Humans have been fascinated with the possibility of life on other planets since the dawn of time. Dr. Dawn Cardace, assistant professor of geosciences at the University of Rhode Island is no exception.
 
Despite her love for geosciences not beginning until after she began college, Dr. Cardace has still been able to make up for lost time, earning her Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Sciences in 2006 at Washington University in St. Louis and  most recently beginning her work for URI in 2010. Being an expert in both earthly sciences and planetary sciences as well, Cardace said she thinks it is perfectly feasible to have subsurface microbial life on other planets, specifically, Mars.
 
“We may be sort of philosophically attuned to a notion that we are the only living planet,” she said. “Certainly I don’t propose that there are beings like us, but if you start thinking of life as more than mammals, as all the incredible diversity and microbiological life that we are learning always more about on Earth, suddenly this starts sounding a lot more reasonable.”
 
Although Dr. Cardace is a firm believer that life on other planets does exist, finding those life forms is where the real challenge lies. Cardace has suggested that since we don’t know exactly where all these cells have been created, it is possible that some of these places could be deep underwater and even in the small pores of rocks.
 
“Some would argue what we are learning right now from the deep ocean environments, these sheltered niches in the deep ocean where you have vents bringing deep chemically unusual fluids into mix with the ocean, we get this really interesting geochemistry there,” Cardace said. “Sometimes inside what you and I would call a chimney structure made of minerals that would participate at the seabed, the cavities, the pore spaces in those chimneys, can be coated with organic compounds.”
 
Those still skeptical of whether life on other planets is truly possible may be surprised to hear that it could be easier to find beings on a place like Mars than it would be Earth due to Mars’ barren landscape and Earth’s diverse and complicated anatomy.
 
“I sometimes joke that we have a better resolved picture of the surface geology of Mars than Earth because of all this vegetation on planet Earth,” Cardace said. “We’ve got incredible definition of the Martian surface and Earth; we’ve got all these banks of green vegetation shielding my view from the geology and the fault interactions and such.”
 
In her career, Cardace has gone as far as examining different rock formations and pieces of Earth’s mantle to studying underwater life miles below sea level, but it wasn’t until she was able to work with NASA that she began even considering studying space. With all that she knows about the universe’s solar system now, it seems strange to imagine that Dr. Cardace almost never even entered the field of planetary sciences in the first place.
 
“I was an earth person and it’s interesting to me how that fellowship at NASA broadened my purview,” Cardace said. “I would go to seminars that dealt with people examining organic compounds in space, like interstellar dust particles, and it completely turned my scientific world view a little bit inside out.”
 
With so many years of experience under her belt and plenty more to come, Dr. Cardace’s work could have big implications someday not only on this planet, but the universe as a whole.
 
“I think the origin of life on Earth and maybe the origin of life in our solar system is still an open question actually,” she said. “That resonates with me a lot and I think it’s a lot of what drew me into geosciences in the first place.”