Questions tagged [astrobiology]
Questions about the origins of life on Earth, and the existence and detection of extraterrestrial life.
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What limits can we set about life beneath the ice of Europa?
Do we know enough about the conditions beneath the ice of Europa to say anything about the complexity of life that may live there? Can we rule out macroscopic life?
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Infrared ozone line detection
I was recently reading Jack R. Woods' response on this forum: Could the James Webb Space Telescope detect biosignals on exoplanets?
In an ideal situation (say looking at absorption lines of a
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Updrafts on Gas Giants
Gas giants put out a fair amount of heat from gravitational collapse, so there's bound to be quite a bit of upward moving winds. If Carl Sagan's idea about aerial ecologies pans out, could larger ...
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Is there a useful measure of how "life-dominated" a planet is?
If life exists on Mars or Venus, then in contrast to life on Earth, it must be "just scraping by". I can imagine a few ways to quantify this:
Life on Mars or Venus is hard to detect -- any ...
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If phosphine gas is to be proof of life on a planet, shouldn't there be other gases too?
If microbes on Venus produce phosphine, wouldn't there also be other gases produced by microbes since earth has many kinds of bacteria and the fast reproduction rate of bacteria make genetic mutations ...
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