Eating Test

Labelled-release experiment

Lifing things should eat. Probably they like to eat carbon. Maybe they also breath out CO_2 from the carbon they eat. At least, that is what we do.

Use radioactive labelling again.

The experiment:

1. Get some regolith.
2. Moisten it with "soup" containing hydrocarbon* molecules.
3. The life forms eat the C* and breath out C*O_2.
4. Look in the gas given off for C* decays.

Control experiment:

• Keep feeding it soup.
• A chemical process might make some C*O_2, but when the reactants are used up the process would stop.
• Creatures would keep growing (if they like the soup) and keep giving off C*O_2

Result: Some C*O_2 seen at first but more soup did not lead to more C*O_2 production.

But maybe the creatures died.

So the result was rather inconclusive. It appears that the regolith is just chemically reactive.