Meet the survivors of Earth’s worst days

Technology alone is not going to fix our problems, and there's a very simple reason for this

because technology is not going to suffer the consequences of planetary extremes

Our planet has gone through a lot. It did not have oxygen for the first two billion years

It had different oceans. It had different atmosphere. In fact, it was an oceanic planet altogether that froze multiple times over the course of hundreds of millions of years

And every time, it was biology that suffered the consequences. But microbes found a way to survive

Not only they survived, these organisms evolved and tapped into these solutions and they kept these solutions

By studying these solutions and by traveling back in time and understanding how life learned and responded to the challenges at first place, we may be able to learn how to mitigate current and future problems that our society is facing

I am Betul Kaçar, an astrobiologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

I want to know your origins. Take any chunk of rock in this universe and you will be able to study the physics or the

chemistry or even geology of this chunk of rock. However, there is only one chunk of rock that harbors life and that's the chunk of rock

that we live on So this is the only place that biology exists My work looks into the origins and early evolution of microbes

I like to think that if you don't like microbes, this is not the planet for you, all right

Microbes run this planet. About three billion years ago, oxygen was created by a microbe

And then the planet shifts into a completely different state. That shift, then reshaped evolution and life as we know it

They are the true ancestors of life. For billions of years, they found a way to make use of whatever is available around them

They thrive in seemingly inhospitable places, and they will outlive us. That's for sure

Evolution keeps a record of biology solving problems. So when you study organisms that's been around for a long time, and I am referring to microbes

ultimately you are going to be discovering their survival strategies. In my lab, we bring back those innovations by being almost like a molecular detective, so to speak

By using synthetic biology, we've been able to create a cohort of synthetic systems in the lab

that allows us to recapitulate billions of years of evolution in the course of a week or a month

There's a lot of drama when we bring this ancient DNA back to now

and expect them to communicate with the rest of the cell. So we have to find the best condition for this communication to happen

And with enough patience and enough determination you can do it. We change the environment so it is a little bit like the past

We take oxygen away so it resembles where they were a little bit more We give them a little bit more carbon dioxide so it feels a little bit more familiar And then slowly adjust them to the conditions of our own planet now

by experimentally evolving them. And then push them a little further. Let's assume and predict a variety of different environments

and see how these molecules will respond to these different conditions. We find that our ancestral enzymes respond differently

than the modern organisms and the modern enzymes that are around us today

They are not simply doing what their offspring is doing. By understanding how microbes evolved and survived under these environmental changes

we can re-engineer and repurpose enzymes and metabolisms that exist around us today

My group looks into a particular element that is extremely important for life as we know it

and that is nitrogen and nitrogen fixation. The way that the environment is changing in front of our eyes

we will have to think of better ways in order to mitigate how we engineer crops, how we deliver nitrogen more effectively

And we found really remarkable responses when we tracked the survival pathway of these organisms

For three billion years, life has been taking nitrogen in the atmosphere

and turning it into a bioavailable form. We found that in the face of really extreme conditions, these microbes kept going and

going and going. Through our work we were able to understand the origin and evolutionary story of multiple

enzymes that humanity needs so bad for our own sustainability and not just ourselves but everything that our life depends on Now we are in the process of engineering plans with DNA

that belongs to a planet that once was, that was different than now

but may not be that different compared to what we are headed towards

When we bring these ancient solutions to currently existing systems, we find that we are able to re-engineer more resilient forms of living systems

I view life and what is around us as sort of a set of survivors, so to speak

that did not fail the test of time. Over 99% of all species that ever existed on this planet has gone extinct

So we are working with less than a percent of whatever made it thus far

and using that less than a percent to stitch the story of an entire history

I mean, this is harder than resurrecting an ancient language. The more we study today, the more our past benefits

and the more we understand our past, the more our future benefits. As we explore different planets and life on different planetary bodies

it will really come down to knowing ancient life and ancient signatures of life

And everything that we will compare and contrast to comes down to our understanding of what life is capable of here

We are in the process of building a museum of life, so to speak, so that we can visit and understand what are the tools

and what are the past stories that enabled life as we know