New technique offers better odds of finding aliens, study says

Key to finding extra terrestrial life may not lie in only studying ‘habitable’ planets and looking for liquid water

The search for “computational zones” of nearby stars may yield better chances of finding alien life than the current approach to looking for planets and moons where liquid water can potentially exist, according to a new study.

Computation is a universal phenomenon that involves the manipulation of information following well-defined rules.

Researchers, including those from the Nasa Ames Research Center in the US, call computation a fundamental attribute of living systems – a set of processes that act on information represented by biological systems.

For instance, in life forms on Earth, information is stored in DNA or RNA and the computations are performed by various proteins in the cells.

The yet-to-be peer-reviewed research, posted in the arXiv pre-print server, argues that a more nuanced approach for finding aliens would be to look for signs of “computation”.

In the quest to find extra terrestrial life in other solar systems, astronomers have often looked for “habitable zones” or “Goldilocks zones” of nearby stars, which are regions around a star where water can potentially exist in its liquid form.

The traditional search for alien life looks for potential creatures on other worlds that are at just the right “Goldilocks” distance from a parent star that may use liquid water as a solvent for their internal chemical reactions.

But researchers said there could be more complex life forms in the universe in worlds with other solvents, adding that there may be better chances of finding life in places where there is the easiest access to computation.

Instead of looking for areas around nearby stars that may have liquid water, a better-defined approach to finding extra terrestrial life could be to look for regions in other solar systems that may have stored information acting on its environment, allowing it to evolve via natural selection.

“Computational zones naturally combine traditional habitability factors, including those associated with biological function that incorporate the chemical milieu, constraints on nutrients and free energy, as well as element availability,” researchers explained.

These computational zones require three characteristics pointed out by scientists.

One is the capacity for computation via information stored in a rich repository of chemicals.

There must also be natural energy sources like sunlight or hydrothermal vents and finally, there must also be a substrate within which the computations can happen.

Habitable zones are then a subset of the larger concept of computational zones and an approach to look for the latter may broaden the definition of life.

Looking for computational zones may theoretically help look for technological energy use across the Universe.

“One perennially discussed hypothesis is that alien life may have reached an advanced technological stage, where it builds engines enabling it to perform large amounts of computation. This suggests looking beyond the understood biological qualities of life to detect such situations,” researchers explained.