Claudio Flores Martinez has just finished an MSc at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany and is now enroute to a PhD in theoretical biology. He currently serves as a research assistant at the Developmental Biology Unit of EMBL and the University of Heidelberg's Centre for Organismal Studies. With three papers in Acta Astronautica under his belt, Claudio is already deep into theoretical evolutionary biology, and in particular the contingency vs. convergence debate. In the paper below, he discusses how these issues couple with the possible emergence and development of life on Europa and the potential biosignatures by which we might find it, a journey that takes us deep into the nature of living systems. Just what might we encounter under that Europan ice? by Claudio Flores Martinez “Science is an endless search for truth. Any representation of reality we develop can be only partial. There is no finality, sometimes no single best representation. There...

Oil companies involved in astrobiology? It doesn't seem likely, but in a roundabout way, it's true. A consortium including Chevron, Repsol, BP and Shell have a natural interest in developing better models for subsurface reservoirs and source rocks in microbe-rich carbonate environments. At the same time, NASA's Astrobiology Program is intrigued with how we could find bacterial structures on other worlds, and their role in planetary habitability. The result: Both Big Oil and NASA are supporting research into stromatolites, the calcium-carbonate rock structures built up by lime-secreting bacteria (technically, cyanobacteria, that draw their energy from photosynthesis). We can probe ancient life on Earth by studying these accreted structures, some of which go back more than 3.5 billion years. Erica Suosaari works for Bush Heritage Australia, an organization involved in conservation and land management. The Hamelin Station Reserve in Western Australia borders a nature reserve with vast...

If you’ve been following the KIC 8462852 story, you’ll want to be aware of Paul Carr’s Dream of the Open Channel blog, as well as his Wow! Signal Podcast, both of which make for absorbing conversation. In his latest blog post, Carr offers sensible advice about how to look at anomalies in our astronomical data. Dysonian SETI tries to spot such anomalies in hopes of uncovering the activities of an extraterrestrial civilization, but as Carr makes clear, this is an enterprise that needs to be slowly and patiently done, without jumping to any unwarranted assumptions. Let me quote Carr on this important point: ...we will have to be patient, since we will be almost certainly be wrong at first, or perhaps just unlucky in our search. We don't need to nail it exactly, but we will need to develop rough models of ET activity that distinguishes it from nature. These models would more or less fit the data that we think anomalous, would make testable predictions, and would show how to rule out at...

When Nikolai Kardashev looked into the question of where to find advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, he argued that the obvious starting point would be in the vicinity of extreme astrophysics. Active galactic nuclei (AGN) come to mind, or even the centers of comparatively quiet galaxies like our own. Clément Vidal picked up the same point in his The Beginning and the End (Springer, 2014), arguing persuasively that we should consider how black holes could be used, perhaps by manipulating the merger of such objects. And yes, this is astroengineering utterly beyond our skills, but possibly not those of an advanced ETI. Using black holes for energy is extreme, but Roger Penrose has imagined a super-civilization extracting black hole rotational energy by the injection of matter, and there are a number of other propositions on how such advanced engineering might work. Extracting energy from a black hole’s accretion disk might be the most efficient method, but lower-grade operations...

The SETI concepts now called ‘Dysonian’ are to my mind some of the most exhilarating ideas in the field. Dysonian SETI gets its name from the ‘Dyson spheres’ and ‘Dyson swarms’ analyzed by Freeman Dyson in a 1960 paper. This is a technology that an advanced civilization might use to harvest the energy of its star. You can see how this plays off Nikolai Kardashev’s classification of civilizations; Kardashev suggested that energy use is a way to describe civilizations at the broadest level. A Type II society is one that can use all the energy of its star. In the film 2010, director Peter Hyams’ 1984 adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2010: Odyssey Two (Del Rey, 1982), we see an instance of this kind of technology at work, though it has nothing to do with a Dyson sphere. In the film, a dark patch appearing on Jupiter signals the onset of what Martyn Fogg has called ‘stellification,’ the conversion of a gas giant into a small star. Rapidly replicating von Neumann machines -- the...