If Johnson’s musings are correct, the current focus of the hunt for aliens-searching for life as we know it-might not work for finding biology in the beyond. “Even places that seem familiar-like Mars, a place that we think we know intimately-can completely throw us for a loop,” she says. Inside its pages, she probed the idea that other planets were truly other, and so their inhabitants might be very different, at a fundamental and chemical level, from anything on this world. Her typed musings would later turn into the 2020 popular science book The Sirens of Mars. Johnson found the work exciting (the future alien genome project!), but it also made her wonder: What if extraterrestrial life didn’t have DNA or RNA or other nucleic acids? What if their cells got instructions in some other biochemical way?Īs an outlet for heretical thoughts like this, Johnson started writing in a style too lyrical and philosophical for scientific journals.
As an astronomy postdoc at Harvard University in the late 2000s and early 2010s she investigated how astronomers might use genetic sequencing-detecting and identifying DNA and RNA-to find evidence of aliens. Later, Johnson became a professional at looking. “It was on that trip that the idea of looking for life in the universe began to make sense to me,” Johnson says. The thought opened up the cosmic real estate, and the variety of life, she imagined might be beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Even if a landscape seemed strange and harsh from a human perspective, other kinds of life might find it quite comfortable. Her true epiphany, though, wasn’t about the hardiness of life on Earth or the hardships of being human: It was about aliens. “It felt like it stood for all of us, huddled under that rock, existing against the odds,” Johnson says.
To her surprise, a tiny fern lived underneath it, having sprouted from ash and cinder cones. Looking down, she turned over a rock with the toe of her boot. Johnson wandered away from the other young researchers she was with and toward a distant ridge of the 13,800-foot summit. Its dried lava surface was so different from the eroded, tree-draped mountains of her home state of Kentucky. Sarah Stewart Johnson was a college sophomore when she first stood atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano.
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