Related papers: Can AI Detect Life? Lessons from Artificial Life
Since its inception six decades ago, astrobiology has diversified immensely to encompass several scientific questions including the origin and evolution of Terran life, the organic chemical composition of extraterrestrial objects, and the…
Nature has found one method of organizing living matter, but maybe other options exist -- not yet discovered -- on how to create life. To study the life "as it could be" is the objective of an interdisciplinary field called Artificial Life…
The ultimate goal of astrobiology is to determine the distribution and diversity of life in the universe. But as the word "biosignature" suggests, what will be detected is not life itself, but an observation implicating a particular process…
Over a period of several decades a concerted effort has been made to determine whether intelligent life exists outside of our solar system, known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI. This has been based primarily upon…
One of the most important aims of the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence and artificial life is the design and construction of systems and machines as versatile and as reliable as living organisms at performing high level…
In living systems, we often see the emergence of the ingredients necessary for computation -- the capacity for information transmission, storage, and modification -- begging the question of how we may exploit or imitate such biological…
The identification of extraterrestrial life is one the most exciting and challenging endeavors in space research. The existence of extinct or extant life can be inferred from biogenic elements, isotopes, and molecules, but accurate and…
Could artificial intelligence ever become truly conscious in a functional sense; this paper explores that open-ended question through the lens of Life, a concept unifying classical biological criteria (Oxford, NASA, Koshland) with empirical…
The search for signatures of life beyond Earth has been a major goal of space research and astrobiology for decades. The combination of expanded knowledge on Solar System bodies from past missions and advancements in in-situ detection…
In recent decades, artificial intelligence (AI) including machine learning (ML) have become vital for space missions enabling rapid data processing, advanced pattern recognition, and enhanced insight extraction. These tools are especially…
Molecular assembly offers a promising path to detect life beyond Earth, while minimizing assumptions based on terrestrial life. As mass spectrometers will be central to upcoming Solar System missions, predicting molecular assembly from…
Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is…
The search for a second instance of life is one of the greatest problems of modern science. Outside of creating an artificial origin of life on Earth, the primary targets for the search for life are planets inside or outside the solar…
The near-term capability to characterize terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres may bring us closer to discovering alien life through atmospheric data. However, remotely detectable candidate biosignature gases are subject to false positive…
The origin of life and the detection of alien life have historically been treated as separate scientific research problems. However, they are not strictly independent. Here, we discuss the need for a better integration of the sciences of…
Complex systems fail. I argue that failures can be a blueprint characterizing living organisms and biological intelligence, a control mechanism to increase complexity in evolutionary simulations, and an alternative to classical fitness…
Artificial Life provides the opportunity to study the emergence and evolution of simple ecosystems in real time. We give an overview of the advantages and limitations of such an approach, as well as its relation to individual-based modeling…
The discovery of habitable exoplanets has long been a heated topic in astronomy. Traditional methods for exoplanet identification include the wobble method, direct imaging, gravitational microlensing, etc., which not only require a…
If human societies are so complex, then how can we hope to understand them? Artificial Life gives us one answer. The field of Artificial Life comprises a diverse set of introspective studies that largely ask the same questions, albeit from…
What is the prospect of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI)? I investigate this question by systematically comparing living and algorithmic systems, with a special focus on the notion of "agency." There are three fundamental…