title: Extreme alien light allows survival of terrestrial bacteria.
abstract: Photosynthetic organisms provide a crucial coupling between the Sun's energy and metabolic processes supporting life on Earth. Searches for extraterrestrial life focus on seeking planets with similar incident light intensities and environments. However the impact of abnormal photon arrival times has not been considered. Here we present the counterintuitive result that broad classes of extreme alien light could support terrestrial bacterial life whereas sources more similar to our Sun might not. Our detailed microscopic model uses state-of-the-art empirical inputs including Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) images. It predicts a highly nonlinear survivability for the basic lifeform Rsp. Photometricum whereby toxic photon feeds get converted into a benign metabolic energy supply by an interplay between the membrane's spatial structure and temporal excitation processes. More generally, our work suggests a new handle for manipulating terrestrial photosynthesis using currently-available extreme value statistics photon sources.
authors.affiliation: Physics Department, University of Miami, Florida, FL 33126, USA. njohnson@physics.miami.edu
authors.forename: Neil
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Johnson
authors.forename: Guannan
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.forename: Felipe
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Caycedo
authors.forename: Pedro
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Manrique
authors.forename: Hong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Qi
authors.forename: Ferney
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Rodriguez
authors.forename: Luis
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Quiroga
mesh_terms: D001419:Bacteria / Q000378:metabolism* / Q000528:radiation effects*; D005118:Extraterrestrial Environment; D008027:Light; D008954:Models, Biological; D017785:Photons; D010788:Photosynthesis / Q000528:radiation effects