What helps humans appear will 'guide' to aliens?

Research from the University of Oxford (UK) has shown that metals are extremely important in promoting life on Earth, contributing to the birth of humanity. That will also be an important sign in the hunt for intelligent alien life.

The article, recently published in the journal PNAS, confirms that this special thing is iron . Iron is an essential nutrient that all life needs to grow and develop and, according to the authors, is one of the leading factors driving evolution.

Analysis of iron in exoplanets' mantles could help identify planets capable of forming intelligent life - (Image: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain)

"The initial amount of iron in the Earth's rocks was established by planetary accretionary conditions, in which the Earth's metallic core separated from its rocky mantle," said Associate Professor Jon Wade, Scientist on Earth. planetary materials from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford, explains.

According to Associate Professor Wade, with so little iron as Mercury, life would be difficult to reproduce. Too much like Mars makes it difficult to keep water on the surface and cannot stimulate the development of complex life.

Iron conditions on the early Earth, according to models the team created, were optimal for keeping water on the surface. Iron is also soluble in seawater, providing simple life forms with a head start.

However, by the Great Oxidation Event (2.4 billion years ago), the increased oxygen reacted with iron, forming iron oxide, which drastically reduced dissolved iron. According to Professor Hal Drakesmith from the University of Oxford's MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine and co-author, life began to struggle and had to find new ways to survive.

A powerful process of evolution began, such as the introduction of multicellular organisms, symbiotic living. to make more efficient use of scarce nutrients. This constant deprivation drives life forms to become extremely complex, which ultimately make up intelligent species like us humans.

According to Phys.org, the above analysis opens a new path to search for alien life, or luckily, an alien civilization.

Professor Drakesmith explains that the basic life-enhancing conditions that we used to search for in the past may not be enough to support life evolving to complex forms. Therefore, by assessing the amount of iron in the mantle of exoplanets, it is possible to narrow the search and identify those planets that have the hope of developing intelligent life.