Artificial Life as an Aid to Astrobiology: Testing Life Seeking Techniques

Abstract

Abstract. Searching for signatures of fossil or present life in our solar system requires autonomous devices capable of investigating remote locations with limited assistance from earth. Here, we use an artificial chemistry model to create spatially complex chemical environments. An autonomous experimentation technique based on evolutionary computation is then employed to explore these environments with the aim of discovering the chemical signature of small patches of biota present in the simulation space. In the highly abstracted environment considered, autonomous experimentation achieves fair to good predictions for locations with biological activity. We believe that artificially generated biospheres will be an important tool for developing the algorithms key to the search for life on Mars.

The role of self-maintaining resilient reaction networks in the origin and evolution of life

“…Each of these systems could in principle evolve "life-like" autopoietic organizations. Recognizing such organizations is a central issue in domains of study such as artificial life, the Gaia hypothesis (Rubin et al, 2021) and astrobiology (Centler et al, 2003). The present paper has proposed several plausible mechanisms and characteristics to look out for when searching for such self-organizing quasi-life forms.…”

“…Such a conception of quasi-living systems is also essential if we wish to investigate the possibilities for life-like organizations outside of DNA-based organisms. Examples include super-organisms (Heylighen, 2007), such as ant colonies, social organizations conceived as "living systems" (Miller, 1995), Earth conceived as a "Gaian" organism (Rubin et al, 2021), life in outer space or on other planets (Centler et al, 2003), and artificial life based in software, hardware or wetware. Instead of assuming a sharp distinction between life and nonlife, the way autopoiesis theory does, we therefore propose to study a continuum of self-maintenance effectiveness.…”

Robust Monomer-Distribution Biosignatures in Evolving Digital Biota

“…It may be seen, therefore, as an approach toward solving the "single data point" problem, that is, that we know only one example of evolved life (the terrestrial biosphere), and therefore cannot draw scientific conclusions about the universality of features we observe. Using Artificial Life techniques, we can test conjectures about observable invariants of life; other examples include measuring the reduction of local entropy induced by cellular automata in an artificial chemistry (Centler et al, 2003).…”

Self-Adaptive Scouting—Autonomous Experimentation for Systems Biology

“…Recently, evolutionary computation has been applied to autonomous experimentation [7] and was employed in conjunction with computer-controlled fluidics to characterize protein response with regard to chemical signals [8]. This method, named scouting, has also been suggested for detecting and localizing unusual chemical signatures [9]. A drawback of the scouting algorithm so far was that several application-dependent parameters need to be set by the user to achieve good performance.…”