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Scientific paper
Sep 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008epsc.conf..805b&link_type=abstract
European Planetary Science Congress 2008, Proceedings of the conference held 21-25 September, 2008 in Münster, Germany. Online a
Other
Scientific paper
Abstract The search for habitable planets has seen a significant boost, since much effort was invested into development of newer and more powerful techniques of detecting such planetary bodies. This search is fuelled by the interest that is sparked by its help in answering the bigger question of the origin of life on Earth and its abundance in the universe. Traditionally a planetary body has been deemed habitable when it provides conditions under which water is liquid. This led to the formulation of a habitable zone across stars, in which liquid water can exist. [1] Liquid water remains to this day the single most important feature in the search for life. There have been various suggestions of life being present in waterless environments like liquid hydrocarbons or even liquid ammonia, but how exactly a living system under such conditions might work, no one can satisfactorily explain. [2] A very important point in this context that is not often raised is that while water might be a favourable medium in which to live and certainly a major constituent of all living organism we know of, water alone is not alive and it will not spontaneously evolve into life. It would thus seem that apart from the presence of liquid water there a number of other, minor, necessary ingredients to life that determine whether a planet is habitable (meaning capable of sustaining life) or whether it is also capable of providing the starting grounds for the evolution of living systems. These other ingredients are determined by the minimum requirements of life itself. They include the molecular components of the most primitive encasing of an organism, the most primitive molecules needed for something like a metabolism and the most primitive way of storing information. [3] In addition to these molecular components, life must be able to utilise a source of energy to drive chemical reactions. Observations of various extremophiles on Earth utilising all kinds disequilibria suggest that these can be very diverse. The exact nature of these other ingredients, their possible presence and history of formation and their impact for the formation and evolution of life will be discussed for several different types of habitats all across the regime in which liquid water can be found, such as very dry and cold bodies like Mars, hot bodies like Venus, bodies covered completely in water or bodies with subsurface oceans. References [1] Kasting J.F., Whitmire D.P., Reynolds R.T., (1993) Icarus 101(1), 108-128 [2] Benner S.A., Ricardo A., Carrigan M.A. (2004) Curr Opin Chem Biol 8(6), 672-689 [3] Ruiz-Mirazo K., Peretó J., Moreno A., (2004) OLEB 34(3), 323-346 EPSC Abstracts, Vol. 3, EPSC2008-A-00039, 2008 European Planetary Science Congress, Author(s) 2008
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