Florida Tech astrobiologist Manasvi Lingam has asked life's biggest questions from a young age. Though he can't recall his exact queries, he says his interests were perfectly consistent with those of other children: dinosaurs and aliens.
On bus rides with his family, he would pepper his parents with questions about the mysteries of the universe. On long walks with his grandfather, he would brainstorm how life could exist on different types of planets.
Lingam's fascination with early life and astrobiology never waned. Now an assistant professor of astrobiology, he has gone from asking his grandfather questions to creating his own models to explore complex topics such as the origin of life. He exchanged the pursuit of definitive answers for scholarly inferences, embracing the universe's uncertainties by exploring chance.
According to Lingam, models—or simplified representations of reality—accomplish two main tasks: they help researchers make predictions and they offer an alternative to experiments that may be too costly or impractical. That was the case with Lingam's recently published analysis regarding the potential origin of life on Earth.
"A Bayesian Analysis of the Probability of the Origin of Life per Site Conducive to Abiogenesis," published Aug. 19 in the journal Astrobiology by Lingam, recent Florida Tech graduate Ruth Nichols and University of Rome astrobiologist Amedeo Balbi, models the relationship between hypotheses predicting varying numbers of potential sites for abiogenesis—the emergence of life from non-life—on Earth and the likelihood of life's emergence at those sites.
To read more, click here.