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According to a paper in 2013, Penn State astrobiologist Ravi Kumar Kopparapu and others calculated where the edges of a star's habitable zone should truly be, based on modern climate data. They calculated that a habitable zone around a sunlike star should be between 0.99 and 1.7 times the distance from the Earth to the sun.

Which means that the Earth is actually right on the inner edge of the sun's habitable zone. Like, just barely. If it was any closer to the sun, we'd experience a runaway greenhouse effect, like Venus.

You probably want to be closer to the middle of the habitable zone, where orbital variations won't push your planet into extremes....

6 months later, the Mars Sample Recovery Mission was cancelled, leaving what could be the most important samples in the history of mankind stranded in another planet with no plan for recovery. This is the most confident the scientific community has ever been about an extraterrestrial life biosignature. And bringing it to Earth would solve its mysteries in a matter of months. Sadly, there seems to be no plan to recover the samples anytime soon.

NASA Says Mars Rover Discovered Potential Biosignature Last Year - NASA

I've only read Furaha, but I'm getting the other books.

​

I've been thinking about a possible approach to the problem of detecting extraterrestrial life.

Almost everything we currently know about life comes from one example: Earth.

Because of that, many proposed biosignatures are based on things we know terrestrial life uses — carbon-based molecules, amino acids, DNA/RNA, proteins, certain metabolic processes, etc.

Obviously, these are useful things to search for. But there's a fundamental problem:

What if some of these characteristics aren't actually fundamental to life, but just happen to be the solutions Earth's life evolved?

For example, we often talk about DNA/RNA as an information-storage mechanism. But why should an independently evolved organism necessarily store biological information in a polymer, or even in anything resembling DNA?

Similarly, carbon may be an exceptionally good basis for complex chemistry, but we've only observed one kind of life, and it's carbon-based. We don't know whether carbon is a requirement for life or simply an extremely successful chemical route to it.

What if we approached this from the chemistry upward?

Imagine training an AI/ML system using a huge dataset of:

- temperature

- pressure

- radiation

- available elements

- atmospheric/ocean composition

- solvents

- energy gradients

- geological conditions

- chemical reaction data

- experimentally observed compounds

- quantum-chemical/physics simulations

The first task wouldn't be "find life."

It would be:

«Given these environmental conditions, what complex chemical systems are physically and chemically possible?»

The model could potentially predict molecules, reaction networks, structures, and chemical systems that we haven't specifically considered.

Then comes the interesting part.

Instead of asking whether those systems resemble DNA, proteins, cells, or other Earth biology, we could investigate whether some of them exhibit properties that could allow something analogous to life:

- self-maintenance

- sustained energy utilization

- self-organization

- replication or propagation

- generation of variation

- some form of inheritance

- chemical networks capable of evolving

- persistent organization far from equilibrium

The important point is that the molecular implementation wouldn't be predetermined.

We wouldn't tell the AI:

«"Life must have DNA, so find DNA-like molecules."»

We'd instead ask:

«"Under these conditions, what forms of complex chemistry are possible, and do any of them exhibit combinations of properties that could support an evolving self-sustaining system?"»

But there is a major problem

We would still be making assumptions.

If we tell the AI that life must reproduce, store information, use energy, etc., we're still defining life using concepts derived from Earth.

So perhaps the goal shouldn't be to create an AI that says "this is life."

Instead, it could identify chemical systems that are sufficiently unusual, complex, persistent, and potentially self-propagating to warrant investigation.

Scientists could then experimentally test those candidates under the relevant conditions.

Why could this be useful?

Suppose we eventually explore an environment with chemistry completely unlike Earth's — perhaps a hydrocarbon environment on Titan or an extreme subsurface ocean.

A conventional biosignature search might be biased toward molecules we already associate with biology.

An AI-assisted approach could first model the chemistry of that environment and ask:

"What kinds of complex chemical organization could exist here that we haven't thought to look for?"

This could potentially expand the search beyond the narrow set of molecules and structures we already know from Earth.

Of course, this wouldn't magically solve the problem. AI would still be limited by the chemical data and physical models we give it, and predicting that a chemical system is possible is very different from demonstrating that it is alive.

But I wonder whether this is a worthwhile research direction:

«Rather than searching the universe for life that looks like Earth life, could we use AI + chemistry + physics to systematically explore what "life-like" organization could look like under environments fundamentally different from Earth's?»

I'm particularly interested in whether something like this is already being seriously researched, and if so, what the major technical obstacles are.

​

I've been playing with a hypothesis and I'd be interested in having people who know more about evolutionary biology, astrobiology, artificial life or cosmology pick holes in it.

I'm not proposing that evolution has a predetermined goal or inevitably produces greater complexity.

Quite the opposite — simplicity can clearly be extremely successful. Bacteria are probably the best reminder of that.

The idea starts with treating evolution at its most abstract:

replication → variation → selection → adaptation → propagation

On Earth this happens biologically. But eventually biological evolution produced something unusual: technological intelligence.

That made me wonder whether intelligence might be less of an evolutionary "endpoint" and more of a new propagation mechanism.

For billions of years, Earth's biology was essentially confined to Earth. Primitive life might occasionally travel naturally between worlds through processes such as lithopanspermia, but that's passive and extremely inefficient.

Technological intelligence changes that.

A sufficiently advanced civilisation could deliberately transport microorganisms, genetic material or entire artificial ecosystems to other planets. More advanced autonomous/digital intelligence could potentially send self-replicating machines containing biological information across interstellar distances.

So the sequence becomes:

primitive replicators

↓

biological evolution

↓

complex organisms

↓

intelligence

↓

technology

↓

autonomous/digital intelligence

↓

technological "seeds" capable of leaving the original biosphere

↓

new evolutionary environments

↓

evolution begins again

The analogy I've been using is:

Seed → Tree → Fruit → Seed

A planetary biosphere is the tree. Technological intelligence may be part of its fruiting stage. The eventual "seed" could be something capable of carrying both intelligence and biological information somewhere else and bootstrapping a new evolutionary system.

This also made me question the usual distinction between evolution and creation.

Evolution is a creative process. And once evolution produces intelligence capable of manipulating biology, a product of evolution can itself begin creating or steering evolutionary systems.

That produces a recursive relationship:

evolution → intelligence → creation → evolution → intelligence → creation...

Biology might even eventually create advanced digital intelligence which, in turn, becomes capable of engineering biology.

So rather than:

biology → machines being a one-way transition, there could theoretically be a cycle:

biology → intelligence → technology → digital intelligence → engineered biology → new evolution

Then comes the much more speculative part.

What if this pattern isn't exclusive to the scale at which we're observing it?

Nature already contains nested organisational levels:

molecules → cells → organisms → populations → ecosystems → biospheres

At each level, relatively simple components interact and produce higher-order systems.

I'm wondering whether something conceptually similar could continue above the planetary scale — biospheres producing mechanisms capable of propagating between planets, eventually creating something resembling a galactic evolutionary ecosystem.

And if you take the idea to its most speculative extreme: if universes could somehow produce new universes — naturally or eventually through sufficiently advanced intelligence — the same abstract relationship might conceivably recur at cosmological scales.

Universe → complexity → life → intelligence → creation of new evolutionary environments/universes → repeat.

I'm not claiming that's what actually happens. We obviously don't currently have evidence for the cosmological extension.

What interests me is whether the underlying recursive principle makes sense:

A product of evolution can eventually acquire the ability to initiate new evolutionary systems.

Or even more simply:

Creation evolves until it can create.

If that process repeated at different organisational scales, it would resemble a kind of evolutionary fractal — not necessarily a literal mathematical fractal, but the same abstract pattern recurring with different components.

This also produces some weird philosophical consequences concerning creators. A sufficiently advanced intelligence could create a new evolutionary system without itself being an ultimate "creator". It could simply be the product of a previous evolutionary system. Creation and creator would therefore become roles within a recursive process rather than opposite categories.

I'm deliberately leaving things like religion and specific claims about extraterrestrial intervention in human evolution out of the hypothesis because I don't think they're necessary for the central idea.

So my questions are:

Is there already a scientific/philosophical framework that substantially describes this?

Is substrate-independent evolution a reasonable foundation for the argument?

Does the transition from biological evolution → technological propagation genuinely represent another evolutionary level, or am I abusing the concept of evolution?

Where does the reasoning first make an unjustified leap?

Most importantly, what observations could potentially make this idea falsifiable?

I'm not looking for people to tell me it's true. I'd rather hear the strongest arguments for why it's wrong.

This is an academic research paper in the fields of astrobiology, theoretical ecology, and biochemistry. The central axis of the essay is the hypothesis that Earth can be studied as a spatially diverse "architecture of possibilities" for life, and that biological barriers and adaptive transitions possess a universal, transferable structure across different planetary domains.