What is Life?

Witzany, Guenther

doi:10.3389/fspas.2020.00007

Cited by 31 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 163 publications

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“…The environment must exhibit a threshold level of complexity such that there is a selection pressure for the information processing and learning behaviors that are at the core of the living state [ 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 ]. There is no physical or computational reason for a lyfeform to emerge or evolve in an environment that is trivially simple.…”

Section: Developing a More General Concept Of Habitability (Genesity)...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Searching for Life, Mindful of Lyfe’s Possibilities

Wong

Bartlett

Chen

et al. 2022

Life

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We are embarking on a new age of astrobiology, one in which numerous interplanetary missions and telescopes will be designed, built, and launched with the explicit goal of finding evidence for life beyond Earth. Such a profound aim warrants caution and responsibility when interpreting and disseminating results. Scientists must take care not to overstate (or over-imply) confidence in life detection when evidence is lacking, or only incremental advances have been made. Recently, there has been a call for the community to create standards of evidence for the detection and reporting of biosignatures. In this perspective, we wish to highlight a critical but often understated element to the discussion of biosignatures: Life detection studies are deeply entwined with and rely upon our (often preconceived) notions of what life is, the origins of life, and habitability. Where biosignatures are concerned, these three highly related questions are frequently relegated to a low priority, assumed to be already solved or irrelevant to the question of life detection. Therefore, our aim is to bring to the fore how these other major astrobiological frontiers are central to searching for life elsewhere and encourage astrobiologists to embrace the reality that all of these science questions are interrelated and must be furthered together rather than separately. Finally, in an effort to be more inclusive of life as we do not know it, we propose tentative criteria for a more general and expansive characterization of habitability that we call genesity.

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Section: Developing a More General Concept Of Habitability (Genesity)...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Searching for Life, Mindful of Lyfe’s Possibilities

Wong

Bartlett

Chen

et al. 2022

Life

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“…This is not error, but pure productivity. This is a creative process, not copying previous elements, but generating genuinely new ones (Witzany 2020b). There is a crucial difference between interpreting RNA structures as results of error replication events, or as events of creative productivity.…”

Section: Mechanistic Error In the Twentieth Centurymentioning

confidence: 99%

To the End of Dogmatism in Molecular Biology

Witzany

2021

Biosemiotics

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Denis Nobel looks at four important misinterpretations of molecular biology concerning evolutionary processes and demonstrates that the new synthesis today looks rather outdated. The modern synthesis is nearly 80 years old. The proponents who worked out the modern synthesis had no access to the current knowledge on cell biology, genetics, epigenetics, RNA biology and virology. Therefore this contribution adds several aspects which Nobel's article does not explicitly mention, providing some examples for a better understanding of evolutionary novelty.

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“…[13] being one of the most influential works of the XXth century because he shifted this question from the realm of philosophy to an experimental field of physics and chemistry. Though there are so many reviews and books dedicated to this question that it is not possible to discuss it here, an excellent recent review by Guenther Witzany [14] summarizes multiple perspectives on the question of Life. However life, as we know it, needs chemistry and the conditions for chemistry to run, i.e.…”

Section: The Ultimate Goal -Search For Exolifementioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying the Classification of Exoplanets: in Search for the Right Habitability Metric

Safonova,

Mathur,

Basak

et al. 2021

Preprint

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What is habitability? Can we quantify it? What do we mean under the term habitable or potentially habitable planet? With estimates of the number of planets in our Galaxy alone running into billions, possibly a number greater than the number of stars, it is high time to start characterizing them, sorting them into classes/types just like stars, to better understand their formation paths, their properties and, ultimately, their ability to beget or sustain life. After all, we do have life thriving on one of these billions of planets, why not on others? Which planets are better suited for life and which ones are definitely not worth spending expensive telescope time on? We need to find sort of quick assessment score, a metric, using which we can make a list of promising planets and dedicate our efforts to them. Exoplanetary habitability is a transdisciplinary subject integrating astrophysics, astrobiology, planetary science, even terrestrial environmental sciences. It became a challenging problem in astroinformatics, an emerging area in computational astronomy. Here, we review the existing metrics of habitability and the new classification schemes (machine learning (ML), neural networks, activation functions) of extrasolar planets, and provide an exposition of the use of computational intelligence techniques to evaluate habitability scores and to automate the process of classification of exoplanets. We examine how solving convex optimization techniques, as in computing new metrics such as a CDHS and b CEESA, cross-validates ML-based classification of exoplanets. Despite the recent criticism of exoplanetary habitability ranking, we are sure that this field has to continue and evolve to use all available machinery of astroinformatics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. It might actually develop into a sort of same scale as stellar types in astronomy, to be used as a quick tool of screening exoplanets in important characteristics in search for potentially habitable planets (PHPs), or Earth-like planets, for detailed follow-up targets.

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What is Life?

Cited by 31 publications

References 163 publications

Searching for Life, Mindful of Lyfe’s Possibilities

Searching for Life, Mindful of Lyfe’s Possibilities

To the End of Dogmatism in Molecular Biology

Quantifying the Classification of Exoplanets: in Search for the Right Habitability Metric

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