Three Versions of the Third Law: Technosignatures and Astrobiology

Astrobiology, 2014

Civiltà Cattolica, 2017

Astrobiology "studies the origin and evolution of life on Earth and the possible variety of life elsewhere." Often confused with SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), astrobiology is a rapidly developing interdisciplinary scientific research field. A group of scholars, composed of theologians and astrobiologists, has investigated and is still investigating the social implications of this new scientific branch. This experience has become an opportunity to evaluate how scientific research is carried out today and to propose some ethical paradigms in this regard. But also to understand if and how theology and astrobiology can support each other; in particular, if and how astrobiological research can promote a theological understanding of creation and of human life founded on the Incarnation and animated by it.

EMBO reports, 2007

New Astronomy Reviews, 2004

''Are we alone?'' ''Where did we come from?'' These are the defining questions of the new field of Astrobiology, and they are also the questions that have tantalized humanity throughout recorded history. The SKA will afford an excellent opportunity to answer these old questions and thereby calibrate our place in the cosmos. With the SKA we may discover another technological species and chart the pathways by which complex organic molecules assembled in interstellar space were incorporated into, or reassembled within, nascent planetary systems and the role these molecules play in creating habitable worlds.

Bulletin of the AAS, 2021

Are we alone? The study of technosignatures, physical manifestations of technology from extraterrestrial intelligences, is a rigorous astrobiological sub-discipline. The Planetary Science decadal should include searches for technosignatures alongside biosignatures in its recommendations for funding a robust astrobiology research portfolio.

The 2013 data from the Kepler Mission gives a current estimate of the number of Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, as 144 billion. We propose that this estimate has caused a consciousness change in human belief in the probability of life off Earth. This seems to have affected NASA's public statements which are now leaning to the more visionary mission goal of the " Search for Life " rather than the 1975-2012 focus of the " Search for Water ". We propose that the first confirmed Earth-like planet, expected to be announced later this year, be called " BORUCKI " in honour of the visionary USA scientist Bill Borucki, the father of the Kepler Mission. We explore the 2013 status of the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe Model of Panspermia, its hypothesis, propositions, experiments and evidence. We use the Karl Popper model for scientific hypotheses(1). Finally we explore Sir Fred Hoyle's vision of a planetary microbe defense system we call the Hoyle Shield. We explore the subsystem components of the shield and assess some options for these components using breakthrough technologies already available.

Astrobiology

According to the 2015 Astrobiology Strategy, a central goal of astrobiology is to provide a definition of life. A similar claim is made in the 2018 CRC Handbook of Astrobiology. Yet despite efforts, there remains no consensus on a definition of life. This essay explores an alternative strategy for searching for extraterrestrial life: Search for potentially biological anomalies (as opposed to life per se) using tentative (vs. defining) criteria. The function of tentative criteria is not, like that of defining criteria, to provide an estimate (via a decision procedure) of the likelihood that an extraterrestrial phenomenon is the product of life. Instead, it is to identify phenomena that resist classification as living or nonliving as worthy of further investigation for novel life. For as the history of science reveals, anomalies are a driving force behind scientific discovery and yet (when encountered) are rarely recognized for what they represent because they violate core theoretical beliefs about the phenomena concerned. While the proposed strategy resembles that of current life-detection missions, insofar as it advocates the use of a variety of lines of evidence (biosignatures), it differs from these approaches in ways that increase the likelihood of noticing truly novel forms of life, as opposed to dismissing them as just another poorly understood abiological phenomenon. Moreover, the strategy under consideration would be just as effective at detecting forms of life closely resembling our own as a definition of life.

2019

I declare that this thesis has been composed by myself and that the work presented is my own, except where explicitly indicated otherwise in the text. This work has no been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification.