research

what does solpera research?

Every definition of life we have was written from inside one. It describes the chemistry we grew up with, on the one planet we have measured closely, through the one set of senses we happen to own. A definition built that way is not obviously the right instrument for anywhere else.

The definitions in use are lists of things Earth life happens to do. A chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution is the standard formulation, but nobody meeting something unfamiliar is going to wait for it to evolve before deciding whether it is alive. Solpera works the problem from the measurement end: not whether something is alive, but what matter does through time when energy hits it, and whether an instrument can watch it happen and characterise it in real time. We care about what livingness is in the most practical of contexts, so we can measure it, weigh it, watch it, and uncover it across our universe.

a snapshot is not enough

Remote sensing is clever and valuable, but one of its most obvious limitations is separability. Certain minerals absorb at the same wavelengths as the pigments cyanobacteria make, and a spectrum taken at one instant can leave nothing to separate them. Couple that with atmospheric attenuation and kilometre-wide pixels, and the picture becomes a mess. What separates them is history. A rock and a cyanobacterium both answer energetic light, but only the cyanobacterium builds its absorber in response, drawing on a far deeper stored history. That difference in depth is the whole measurement.

nothing is alive

Take a spider out of its environment and put it in a glass box. Examine it and every test says alive: the legs work, the cells divide, it behaves like nothing you would call dead. Leave it there and it dies. Nothing about the spider changed. The context did, and the difference took time to appear. “Alive” was never a property of the spider, only a label for one instant. The livingness was in the spider and its surroundings, moving together through time.

The same holds at every scale, including the one that matters here. A cell in the dark and a cell in sunlight are not the same system, because the light is not incidental to the cell. The interaction is where the living happens. So the unit under measurement is never the organism alone. It is the organism and what is arriving at it. The fall of a rock has livingness too, of the same kind as a cell in sunlight or an AI acting in the world. Each has a profile, not a rank: how many parts move together, how fast it runs for matter of its size, how much it can take and still carry on, and how much stored history it draws on.

the proxy

Cyanobacteria growing under hard ultraviolet build photoprotective pigments to manage the influx of energy, either reflecting it or absorbing it. Either way the response is regulated and managed: the bacterium does not move with the energy gradient into destruction and death. The pigment survives desiccation and dormancy, so material that has been dry for years still carries the record of having managed light.

Ultraviolet is a universal problem: surface life on any world without an ozone shield has to manage it, and Mars poses the problem more sharply than anywhere on this planet, because its thin atmosphere passes harder, shorter-wavelength light than ever reaches Earth's surface. That is what makes photoprotection worth reading as a proxy for livingness, in Earth's deserts first and one day on the ground of Mars.

the method

Provoke the surface, and measure what it does next. Deliver a controlled dose of the energy every sunlit surface has to manage, then read the same material before and after under locked acquisition parameters, so that the same physical sample becomes its own control. The question stops being what does this look like and becomes what changed, and in which direction. We predict that a cyanobacterial mat answers with regulation: induction after a lag, saturation, and slow change once the stress is removed, never a return to where it started. A killed copy of the same mat and bare mineral answer too, with less stored history to draw on. How each one carries on is what we read, as a profile, never as a verdict of alive or dead.

the window

The pigment absorbs in the near ultraviolet, below where operational Earth imaging begins. The first bands of Landsat and Sentinel-2 start around 430 nanometres, and the ultraviolet instruments that do fly are kilometre-scale atmospheric sounders, blind to the ground at the scale of a crust. Of 52 published studies of ultraviolet reflectance in crop remote sensing between 1969 and 2020, none performed aerial remote sensing. Very little on the ground reads here either, so we built the instrument ourselves.

review: heath, st-onge & hausler (2024), plos one 19(3): e0285912

beyond the cell

Ultraviolet on a mat is one way to probe livingness, not the only one, because livingness need not be restricted to a cell. Here the matter is simulated and every rule in the system is predefined and restricted. Small bent units grip only at their tips, and joined tip to tip they curve round into rings. Fuelled rings spend energy to hold their joints; passive rings hold them for free. Every ring is then broken, new units are brought into the environment, and each world runs on unattended. We perturb matter and watch it through time to observe the phenomenon which could be “livingness”.

Two square worlds, one above the other: fuelled on top, passive below. Each picture is a frame saved by the simulation, with nothing drawn in between. The loop begins just after every ring in both worlds was broken and new units were brought in. Ordinary units in a closed ring are drawn light, those outside closed rings grey, and the new units gold. Through the loop the units drift, join and come apart, and rings close and open. Each world wraps around at its edges, so units near one edge also show, dimmed, beyond the opposite edge. A thin line along the bottom shows how far through the run each frame is. At the end the units fade out and the loop starts again from the first frame.

the next field programme

Antarctica · 2026–27 season

The Antarctic programme takes these questions into an environment where cold, dryness and isolation shape both microbial mats and the instruments used to study them. The Spectrophage goes to the McMurdo Dry Valleys this season with an Antarctica New Zealand science event.

Solpera is developing field instrumentation and onboard computing to support microbial monitoring in climate-change research. The aim is to bring measurement and interpretation closer to the organisms and surfaces under observation.

Preparation centres on Spectrophage field readiness, Atlas integration with Spot, repeatable measurements and field testing. The programme is a step towards sustained observation of life in extreme environments.

The field systems in development →

The milestones that support this work →

where it goes

The ladder runs from culture plates to constructed soils to intact desert crusts to remote observation, each rung testing whether the signal survives the climb. The far end is the search for life on the ground of other worlds, conducted autonomously by robots and artificial intelligence that will traverse the stars. That exploration reaching the Moon, and then Mars, is an inevitability. The steps being taken now are the iterative building blocks that will host our species as a multiplanetary organism, part of a larger system, and with that responsibility must come a greater understanding of what life is, and of why there is no such thing as a living thing. We will measure and search for life on Mars because we must, for the sake of our humanity, understand livingness at every scale.