Astrobiology (Paperback) | Released: 20 Aug 2022

Astrobiology is a field that aims to forecast and predict if life will exist elsewhere in the universe as well as to hunt for it. Complete range. Earthly life is one thing. All living things, from the tiniest microbe to the biggest mammals, are made of the same genetic material and genetic code, and they all descended from a four billion year old tree of life.

The limitations of life on Earth shape our expectations for life in the universe. Those boundaries are extraordinary when it comes to microbes. Both above and below the boiling point of water, there are bacteria that can survive.
They can live in hazardous conditions that would kill us and in highly radioactive areas that would likewise be lethal to people. They can endure in almost a vacuum. On this planet, microbes have multiplied to fill practically every ecological and evolutionary niche imaginable.

That sets the tone for what we could anticipate seeing in various physical environments both within the solar system and beyond of it. Understanding the origins of life on Earth is crucial to the quest for extraterrestrial life. If life were an accident, then perhaps it is extremely unusual, and perhaps we are special.
But if life develops naturally under the correct physical and chemical conditions, we may anticipate finding biology on many of the worlds that studies of nearby stars and their planets suggest are habitable. Unfortunately, historical science only addresses the genesis of life. Planet Earth moves around a lot.

Because of the loss of rocks older than four billion years and subsequent tremendous geological activity on earth, the first star from which life originated may have been hidden from us. We also need to understand how life arose on Earth in order to understand both simple and sophisticated species. Is the emergence of intelligent, sentient, sophisticated animals an uncommon occurrence or a fluke, or does it occur naturally with enough time?
Is Darwinian natural selection, in a sense, a phenomenon that occurs everywhere as well? Intelligent life may be so alien as to be unrecognizable if we envision intelligent life existing elsewhere. But it's also important to keep in mind that intelligent, non-communicable, sentient species live on the same planet as ourselves.

Before we extrapolate the possibilities of life in the universe, we must first discover as much as we can about the planet in the field of exobiology. Astronomers will keep observing the habitable planets in an effort to find biomarkers, which are signs of microbial life. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, also known as SETI, has been running in the background for more than 50 years, looking for intelligence signals from extraterrestrial civilizations that are far away in space.

While the majority of this work was done at radio frequencies, optical wavelengths have lately been included as well. The so-called Great Silence has so far greeted the researchers, but they aren't deterred and believe the hunt is only now beginning to be interesting. We must think creatively to survive in the cosmos.
We don't know how weird life or intelligence might be in remote spheres because all biology on Earth is an example of one thing and we lack a general theory of biology. But given the sheer number of habitable places in the Milky Way and elsewhere, it is statistically likely that we are not the only species in the cosmos.