Mikko TuomiHere is a problem that has been quietly gnawing at astronomers for decades.
The standard approach to detecting #life on other worlds involves scanning #exoplanet #atmospheres for #oxygen, #methane, and #ozone, whose presence is difficult to explain without #biology.
It's a clever idea, but it carries a hidden flaw. That entire shopping list was written by studying Earth. It is, inevitably, a search for life like us.
The list of ways that #chemistry alone can accidentally mimic these #biosignature gases is growing faster than the list of new ways to detect life.
Each new false positive scenario demands even more information about the #planet to rule it out, and there is a genuine question about whether that information can ever be gathered exhaustively.
But there is a solution.
#Assembly theory doesn't ask what #molecules are present in an #atmosphere. Instead, it asks how hard they were to make.
Every molecule can be assigned an assembly index, a minimum number of construction steps required to build it from basic #chemical building blocks.
Simple molecules are easy to assemble by chance, but truly complex ones, requiring many sequential steps, don't arise without something doing a great deal of deliberate selection.
That something would then be life itself.
#astrobiology #astronomy
https://phys.org/news/2026-03-life.html
Paper by Walker et al. (2026): https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11086
Life, but not as we know it
Here is a problem that has been quietly gnawing at astronomers for decades. The standard approach to detecting life on other worlds involves scanning exoplanet atmospheres for oxygen, methane, and ozone, whose presence is difficult to explain without biology. It's a clever idea, but it carries a hidden flaw. That entire shopping list was written by studying Earth. It is, inevitably, a search for life like us.
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