Astrobiology 2.0
Keith Cowing has a very interesting article on astrobiology: history, current situation and future
"...You created astrobiology. Forces at NASA now seek to undermine all of that hard work. Fight back. Make astrobiology better than it was. If you do not take the initiative no one will do it for you. If you don't try you have no one to blame but yourself."
Read the whole thing.
posted by Steinn at 12:33 PM
3 Comments:
Lets be honest: astrobiology is just a cover up for evolution theory of primigeny cells.
No. Both prebiotic chemistry, origin of first life forms, and the early stages of pre-cell and cellular evolution are explicitly and openly in astrobiology. It is one of the largest tasks in the field and one the bio and geo people jumped on.
Astrobio is also more than that, including detection of life outside Earth, searches for habitable locations, and indirect detection of biomarkers (or the more rarely discussed anti-biomarkers).
No cover up, it is all in the open.
Yep, they are explicitly, openly and forming one of the largest and important tasks. Now, how many institutes do you know researching on this field (origin of the life) and claiming themselves to be researching just this, Origin of the Life, and no astrobiology? I know none. So, astrobiology has become a substitute name for the science Miller ignited half century ago. Why it has happenned so, I can not tell, but perhaps it is because Origin of Life is a risky label, prone to attack from creationists and such.
A small inconvenience of the astro- label is that the research about primitive soups (Miller like) and starting conditions needs to be more general than the one of the Earth, and then we have still unsolved the mistery of the starting conditions on Earth itself, particularly the evolution of chiral molecules.
Post a Comment
<< Home