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The beauty of the montage index is that it does not require that aliens be made of organic carbon-based materials like organisms on Earth.
The assembly index is also indifferent to whether alien life is just beginning to emerge or has advanced to a technological stage beyond our understanding. All these states produce complex molecules that could not occur without a living system.
Currently, Walker and Cronin’s team is applying the idea of Montage 15 to future NASA missions.
In the mid-2030s, NASA’s Dragonfly spacecraft will move from place to place by flying through the thick nitrogen and methane atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan. Titan is the only place other than Earth that has stable liquid masses. On the surface of this moon, there are liquid hydrocarbon lakes and it is thought that it also hosts liquid water under its surface.
NASA’s robotic lander digs into Titan’s icy surface at each landing site and extracts a sample of less than one gram from it. This sample is blasted with a laser tool to separate the larger molecules and the chemical composition of the rock can be analyzed.
According to Walker, their theory is a good example of the advantage of a more general approach to life; Because Titan is very different from Earth. He says that nothing like terrestrial life is expected to evolve or live on this moon; Consequently, if we want to find out if there is life on Titan, we need an unbiased technique.
“My group is now working on determining how to identify the high assembly molecules,” Walker adds. “We are working with NASA to ensure that their mass spectrometry instrument has sufficient resolution to detect highly assembled molecules.”
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