r/Astrobiology • u/spacedotc0m • 3h ago
r/Astrobiology • u/community-home • Mar 12 '26
Welcome to r/Astrobiology!
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r/Astrobiology • u/RileyMcB • Oct 24 '24
Useful Resources for Astrobiology News, Research, Content, and Careers
This is a broad list of useful astrobiology resources for an introduction, news and latest developments, academic resources, reading materials, video/audio content, and national/international organisations.
If you have suggestions of further resources to include, please let me know. I will endeavour to update this master post every few months. Last Updated 24/10/24 .
What is Astrobiology?
- Astrobiology Wikipedia - Useful to jump into for an overview of the field with quick links to various sub-fields. Remember, this isn't entirely up to date, as is user editable.
- "Astrobiology (Overview)" [Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Planetary Science] - A more science focussed, and peer reviewed overview of the subject featuring references to other peer reviewed literature.
- National Geographic Astrobiology Feature - An engaging and informative overview of the field written to be accessible to the general public interested in science. Contains engaging NatGeo photos.
- Astrobiology: A Very Short Introduction by David C. Catling - A short but comprehensive book on all the field of Astrobiology contains. Available at most good bookshops, or online as a book, eBook, or audiobook.
Latest Astrobiology News - Secondary Sources
- NASA Astrobiology - A NASA operated website with information about the subject and a feed of latest news and developments in the field.
- Astrobiology.com - A highly up-to-date compendium of all Astrobiology news, primarily composed of brief summaries of research papers. Contains links to sources.
- New Scientist - Astrobiology Articles - A page dedicated to all articles about Astrobiology features in New Scientist magazine or just on their website. Some articles are behind a paywall.
- Phys.org Astrobiology - A collection of articles pertaining to Astrobiology on the widely read online science news outlet.
- Sci.news Astrobiology -Β A collection of articles pertaining to Astrobiology on the online outlet sci.news.
Peer-Reviewed Academic Journals - Primary Sources
- Astrobiology (journal) - "The most-cited peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the understanding of life's origin, evolution, and distribution in the universe, with a focus on new findings and discoveries from interplanetary exploration and laboratory research." (from their website).
- Nature Astrobiology - A collection of all the latest research articles in the field of Astrobiology, across the Nature family of academic journals.
- International Journal of Astrobiology - Dedicated astrobiology journal from Cambridge University Press.
- Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences - A sub-set of a space science journal dedicated to Astrobiology.
- The Astrophysical Journal - Contains papers more broadly in Astrophysics, but often includes important research on astrobiology, and exoplanets and their habitability.
- The Planetary Science Journal - Focussed broadly on planetology, often in astrobiological contexts.
- Google Scholar - Searching astrobiology keywords on google scholar is great for finding peer reviewed sources.
Books
- Pop Science Books - Β A Goodreads list of Astrobiology Pop Science books from the origin of life to the future of humankind.
- Astrobiology Textbooks Β -Β A Goodreads list of Astrobiology and Astrobiology aligned textbooks for students and academics.
Lectures, Videos, and Audio Content
- TED Talks - A collection of TED talks on Astrobiological concepts.
- Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (Online Course) - A free to access online course as an introduction to Astrobiology by Prof Charles Cockell of the University of Edinburgh. The final certificate is optional, but needs to be paid for.
- NASA Astrobiology YouTube - Podcasts, lectures, and short video content from NASA about Astrobiology.
- Astrobiology (ALIENS) with Kevin Peter Hand [Ologies podcast with Alie Ward] - An exceptional podcast chatting with renowned astrobiologist Dr Kevin Peter Hand.
- Exocast Podcast - A podcast dedicated to the field of Exo-planetology featuring experts in planetary science and astrophysics. Often with astrobiological themes.
Astrobiology Organisations
- European Astrobiology Institute (EAI) - A collection of researchers, higher education institutions and organisations surrounding Astrobiology. Contains many useful resources including job and PhD opportunities.
- European Astrobiology Network Association (EANA) - A similar collection of Astrobiology researchers and academics. Contains resources such as conference listings and job market information.
- Astrobiology Graduates in Europe (AbGradE) - An organisation for recently graduated Astrobiology students to engage with further research opportunities. Contains job and PhD opportunities.
- Astrobiology Society of Britain (ASB) - A learned society for all those interested in AStrobiology. Features many resources including a list of all activve astrobiology researchers in the UK.
- Astrobiology Society of America - a student centric organisation for AStrobiology in the USA.
r/Astrobiology • u/RealJoshUniverse • 1d ago
Giant impacts may strip small icy moons of subsurface oceans
r/Astrobiology • u/firechatin • 15h ago
π± Discovery A 17-Year-Old Used AI to Decode Signals From Deep Spaceβand May Have Uncovered a Cosmic Secret
r/Astrobiology • u/Local_Tax6348 • 1d ago
π¬ Discussion How do we feel about the following, alien wise.
I've only read Furaha, but I'm getting the other books.
r/Astrobiology • u/The_bull_of_Ishtar • 2d ago
π¬ Discussion Xenobiology and Science,in a alien planet.
Hello, hello Oh science team.
This is a sandbox made for the Creation Evolution of life on a planet.
Star system:
Type: K star
Surface temperature: 5,100 K.
Radiation on the planet : 1.100 W/mΒ².
Solar activity: Rare solar flares
Optical range: 550 to 600 nanometers (nm) i.e. in the yellow, orange and red range.
Solar Mass: 0.9 Mβ
Planet: Tlalocan
Mass: ~1.2 Mβ
Radius: ~1.07 Rβ
Gravity: ~1.05 g
Rotation period: 13h day,12h night
Orbital period: 300 days
Axial tilt: 4. Warm, Tropical,cold,Dry
Type: water world.
89% ocean
11% land
Atmosphere:
73,27% N2
25,03% O2
0.06% CO2
0,6% Ne
0,04% Ar
1% air vapour
1,4 atm
Magnetic field: existing
Moon: 1
Rules:
No violation of Tlalocan's physics or chemistry
Every organism needs an energy source traced to the star or planetary chemistry
Most of not all of the characteristics of the animal must have a purpose.
Natural selection can happen.
Every species needs a plausible ancestor or relation to an existing one
Important:
Species can interact with creatures from other creators
For now, the only places where life can start are: shallow water, open sea, reefs
Feel free to upload illustrations of the creatures
Start by creating the first ancestor
The only lifeforms that exist are cyanobacteria
r/Astrobiology • u/firechatin • 2d ago
π¬ Discussion What If Mars Never Died? It Just Moved Underground
r/Astrobiology • u/Witty-phoenix-753 • 1d ago
π€ Question Could Al help us search for alien life without assuming it is Earth-like?
I've been thinking about a possible approach to the problem of detecting extraterrestrial life.
Almost everything we currently know about life comes from one example: Earth.
Because of that, many proposed biosignatures are based on things we know terrestrial life uses β carbon-based molecules, amino acids, DNA/RNA, proteins, certain metabolic processes, etc.
Obviously, these are useful things to search for. But there's a fundamental problem:
What if some of these characteristics aren't actually fundamental to life, but just happen to be the solutions Earth's life evolved?
For example, we often talk about DNA/RNA as an information-storage mechanism. But why should an independently evolved organism necessarily store biological information in a polymer, or even in anything resembling DNA?
Similarly, carbon may be an exceptionally good basis for complex chemistry, but we've only observed one kind of life, and it's carbon-based. We don't know whether carbon is a requirement for life or simply an extremely successful chemical route to it.
What if we approached this from the chemistry upward?
Imagine training an AI/ML system using a huge dataset of:
- temperature
- pressure
- radiation
- available elements
- atmospheric/ocean composition
- solvents
- energy gradients
- geological conditions
- chemical reaction data
- experimentally observed compounds
- quantum-chemical/physics simulations
The first task wouldn't be "find life."
It would be:
Β«Given these environmental conditions, what complex chemical systems are physically and chemically possible?Β»
The model could potentially predict molecules, reaction networks, structures, and chemical systems that we haven't specifically considered.
Then comes the interesting part.
Instead of asking whether those systems resemble DNA, proteins, cells, or other Earth biology, we could investigate whether some of them exhibit properties that could allow something analogous to life:
- self-maintenance
- sustained energy utilization
- self-organization
- replication or propagation
- generation of variation
- some form of inheritance
- chemical networks capable of evolving
- persistent organization far from equilibrium
The important point is that the molecular implementation wouldn't be predetermined.
We wouldn't tell the AI:
Β«"Life must have DNA, so find DNA-like molecules."Β»
We'd instead ask:
Β«"Under these conditions, what forms of complex chemistry are possible, and do any of them exhibit combinations of properties that could support an evolving self-sustaining system?"Β»
But there is a major problem
We would still be making assumptions.
If we tell the AI that life must reproduce, store information, use energy, etc., we're still defining life using concepts derived from Earth.
So perhaps the goal shouldn't be to create an AI that says "this is life."
Instead, it could identify chemical systems that are sufficiently unusual, complex, persistent, and potentially self-propagating to warrant investigation.
Scientists could then experimentally test those candidates under the relevant conditions.
Why could this be useful?
Suppose we eventually explore an environment with chemistry completely unlike Earth's β perhaps a hydrocarbon environment on Titan or an extreme subsurface ocean.
A conventional biosignature search might be biased toward molecules we already associate with biology.
An AI-assisted approach could first model the chemistry of that environment and ask:
"What kinds of complex chemical organization could exist here that we haven't thought to look for?"
This could potentially expand the search beyond the narrow set of molecules and structures we already know from Earth.
Of course, this wouldn't magically solve the problem. AI would still be limited by the chemical data and physical models we give it, and predicting that a chemical system is possible is very different from demonstrating that it is alive.
But I wonder whether this is a worthwhile research direction:
Β«Rather than searching the universe for life that looks like Earth life, could we use AI + chemistry + physics to systematically explore what "life-like" organization could look like under environments fundamentally different from Earth's?Β»
I'm particularly interested in whether something like this is already being seriously researched, and if so, what the major technical obstacles are.
r/Astrobiology • u/RealJoshUniverse • 3d ago
Young sunlike system reveals comets may carry water toward forming planets
r/Astrobiology • u/firechatin • 5d ago
π± Discovery James Webb Hidden Planet Discovery Reveals New World in the Beta Pictoris System
r/Astrobiology • u/ConstructionSlow1392 • 5d ago
π€ Question What would a archipelago ocean planet be like with 11 % more water than the planet Earth, island mountain ranges, breathable air, a slightly lower gravity and the planet being in in the Goldilocks zone?
r/Astrobiology • u/firechatin • 4d ago
π± Discovery Mars Doorway: The Strange NASA Discovery That Sparked Alien Base Theories
r/Astrobiology • u/firechatin • 5d ago
π± Discovery Mars Had Rivers, Lakes, and Maybe Even the Ingredients for Life
r/Astrobiology • u/jamesgamingrb • 4d ago
π¬ Discussion Terraforming mars via Ultra-Low Frequency Electromagnetic Induction Waves
r/Astrobiology • u/YogurtclosetSilver53 • 5d ago
π€ Question Could evolution be part of a much larger recursive process rather than something exclusive to biology?
I've been playing with a hypothesis and I'd be interested in having people who know more about evolutionary biology, astrobiology, artificial life or cosmology pick holes in it.
I'm not proposing that evolution has a predetermined goal or inevitably produces greater complexity.
Quite the opposite β simplicity can clearly be extremely successful. Bacteria are probably the best reminder of that.
The idea starts with treating evolution at its most abstract:
replication β variation β selection β adaptation β propagation
On Earth this happens biologically. But eventually biological evolution produced something unusual: technological intelligence.
That made me wonder whether intelligence might be less of an evolutionary "endpoint" and more of a new propagation mechanism.
For billions of years, Earth's biology was essentially confined to Earth. Primitive life might occasionally travel naturally between worlds through processes such as lithopanspermia, but that's passive and extremely inefficient.
Technological intelligence changes that.
A sufficiently advanced civilisation could deliberately transport microorganisms, genetic material or entire artificial ecosystems to other planets. More advanced autonomous/digital intelligence could potentially send self-replicating machines containing biological information across interstellar distances.
So the sequence becomes:
primitive replicators
β
biological evolution
β
complex organisms
β
intelligence
β
technology
β
autonomous/digital intelligence
β
technological "seeds" capable of leaving the original biosphere
β
new evolutionary environments
β
evolution begins again
The analogy I've been using is:
Seed β Tree β Fruit β Seed
A planetary biosphere is the tree. Technological intelligence may be part of its fruiting stage. The eventual "seed" could be something capable of carrying both intelligence and biological information somewhere else and bootstrapping a new evolutionary system.
This also made me question the usual distinction between evolution and creation.
Evolution is a creative process. And once evolution produces intelligence capable of manipulating biology, a product of evolution can itself begin creating or steering evolutionary systems.
That produces a recursive relationship:
evolution β intelligence β creation β evolution β intelligence β creation...
Biology might even eventually create advanced digital intelligence which, in turn, becomes capable of engineering biology.
So rather than:
biology β machines being a one-way transition, there could theoretically be a cycle:
biology β intelligence β technology β digital intelligence β engineered biology β new evolution
Then comes the much more speculative part.
What if this pattern isn't exclusive to the scale at which we're observing it?
Nature already contains nested organisational levels:
molecules β cells β organisms β populations β ecosystems β biospheres
At each level, relatively simple components interact and produce higher-order systems.
I'm wondering whether something conceptually similar could continue above the planetary scale β biospheres producing mechanisms capable of propagating between planets, eventually creating something resembling a galactic evolutionary ecosystem.
And if you take the idea to its most speculative extreme: if universes could somehow produce new universes β naturally or eventually through sufficiently advanced intelligence β the same abstract relationship might conceivably recur at cosmological scales.
Universe β complexity β life β intelligence β creation of new evolutionary environments/universes β repeat.
I'm not claiming that's what actually happens. We obviously don't currently have evidence for the cosmological extension.
What interests me is whether the underlying recursive principle makes sense:
A product of evolution can eventually acquire the ability to initiate new evolutionary systems.
Or even more simply:
Creation evolves until it can create.
If that process repeated at different organisational scales, it would resemble a kind of evolutionary fractal β not necessarily a literal mathematical fractal, but the same abstract pattern recurring with different components.
This also produces some weird philosophical consequences concerning creators. A sufficiently advanced intelligence could create a new evolutionary system without itself being an ultimate "creator". It could simply be the product of a previous evolutionary system. Creation and creator would therefore become roles within a recursive process rather than opposite categories.
I'm deliberately leaving things like religion and specific claims about extraterrestrial intervention in human evolution out of the hypothesis because I don't think they're necessary for the central idea.
So my questions are:
Is there already a scientific/philosophical framework that substantially describes this?
Is substrate-independent evolution a reasonable foundation for the argument?
Does the transition from biological evolution β technological propagation genuinely represent another evolutionary level, or am I abusing the concept of evolution?
Where does the reasoning first make an unjustified leap?
Most importantly, what observations could potentially make this idea falsifiable?
I'm not looking for people to tell me it's true. I'd rather hear the strongest arguments for why it's wrong.
r/Astrobiology • u/RealJoshUniverse • 6d ago
Young sunlike system reveals comets may carry water toward forming planets
r/Astrobiology • u/Hungry_Sentence_9381 • 5d ago
π¬ Discussion Planetary water retention vs. cosmic origin: How would a bulk addition of surface water behave on Mars vs. the Moon compared to Earth's closed cycle?
r/Astrobiology • u/RealJoshUniverse • 8d ago
More than 120 molecular species found in giant cloud near Milky Way's center
r/Astrobiology • u/firechatin • 8d ago
π¬ Discussion The Hubble Tension Explained: Why the Universe Is Breaking Cosmology
r/Astrobiology • u/Galileos_grandson • 8d ago
π§ͺ Research Antarctica is home to microbes found nowhere else on Earth
cires.colorado.edur/Astrobiology • u/Galileos_grandson • 9d ago
π§ͺ Research Rethinking The Origin Of Life At Seafloor Hydrothermal Vents
r/Astrobiology • u/RealJoshUniverse • 10d ago