[Current Biology (Cell)] Astrobiology aims not only to determine whether life exists beyond Earth but to understand how biology ‘fits’ into a physicochemical universe of stars and planets, including Earth itself.
The field coalesced in the late twentieth century around a core of much older questions about the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. Today, it is a rapidly advancing interdisciplinary collaboration that draws on many sources of data — from planetary missions and exoplanet surveys to field-based, experimental, computational and analytical methods in biology, geology, chemistry, physics and astronomy.
A recurrent concern across many branches of astrobiology is the fuzziness of the boundaries between life and non-life as well as the difficulty of discriminating biological signals from an ‘abiotic baseline’.
What is astrobiology?
Contrary to popular belief, astrobiology (also known as ‘exobiology’) is not defined solely by the search for extra-terrestrial life. From the earliest days of the field, its proponents realized that to ask ‘is there life beyond Earth?’ invites a host of closely related questions.
How does life begin? Which environments can produce and sustain it? What forms can it take? How can it be recognized? How do planetary and (astro)physical events, objects, and materials shape and constrain life over time? This plural focus is reflected in NASA’s proposed definition of astrobiology as “the scientific study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe”.
The surprising fact that a US government agency has ventured to define a field of science reflects the central role that NASA has played in astrobiology for more than sixty years. Building on longstanding but small-scale efforts in this area, the agency launched a new astrobiology grant programme in the mid-nineties following the discovery of fossil-like objects in a Martian meteorite.
This funding unleashed a new wave of astrobiology research across the U.S. and further afield, exposing an enormous latent appetite in the scientific community and the wider public to examine the links between life and the universe.
Within a decade, new astrobiology centres, societies, networks, journals and conferences had appeared around the world. In today’s era of solar system exploration and exoplanet discovery, astrobiology is both a firmly established and fast developing field with a wide range of ideas, uncertainties and sources of data.
- Astrobiology Primer, Current Biology (Cell) via PubMed
- Astrobiology Primer, Current Biology (Cell) (Open access)
Astrobiology,
