#atmospheres — Public Fediverse posts

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.

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

Ten years ago, on 13/11/2015, I made these field recordings at the site from which young men involved in the Paris attacks left for Paris; arrests took place on the same spot the following day. Recording “before having words.” I had spent seven years working in the street life of these kids and was moving into sound studies in urban planning. This experience motivated a move away from #soundscape towards #atmospheres, #habitus, #infrastructures of violence, & #affect. https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=30439

Just saw my fist poster that was accessible for vision impaired people and it is amazing, why don’t we all do this!

#ScienceForEveryone #Inclusion #DEIA #Lightning #Atmospheres #AGU22