The search for extraterrestrial life combines several scientific disciplines in our search to determine if we are alone in the cosmos, reports Universetoday.com.
Scientists hunt for biosa signatures in exoplanet, explore potentially habitable worlds in our own solar system such as Mars and Europe and scan on artificial signals that may indicate intelligent civilizations.
This process forces us to question our definition of life, because alien organisms can use biochemistry that vary enormously from carbon -based systems.
Despite no final contact yet, discoveries of potentially habitable worlds and extremophiles that bloom in the heaviest environments of the earth can be common in the entire universe.
If life on planets can be so different from those of the earth, it becomes difficult to know what signs they should look for. In their paper published In Nature Communications, Akshit Goyal (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research) and Mikhail Tikhonov (Washington University) suggest on ecosystems instead of specific forms of life.
By modeling how organisms compete in order to work on resources and ecologically, it can be possible to identify universal biosa signatures that are not dependent on the earth such as biology or specific metabolic processes.
Although earlier approaches suggested that life was identified by chemical imbalances or energy fluxing patterns, they missed a specific criteria for distinguishing biologically from non-biological processes.
In the paper, the researchers combine the energy perspective with an important observation: life forms almost never exist separately, but develop into competitive ecosystems with ecological interactions. With only one known exception to Earth, the formation of ecosystems seems almost as fundamental to life as evolution itself.
Volcanoes such as the Augustine Volcano in Alaska can produce chemical signatures that can be mistaken for life. (Credit: Alaska Volcano Observatory)
Even if we can arrange ourselves about the criteria to look for, finding these universal signs of life is going to be challenges. Although energy consumption is customary for all life, distinguishing the biological of non-biological processes is difficult with today’s technology.
This article concludes a new approach: looking for spatial layering of chemicals ranked by their energy content! This stratification naturally comes from two universal characteristics of life: self -replication and competition between species.
Together these functions create patterns in which high energy sources are faster and various organisms are spatially separated.
In contrast to traditional biosignures connected to specific earth -like metabolisms, this pattern would result from ecosystem competition, regardless of the biochemistry involved. Although non-biological processes can create layered structures, they are usually not organized by energy content.
However, the most important limitation is the practical implementation, because such patterns are difficult to detect with current technology, mainly due to teledetection. Unfortunately traveling to distant aliens around other galaxies is also our ability and so we have to rely on count detection techniques.
