides, which they oxidize by breaking down nitrates in a process accomplished without the help of oxygen.
They live in a seabed often buried by thick mud and have to wait until methane eruptions or storms stir up the mud and bring them into nitrate-rich waters. They quickly take in large quantities of nitrate and store it in vacuoles that account for 98% of their volume.
Once buried again, they can live for a number of years using these nitrate stocks.

Lysinibacillus sphaericus

It can remain dormant for a long time. Record holder for the longest sleep. Survived in amber inside the gut of a bee that was trapped in tree resin for more or less 40 million years.
Has commercial applications in the textile industry, neutralizing residues of azo dyes from wastewater.

Colwellia psychrerythraea

Metabolic activity has been detected at -196ºC / -320ºF
Covers itself with a sort of molecular netting, like a wool sweater.
Can survive in anaerobic environments and use a vast number of simple and complex carbon compounds for nutrition.
Since it can break down numerous nitrogen compounds and can even use sulfur as a source of energy, the bacterium is well suited for cleaning up environmental pollution in cold climates.

Janibacter hoylei

Found in the stratosphere at an altitude of 41.100 meters / 25.5 miles.
Particularly resistant to the intense ultraviolet radiation of very high altitudes.
Ruppell’s Vulture is thought to hold the record for the highest flying animal (11.200 meters / 7 miles). Higher still, it is slightly warmer but the atmosphere becomes so thin that birds can no longer breathe.
J. hoylei is just at home on the ground.
It is nonmotile.

Constrictibater antarcticus

Biologists call organisms living in rocks endoliths.
There are bacteria found in rocks on or beneath the seafloor and in plutonic rocks deep inside mines or drill cores. As there is no light in their habitat and usually no organic remains from other living organisms, they live a fairly spartan life and are typically chemolithoautotrophs, meaning they produce all the essential molecules and cell components from rocks.
The extreme lack of energy and nutrients in their environment means that they multiply very slowly. Microbiologists estimate that the cells can divide only once every few hundred years.
Despite the low population density (of bacteria) and because the oceanic crust accounts for 60% of the Earth’s surface, these plutonic rocks beneath the sea are probably the largest ecosystem on the planet, and one that functions completely independently of sunlight.
Biologists are interested in endoliths because these organisms may be able to exist under conditions such as those found on Mars or some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Such frugal bacteria could probably survive a trip through space in rocks sent spinning off into the darkness by some cosmic catastrophe and then colonize new worlds.

Cupriavidus metallidurans

The heavy metal-tolerant, copper-loving bacterium was discovered in 1974 in the wastewater of a zinc smelting plant in the town of Engis in Belgium.
The Belgian researchers who discovered it were seeking bacteria that could withstand high metal concentrations, in the hope of identifying microbes that could help restore soils contaminated with heavy metal ions. Even in the Middle Ages, zinc was smelted to produce brass in the vicinity of Engis, and unsurprisingly, the ground is heavily contaminated.

Desulforudis audaxviator

If there used to be water on Mars, now that surface is uninhabitable due to ultraviolet radiation and water can only be found in the soil – perhaps life retreated underground?
In 2006, astrobiologists found what they were looking for in South Africa’s Mponeng gold mine. They discovered bacteria in hot water that gushes out of cracks in the rocks almost 3000 meters / 1.8 miles below the surface.
It is now clear that the species had been cut off from life on the Earth’s surface for some 25 million years (the first apes were colonizing Africa).
The bacterium spread through geologic processes in deep rock and can be found in all parts of the world. How it was forced from the Earth’s surface to the depths is unclear.
Today they are perfectly adapted to live deep down: they grow in low oxygen, in complete darkness, and at temperatures of around 60ºC / 140ºF, and they tolerate a fairly alkaline environment with a pH of 9.3.
It can multiply at these depths only every one hundred to one thousand years.
Gets its energy from decaying radioactive elements. It is the first life form that lives on the basis of nuclear energy, which is why astrobiologists are interested in it. They believe that similar organisms could live not only on Mars, but on Jupiter’s moons (Io, Europa and Ganymede) and on Saturn’s moons (Enceladus and Titan).

July 21st 2025

João’s email to the team, sharing some thoughts on how Julie Nováková’s article “A Stroll into Unfamiliar Worlds” relates to the interests of the artists that will be working with us and with ideas that might be worth exploring in the Bio Art projects.

Link to Julie’s article: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/novakova_12_22/

I still believe, as I suggest in my annotations, that the most intriguing line of enquiry into our research topic would involve some sort of combination between what Betsey Dyer says about bacterium “field marks” (how we can use our senses to identify different kinds of bacteria in our daily lives, outside of the lab) and Nathalie Cabrol’s exploration of the environmental specificities of many places where life might be found in space. 

At any rate, here’s what I wrote, using Julie’s very cool article as a prompt:   

“However, even though [Geen] tries to portray experiences very alien to us, the narrative remains unmistakably human. This is, of course, understandable from the author-publisher-reader perspective (where everyone included wants a book to be accessible and enjoyable) as well as from the philosophical perspective of trying to convey the unconveyable.” —- RE: but what if we try to go beyond what is “enjoyable” and dabble in the “unconveyable” (as, say, experimental art tries to do)? Avant-garde poetry, say, is very much interested in what remains unsaid, in silence, in the incommunicable, glimpses, ellipses and errors. 

“they can send their minds to animals and perceive the world through their senses. However, it’s not without risk; being in another creature’s body means you at least partly take on its thinking style, the more so the longer you remain. Stay too long, and you may become too accustomed to being a rabbit or an owl, so much that you eventually forget that you’re human and are unable to return.” — RE: this is fascinating and it would no doubt be interesting to see how Bio Art could make something like this possible in the real world. However, my sense is still that there is a lot that can still be done to bridge the gap between humans and bacteria that does not involve this sort of “umweltian” acrobatics. Betsey Dyer gives us a number of examples of “fieldmarks” (based on smell and touch) one can rely on to identify different species of bacteria outside of the lab, in mundane environments all around us, which can be easily accessed (like our backyards, our fridge, etc). I suspect that there is a lot that can be done in this area to educate and garner the public’s interest in the world of microorganisms, which is very much alien to us still.

“Now we can conceive of ways to stimulate the brain, which neuroscience studies increasingly show to remain highly plastic (capable of making new kinds of connections) in adulthood, to convey the previously unconveyable. One day, we might narrow this gap between us and animals, too” — RE: I wonder how this relates to Hege’s “Ephemeral” project and Hege & Cosima’s interest in neuropeptides and implanted emotions. Stimulating the brain so that we can experience the life of a bacterium might be an interesting line of inquiry.

July 14th 2025

Raquel Correia on The Twilight Zone:

Two astronauts land on an alien planet. One of them discovers a tiny civilization of microscopic people who worship him as a god. Obsessed with power, he decides to stay on this planet. However, he soon realizes everything is a matter of perspective. This is the synopsis of the episode “The Little People” (Season 3, Episode 28) from the Twilight Zone (1959-1964).

Although not directly about bacteria, this episode presents a useful metaphor for how humans can perceive themselves as dominant and superior over microbial life. Humans are “giants” when compared to bacteria and the human body can be seen as a massive planet or even a galaxy. Through this perspective, humans and microbial life are co-constitutive. This tiny civilization is named by the astronaut as microbes. From this lens, mankind, like this astronaut, often sees microbes as a life form to be controlled (via antibiotics or sterilization). But, on the other hand, microbes might perceive humans as ecosystems to be colonized. After all, they predate humans by billions of years and will likely outlive us.

That is exactly what happens in the episode in question: another life form, a group of giant people, finds the astronaut and kills him by accident, demonstrating how tiny, insignificant, and fragile he was, just as the microscopic civilization was to him. This perspective mirrors how mankind views microbes. They are tiny, numerous, and seemingly irrelevant unless they impact humans. The giant people flip the power dynamic entirely and are the episode’s most disturbing turn: the astronaut, who thought himself a god, is revealed to be bacteria-sized in a larger scale of existence. It is a haunting reminder that, in the vast hierarchy of existence, humans can be microbes, invisible and insignificant.

May 23rd 2025

João and Ana Salvan have an informal chat via Whatsapp about this project’s stance vis-à-vis the idea of “alien intelligence”.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence institute (SETI) came up in conversation:

João: I gave the project a bit of an anti-SETI slant (like, to hell with intelligent aliens, we only care about the boring ones). But we are obviously interested in the work SETI is doing.

João and Ana (in unison): But what is “intelligence” anyway?

Ana: Who is to say that, on other faraway worlds, microbes aren’t scheming an Earth invasion?!

João: That is indeed a very interesting twist —- one of the books one of our consultants, Bruce Clarke, has been saying we should read is called Brain Plague (by Joan Slonczewski), which is precisely about “intelligent” bacteria that turn humans into zombies. And until now I had not really seen how it would fit into what we are doing. Now I think I do.

Ana: Plus, they do a lot of astrobiological work at the SETI Institute as well. It’s not just technosignatures.

Ana (about Brain Plague): Like a subversion of War of the Worlds (which I love)!

João: I hadn’t thought of that either!

May 18th 2025

Inês Pastor on “Titan of Chaos”, Dune and Mass Effect.

As I read G. David Nordley’s “Titan of Chaos” from the Life Beyond Us collection, some thoughts about (re)presentation occurred to me. The giant worms in Nordley’s story made me think of Frank Herbert’s giant worms in Dune (1965) – the irony of ice water worms opposed to desert worms was not lost on me, either – and how their (re)presentation was so very unlike those. There is a clear intention to discuss the biology of the worms of Titan in Nordley’s work, while it is hardly brought up, if at all, in Herbert’s novel(s). Of course, Dune and its sequels fall outside the corpus of “recent” SF literature intended for our project, but when considering our aims alongside this connection, I was struck by some possible questions that might help in later developments: if we think about older works of science fiction and the alien life forms that appear in them, could we conceive of a way in which they could be (re)presented in a more “plausible” form? What would that entail?
While pondering this, I was also reminded of the roleplaying videogame trilogy Mass Effect (2007-2010). While the humanoid sentient aliens are hardly like the microorganisms this project is more focused on, I always found it interesting that the writing team included the detail that the biology of two of the species encountered is based on dextro-amino acids (as opposed to levo-amino acids), preventing them from consuming the same food as the other sentient species (including Terran humans). While a cursory search about the accuracy of the science reveals it is at best questionable, what I want to stress is how it contributes to how these alien species are (re)presented. Does it make these species seem “more” plausible? How so, and would aspects of this be applicable to our research?

I thought these questions might be interesting to consider as we move forward with the project, especially when it comes to the commission of Bio Art, so that we can ensure that it properly (re)presents the answers to our research questions.

April 1st 2025

João on some interesting ideas he came across apropos of “living rocks” or the role that minerals may have played in the emergence of life on Earth:

In her text for the Life Beyond Us collection, Nina Kopacz explores the emergence of life from non-life, emphasizing how the biosphere arose from the geosphere through increasingly complex organic chemistry. Drawing on Cairns-Smith’s hypothesis, she highlights how clay minerals exhibit self-replicating properties, catalyzing the formation of amino acids and peptides while also serving as structural scaffolds for early life. Mineral diversity may be useful in the study of exoplanets. Kopacz further considers the role of liquid media in sustaining life, as molecular diffusion in gases is too rapid and in solids too slow, raising the question of whether the speed of evolutionary change is a necessary criterion for life.

Also writing about the potential importance of clay minerals, Nathalie Cabrol notes in The Secret Life of the Universe that they were readily available on early Earth, forming through the weathering of volcanic glass. Their crystal lattice structure may have helped concentrate and organize organic compounds, much like genes do. Additionally, clay minerals not only polymerize organic molecules but also protect them from harmful UV radiation, further supporting their role in the emergence of life.

February 21st 2025

A summary of the team’s discussion of two short stories: Geoffrey Landis’s “Cloudskimmer” and Tessa Fisher’s “Spider Plant” (livestream available on the ILCML’s Facebook page):

João: Scientists at the beginning of “Cloudskimmer” are looking for “acidophilic microbes [that] could have moved up to the high atmosphere” of Venus, where there is abundant sunlight and temperatures are reasonable for liquid water. Because they are looking for microbes, the characters end up missing a series of balloon-shaped organisms with strange biochemistry: no DNA, no proteins, sulfuric acid used as a solvent instead of water. Perhaps the premise of this project, i.e. that we should focus on life forms that we may realistically find in space, is also limiting since it draws attention away from stranger organisms that may be out there? But what if we only end up finding microorganisms in space? That would still be really cool! We know very little about the countless species of bacteria that exist even here on Earth. Microorganisms may seem boring (they are not intelligent and they are not even animals) but that is because we don’t invest much time in getting to know them.

Megan: We are normally more interested in mesoscale rather than microscale organisms. We resonate more with those creatures but we are probably not going to find a lot of them since we are anomalously large even in our biosphere.

Ana Salvan: One of the first scientists to talk about potential life on Venus was Carl Sagan. In his piece on the topic he did focus on the microscopic scale: balloon-shaped organisms flying about in the clouds. An educated guess. More recently scientists have been talking about biosignatures for microbes at that altitude. Scientists look for “life as we know it” but they generally keep an open mind and don’t rule out “life as we don’t know it”.

Lizzie: Intelligent vs. non-intelligent or complex vs. non-complex life: that’s a very human sort of framework to apply. When we talk about “intelligence”, we have in mind a human conception of intelligence. We have to interrogate what we really mean by that. Stories in this collection do a good of job exposing the assumptions that might set the terms for the encounter between humans and extraterrestrial beings before it even begins. You have a list of things that you’re looking for but the organisms that the characters in these stories find bring a completely different dimension to that, and there’s a readjustment that takes place. Literature (and maybe bio art) are good at creating a space for that readjustment to take place.

Marinela: There is a colonialist undertone in the short story. It reminds me of 15th century discovery narratives (the science fiction of that time), like Columbus’s journal, in which those things that are strange are described using negative terms (they don’t have this, they don’t have that — compared to “us”).

João: We should also highlight the role played by technology in this story. The scientists use drones to filter the images that are being gathered. The drones use a “despeckle algorithm” that erases the images of alien organisms, which are considered to be visual clutter. So the story seems to be saying that first-hand experience – an empirical human presence – is important in this context. The drones appear to be making it even harder for humans to spot alien life.

Marinela: That is an old debate in science fiction, right? That we are superior to machines because we have intuition, imagination, we care, we feel. Humans are always the gold standard in relation to which other things are measured. So the story is in that regard a bit anthropocentric. When you are facing the unknown, you maybe have to tell yourself that you are superior (which is of course not true).

João: And in that sense it’s interesting that the story opens with this image of the Everest as this natural wonder that humans try to master. So hubris is indeed a theme in this story.

João: In “Spider Plant”, scientists are looking for intelligent life in a faraway planet. Life has been found in other planets but, when scientists pick up radio signals coming from this particular planet, they expect to find some sort of civilization. They later realize that the signals are being produced by this network of crystals that a species of bacteria have created throughout the planet. It is interesting that this symbiotic structure is at once animate and inanimate, bacterium and rock at the same time. The title of the story refers to the shape of the mineral network that is at the center of the piece.

Marinela: Here the microbes are the ones who are colonizing the planet and are portrayed as technologically superior. The scientists want to find someone to talk to and instead they find these creatures which are utterly incomprehensible to them. We tend to associate microbes with disease. We are mostly very scared of them. If we want to love them then we first need to understand how intelligent they are.

João: The scientists are looking for a civilization and instead what they find is something that is uninteresting, at least on first blush. But they are nonetheless colonizing the planet. And the theme of colonization is there from the beginning: the protagonist says that maybe this time we will be able to learn what these strangers call themselves before we destroy them (sounds very condescending).

Lizzie: Maybe the story can help us reappraise organisms we are already entangled with. We can see them as analogues to these imagined aliens. The creatures in the story sit in a gray area between animate and inanimate and do not operate as individuals. The description of the network got me thinking of slime molds, which have been known to plot networks in a non-linear but also extremely efficient way. I am interested in the way this project can create a feedback loop between the way we imagine extraterrestrial life and how we interact to organisms on Earth. Slime molds are a conglomerate organism. Difficult to apply an idea of centralized intelligence to them. They operate in a non-linear but connective way. Experiments have been done using slime molds to plot networks. Some scientists put them on top of a map of the Tokyo area and they managed to plot a route that was similar to the subway network.

João: The story also makes a big deal out of communication. The scientists hope to find a life form they can talk to. The standard seems to be human-like speech. The creatures in the story are clearly using some form of language but it has little to do with human discourse.

Megan: The way we think about how we might communicate with aliens is colored by research done on how we might communicate with animals. For example, we teach chimpanzees sign language because we assume that communication has to be carried out in a way that is comprehensible to us. But why would chimpanzees want to communicate in English? In prioritizing this kind of language, we have been neglecting other forms of communication. I think that is a common theme to what we are all interested in.

Marinela: The humans in the story intercepted a message that was not for them. The bacteria were sending a message to their HQ. The story portrays them as intelligent, patient and resilient. This is their world. They will outlive human life. Humans are not at the center of the universe.

February 11th 2025

Ana P. H. Salvan on thoughts she had during our first plenary meeting the previous week:

Themes that emerged

On Earth, microscopic organisms are ubiquitous. They are essential components to all ecosystems on the planet, including our bodies. As proposed by philosopher Donna Haraway in When Species Meet (2008, p. 4) “To be one is always to become with many.” Human bodies are a symphony composed of many different rhythms crucial to maintaining life.

Microbes are not always invisible. At the laboratory, scientists must learn their rhythms, must attend to their needs to be able to conduct experiments and obtain results. Culture media and Petri dishes are “contact zones” that bring together human and non-human trajectories and agency. They allow the invisible to grow into a visible entity by causing the individual to multiply and grow into a colony. The individual becomes visible as a collective. As a collective, these single-celled existences take on different shapes and sizes (and colors), which can be readily recognized by trained eyes. Fungi are different from bacteria. Fungi that contaminate Petri dishes and culture media tend to display a cotton-like appearance, while bacterial colonies will have more of a milky texture. Some display yellowish hues, others range from red to pink to amber to white. It is through their growth and collective form that they tell their tales of survival during experiments. They communicate in a language only astrobiologists can decipher, whispering about the possibilities for life on other worlds, through other configurations.

Microbes are sometimes allies, sometimes enemies, sometimes both at the same time. War of the Worlds is considered one of the first science fiction novels ever written. Published at the end of the 19th century, its plot revolves around a coordinated attack by our planetary neighbors, the Martians, and their inescapable defeat by “the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put on this Earth”: the microbes that populate the oceans, inhabit the soil, float in the air, as well as those that thrive inside human bodies. In the story, microbes play a double role: they are at the same time enemies and allies. Throughout time, they have generated a type of natural selection for resistant organisms on Earth, something the Martians are unaware of. “By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are.” When in sudden contact with these invisible yet ubiquitous earthlings, the Martians do not have any hope of survival. More than a century later, in the scientific reality of laboratories, tiny earthlings of various domains and genera ─ bacteria, cyanobacteria, archaea, fungi ─ are themselves studied as analogs to extinct or extant extraterrestrial life, including on Mars. Life most commonly envisioned on other planets is of the microscopic variety, akin to what astrobiologists call “extremophiles” – earthly organisms that thrive in extreme environments. In research facilities, there are constant negotiations between the micro and the macro scale, the local and the alien, the visible and the invisible, the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial. One domain illuminates the other. Earth microbes teach scientists about the metabolic capabilities, resilience, and activities of potential Martian, Venusians, etc.

The extreme and the extraterrestrial blend into one another. What makes extreme environments (and their inhabitants!) so alluring to astrobiologists is that on other planetary bodies in our Solar System and beyond extreme conditions abound. Crushing atmospheric pressures or no atmosphere at all, scorching or freezing temperatures, acidic or alkaline media, little to no availability of water, salty and oxidizing cocktails, etc. Such conditions differ radically from the biogeochemistry comfort we humans need to survive. Even on Earth, however, there are extremes to be found: acidic rivers and geysers, deserts, saline lakes, underwater volcanoes, anoxic wetlands, etc. Known as “analog environments”, and these places are invariably inhabited by microorganisms. Thus, the extreme informs our current ideas of the extraterrestrial; not monsters with a compromised immune system, but teeny tiny organisms with robust metabolisms. Such microorganisms possibly live and thrive according to different parameters, in sync with other rhythms, no doubt part of unique, alien symphonies.

February 5th 2025

Julie Nováková on novels and novellas about astrobiology that might be worth looking at:

To Be Taught if Fortunate (Becky Chambers, 2019)
This novella is a wonderful vision of future astrobiology exploration and humankind trying to adapt to other environments rather than attempting to co-opt and disrupt them. It features several inhabited planets (inhabited by complex, but not technological and probably not primate-like-intelligent life) within a single explored stellar system and makes use of ideas present in current astrobiology research. Recommended.

Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir, 2021)
Weir’s novel contains two very exotic life forms: the energy-packing microbial Taumoeba, and of course Rocky, the spidery-body-plan intelligent alien. Frankly, it’s hard to judge the life forms’ plausibility, because they are both so far off from anything usually considered in scientific literature, but they are nonetheless well thought-through, unusual and deeply interesting.

Blindsight (Peter Watts, 2006)
Blindsight depicts a first contact scenario with a civilization evidently capable of creating technology, but nigh-impossible for humans to understand. Are the individuals (“scramblers”, depicted with a brittle star-like body plan) intelligent? Sapient? Sentient? What are their intentions, if any? Saying no more to avoid spoilers; just that it’s a brilliant book. The novel also inspired a lot of fan art, including some bio art, though character depictions prevail.