Our mission

The geological history of our planet involved a cascading series of events that led to life becoming complex. For reasons we do not fully understand yet, the ancient single-celled forms of life evolved into eukaryotes. Then half a billion years ago our planet produced an explosion in life’s diversity, eventually leading to technologically advanced species like us. In parallel, Earth itself also evolved, transitioning between multiple states over its 4.5 Gyr history. Over hundreds of thousands of years the climate has meandered; tectonic plates have shifted continually over hundreds of millions of years, remoulding the continents. In some of these transitions, such as the oxygenation of the atmosphere, the evolution of our planet and life are tightly entangled, yet in others the feedbacks are less obvious. If we can map out this co-evolution as a multi-scale, dynamic system, we would clearly decipher how the two threads, the abiotic world and the biotic one, are knotted to the core.

In order to understand the extent to which the evolution of complex life was inevitable on Earth, we must look beyond our planet: is it just one outcome of (life and) planetary evolution? Or are there many more, and how do they differ? Why one celestial body may not support life is as relevant a question as why complex life now exists on another. It is crucial to physically explore the solar system, to validate or refute signs of past or present life. Likewise, reading Earth’s geological history explains how it reached its present state, but we must also look to the cosmic census of thousands of known exoplanets to relativise and thereby understand our own. Interpreting these astrophysical observations depends, in turn, on geoscientific expertise honed on the Earth. Planets and life are intimately connected as physical phenomena shaping one another; so too are the disciplines of life sciences, Earth sciences, and astronomy connected as tools shaping our knowledge.

The mission of the Oxford Planets and Life (OPAL) initiative is to employ tools from multiple scientific disciplines to understand the processes that drive the emergence and evolution of complex life. The expertise for realising this mission lies across the departments and divisions of the University of Oxford. The Department of Physics already combines ground- and space instrumentation and solar system mission expertise with exoplanet detection and spectroscopy, and with atmospheric modelling. The Department of Earth Sciences and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History together host expertise in palaeobiology, biogeochemistry, and analysis of planetary materials, along with field-based and theoretical geodynamics and climate science. The Department of Biology is a hub of evolutionary biology, molecular genetics, and cellular dynamics. Host-pathogen interactions, biometals and metabolic plasticity are studied in the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine. OPAL is the framework for mobilising the collective expertise across these disciplines to unlock the origin of complex life throughout the galaxy.