In the quest to understand the potential for life beyond Earth, researchers are widening their search to encompass not only biological markers, but also technological ones. While astrobiologists have long recognized the importance of oxygen for life as we know it, oxygen could also be a key to unlocking advanced technology on a planetary scale.

In a published in Nature Astronomy, , the Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the Ģ����ý and the author of (Harper, 2023), and an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Roma Tor Vergata, Italy, outline the links between atmospheric oxygen and the potential rise of advanced technology on distant planets.

“We are ready to find signatures of life on alien worlds,” Frank says. “But how do the conditions on a planet tell us about the possibilities for intelligent, technology-producing life?”

“In our paper, we explore whether any atmospheric composition would be compatible with the presence of advanced technology,” Balbi says. “We found that the atmospheric requirements may be quite stringent.”

Igniting cosmic technospheres

Frank and Balbi posit that, beyond its necessity for respiration and metabolism in multicellular organisms, oxygen is crucial to developing fire—and fire is a hallmark of a technological civilization. They delve into the concept of “technospheres,” expansive realms of advanced technology that emit telltale signs—called “technosignatures”—of extraterrestrial intelligence.

On Earth, the development of technology demanded easy access to open-air combustion—the process at the heart of fire, in which something is burned by combining a fuel and an oxidant, usually oxygen. Whether it’s cooking, forging metals for structures, crafting materials for homes, or harnessing energy through burning fuels, combustion has been the driving force behind industrial societies.

Tracing back through Earth’s history, the researchers found that the controlled use of fire and the subsequent metallurgical advancements were only possible when oxygen levels in the atmosphere reached or exceeded 18 percent. This means that only planets with significant oxygen concentrations will be capable of developing advanced technospheres, and, therefore, leaving detectable technosignatures.

The oxygen bottleneck

The levels of oxygen required to biologically sustain complex life and intelligence are not as high as the levels necessary for technology, so while a species might be able to emerge in a world without oxygen, it will not be able to become a technological species, according to the researchers.

“You might be able to get biology—you might even be able to get intelligent creatures—in a world that doesn’t have oxygen,” Frank says, “but without a ready source of fire, you’re never going to develop higher technology because higher technology requires fuel and melting.”

Enter the “oxygen bottleneck,” a term coined by the researchers to describe the critical threshold that separates worlds capable of fostering technological civilizations from those that fall short. That is, oxygen levels are a bottleneck that impedes the emergence of advanced technology.

“The presence of high degrees of oxygen in the atmosphere is like a bottleneck you have to get through in order to have a technological species,” Frank says. “You can have everything else work out, but if you don’t have oxygen in the atmosphere, you’re not going to have a technological species.”

Targeting extraterrestrial hotspots

The research, which addresses a previously unexplored facet in the cosmic pursuit of intelligent life, underscores the need to prioritize planets with high oxygen levels when searching for extraterrestrial technosignatures.

“Targeting planets with high oxygen levels should be prioritized because the presence or absence of high oxygen levels in exoplanet atmospheres could be a major clue in finding potential technosignatures,” Frank says.

“The implications of discovering intelligent, technological life on another planet would be huge,” adds Balbi. “Therefore, we need to be extremely cautious in interpreting possible detections. Our study suggests that we should be skeptical of potential technosignatures from a planet with insufficient atmospheric oxygen.”

This work was funded in part by a grant from NASA.

Living systems—unlike non-living or inanimate objects—use information about their surrounding environment to survive. But not all information from the environment is meaningful or relevant for survival. The subset of information that is meaningful, and perhaps necessary for being alive, is called semantic information.

In a new paper published in , physicists and their coauthors have, for the first time, applied this theory of semantic information to a well-known model of living systems in biology and ecology: an organism or agent foraging for resources.

Using a mathematical model, the researchers simulated how a foraging agent moves in an environment and collects information about resources. The simulations revealed what the researchers have called a semantic threshold: the critical point where information matters for the agent’s survival. Above this threshold, removing some information doesn’t affect survival, but below it, every bit of information is crucial.

By quantifying the correlations or connections between an agent and its environment, the researchers are helping to reveal the role of information in that agent’s ability to maintain its own existence.

Correlations as connections

Imagine a bird in its forest. It knows where to find the food it has stored to nourish itself. Say you move that bird 100 feet to a different part of the forest. “By doing so, you’ve cut some of the bird’s correlations or connections with its environment, but there are still enough correlations that it doesn’t affect viability, or the ability of the bird to survive,” explains , the lead author of the paper and a postdoctoral associate in the at Rochester.

Now, move the bird 1,000 feet away—or, more drastically, 1,000 miles away.

“Eventually, the bird is not going to know anything about its environment—all of the connections are cut. The viability of the bird goes from not really being affected to all of a sudden starting to plummet,” says Sowinski.

By contrast, moving a non-living thing like a pebble 100 feet, 1,000 feet, or even 1,000 miles away doesn’t fundamentally change the connections between the environment and the pebble. That’s because the pebble isn’t harnessing any information—relevant or irrelevant—about its surroundings to maintain or reproduce itself.

“One of the most basic things that life does is consume resources while navigating in space,” says coauthor , a professor of physics at Rochester. “These new findings indicate that our way of thinking—the idea that there is relevant and irrelevant information for survival—shows promise when applied in a simple resource-foraging model. The big question now is, will our way of thinking still apply with increasingly complex models?”

From particles to people: How does agency emerge?

Agency means acting with a purpose, or responding to the environment in a non-random way. That requires making meaningful connections with the environment—interacting, reacting, and then deliberately acting in ways that are self-maintaining and self-producing.

So, when and how does agency—in an individual, in a group, or in a system—emerge?

“That’s a deep philosophical question,” says coauthor Adam Frank, the Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. “The whole point of advances in science is to take questions that used to be the domain of philosophical speculation and find a way to talk about them quantitatively. This paper does that in a mathematically rigorous way.”

Such a broadly applicable mathematical definition of semantic information could offer new insights across the disciplines—from biology to cognitive science, philosophy to physics—into how living and non-living systems are related. That’s one reason why the , a philanthropic organization that funds academic scholarship on critical topics crossing disciplinary, religious, and geographical boundaries, has supported the team’s research.

“By using this language of information theory, we’re creating a bridge between the mechanistic narratives in the physical sciences and the more informational or behavioral narratives used in the life sciences,” says Sowinski.

He, like his colleagues, is energized to continue the team’s line of inquiry into the fundamental mystery of life. As Sowinski puts it, “Our work is a promising first step to answering a bigger question: What in the world causes a lifeless rock full of pebbles to eventually be covered with purposeful entities that are interacting meaningfully with one another and their environment?”

In an article published in The Atlantic, , the Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the , discusses what he calls this new era of astronomy. As he explains, a field called High Energy Density Laboratory Astrophysics (HEDLA) has emerged around lasers, which provide scientists an entirely new realm to better understand planetary conditions and other phenomena in the universe.

Large lasers, such as the at Rochester’s , have allowed researchers “to explode mini supernovas in their labs, reproduce environments around newborn stars, and even probe the hearts of massive and potentially habitable exoplanets,” Frank writes.

He attributes the emergence of large-scale, lab-based astrophysics to the decades-long quest for nuclear fusion. Last month, for instance, the Department of Energy announced that scientists had reached a fusion milestone when they achieved ignition—that is, more energy was released from the fusion reaction than was expended in generating it. To accomplish this feat, researchers used lasers to recreate conditions that exist at the core of the sun, where fusion reactions already occur.

“They focused the lasers on tiny pellets of hydrogen, mimicking the sun’s extraordinarily high temperatures and densities to squeeze the hydrogen nuclei into helium and kick off fusion reactions,” Frank writes. “The lasers used are factory-sized affairs that require enormous power to do their work. It was in the process of building these multistory light machines that scientists realized they were also incidentally building an unprecedented tool for studying the heavens.”

As for the future of HEDLA research, Frank says a “sweet spot” may be using laser-based experiments to assist in the search for distant worlds that could potentially harbor life.

“The universe is more in our hands than ever before,” he writes.

• Read the .

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This past year, Jeff Bezos launched himself into space, while Elon Musk funded a space flight for a non-astronaut crew. Space collaborations between government and private entities, including Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin have become increasingly common. But with the recent emergence of the so-called “New Space” movement, aerospace companies are working to develop low-cost access to space for everyone, not only billionaires.

For a future beyond Earth, however, humans need places to accommodate homes, buildings, and other structures for millions of people to live and work.

Right now space cities exist only in science fiction. But are space cities feasible in reality? And, if so, how?

According to new research from scientists, our future may lie in asteroids.

In what they deem a “wildly theoretical” published in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, the researchers, including , the Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and Peter Miklavčič, a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering and the paper’s first author, outline a plan for creating large cities on asteroids.

“Our paper lives on the edge of science and science fiction,” Frank says. “We’re taking a science fiction idea that has been very popular recently—in TV shows like Amazon’s The Expanse—and offering a new path for using an asteroid to build a city in space.”

A spinning space metropolis

In 1972 NASA commissioned physicist Gerard O’Neill to design a space habitat that could feasibly allow humans to live in space. O’Neill and his colleagues worked out a plan for “O’Neill cylinders,” spinning space metropolises consisting of two cylinders rotating in opposite directions, with a rod connecting the cylinders at each end. The cylinders would rotate fast enough to provide artificial gravity on their inner surface but slow enough that people living in them would not experience motion sickness.

Since then, TV shows and movies including Star Trek and books such as Orson Scott Card’s 1985 novel Ender’s Game have depicted O’Neill cylinder-like habitats populated with human beings. Both Bezos and Musk have referenced O’Neill cylinders in their visions for future space habitats.

However, while O’Neill cylinders offer a solution to space’s lack of gravity, getting the necessary building supplies from Earth to space to create the O’Neill cylinders would be difficult and cost prohibitive.

A pandemic project

During the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, Miklavčič, Frank, and several Rochester students and colleagues—John Siu ’20; Esteban Wright ’22 (PhD); Alex Debrecht ’21 (PhD); , an assistant professor of mechanical engineering; and , a professor of physics and astronomy—considered this conundrum of creating cost-effective O’Neill cylinders.

“This project started as just a way for physicists and engineers to blow off steam, set aside worldly stresses for a while, and imagine something crazy,” Miklavčič says.

They soon discovered, however, that they might be onto something: could asteroids be used to create O’Neill cylinders?

A fast, cheap, and effective path

Asteroids are rocky bodies orbiting the sun, leftover from the formation of the solar system approximately 4.6 billion years ago. Scientists estimate there are about 1,000 asteroids larger than one mile across traveling in our solar system.

“All those flying mountains whirling around the sun might provide a faster, cheaper, and more effective path to space cities,” Frank says.

Besides their abundance in the solar system, asteroids have many other advantages for human habitation, including their rock layers, which provide a natural shield against deadly cosmic radiation from the sun.

But asteroids have several major drawbacks, the researchers found: the rock that comprises asteroids is not strong enough to handle getting even one-third of Earth’s gravity from spinning. Once an asteroid was set into rotation, it would merely fracture and break. Moreover, most asteroids are not even solid rock but “rubble piles”—clusters of loose boulders, stones, and sand held together by the weak mutual gravity of space. If the researchers wanted to make space habitats out of these asteroids, they’d have to figure out how to work with rubble piles.

Managing rubble

Miklavčič’s research focuses on granular systems—systems composed of many tiny particles, such as sand or grain. In particular, he studies how these systems respond in environments with low or no gravity; for instance, how space rovers might impact and disperse granular surfaces of planets when they touch down.

“My typical research and this project are on two ends of a spectrum,” Miklavčič says. “I’m normally interested in the grain-level response of granular media, whereas this project was more of a big picture exercise managing rubble as a large system.”

Miklavčič and his colleagues conducted calculations of forces, materials, and strategies for constructing rotating asteroid settlements and came up with an idea for containing the rubble that would inevitably result from forming an O’Neill cylinder out of an asteroid.

Containing an asteroid

Their solution? A very big, very flexible bag.

The researchers imagine covering an asteroid in a flexible, mesh bag made of ultralight and high-strength carbon nanofibers—tubes made of carbon, each just a few atoms in diameter. The bag would envelope and support the entire spinning mass of the asteroid’s rubble and the habitat within, while also supporting its own weight as it spins.

“A cylindrical containment bag constructed from carbon nanotubes would be extremely light relative to the mass of the asteroid rubble and the habitat, yet strong enough to hold everything together,” Miklavčič says. “Even better, carbon nanotubes are being developed today, with much interest in scaling up their production for use in larger-scale applications.”

The process could theoretically go something like this:

• The asteroid would be spun to create artificial gravity. This process would inevitably cause the asteroid to break apart.
• The bits of the asteroid rubble would fling outward, expanding the carbon nanofiber bag enveloping the asteroid.
• When the bag reached its maximum extent, the carbon nanofibers would snap taut, catching the expanding rubble.
• As the rubble settled against the bag, it would produce a layer thick enough to shield against radiation for anyone living inside. The spin of the cylinder would induce artificial gravity on the inner surface.

“Based on our calculations, a 300-meter-diameter asteroid just a few football fields across could be expanded into a cylindrical space habitat with about 22 square miles of living area,” Frank says. “That’s roughly the size of Manhattan.”

Just theoretical—for now

Living inside asteroids is still the fancy of science fiction, but Frank and Miklavčič say the physics and mechanics are there to make science fiction a reality.

“Obviously, no one will be building asteroid cities anytime soon, but the technologies required to accomplish this kind of engineering don’t break any laws of physics,” Frank says.

Everything the researchers imagine in their study—from the motors needed to spin up the asteroid, to the carbon-nanofiber bag—are technologies people are currently either using or developing.

“The idea of asteroid cities might seem too distant until you realize that in 1900 no one had ever flown in an airplane, yet right this minute thousands of people are sitting comfortably in chairs as they hurdle at hundreds of miles an hour, miles above the ground,” Frank says. “Space cities might seem like a fantasy now, but history shows that a century or so of technological progress can make impossible things possible.”

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What are UFOs? UFO stands for��unidentified flying objects. They are sometimes also referred to as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP. Some people believe that sightings of UFOs and UAPs are evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. In a��, Adam Frank, the Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor of at the Ģ����ý, disagrees:

To date, there is simply no data—no evidence—strong enough to link them [UFOs] to alien life. Fuzzy videos and personal narratives, as engaging as they may be, are simply not enough to support such an extraordinary claim.

Now though, America’s space agency has it is convening a commission to investigate UAPs. “If it’s handled well, the commission could do more than shed much-needed light on UAPs,” writes Frank.��“It could also give Americans a masterclass in the most basic, most important, and unfortunately, most boring topic in science: standards of evidence.”

As Frank explains, scientists have the technology to detect biosignatures, which occur when a distant planet is clothed in a biosphere whose life alters the host world’s atmosphere biosignatures—in other words, signs of life.��“But as exciting as this prospect is, we won’t ever be able to claim we’ve found life without those all-important standards of evidence,” Frank writes. “And it’s those standards, stated clearly and followed precisely, that have everything to do with UFOs and NASA.”

If—or perhaps when?—NASA detects life elsewhere in the universe, the finding will come with the weight of the standards of evidence embodied by the agency. According to Frank:

The real opportunity lying in the proposed NASA study is not just about what it finds. Instead, it’s about showing the American people how NASA, and science in general, goes about the business of finding. Showing people how science and those standards of evidence work in a transparent way, and on a subject everyone is interested in, could be a powerful moment.

• Read the full Newsweek .

When Ģ����ý astrophysicist Adam Frank was five years old, he found his father’s pulp science fiction magazines featuring pictures of bug-eyed monsters and lunar landscapes. That was the beginning of Frank’s love affair with the stars and science itself.

“For me, it was a quasi-spiritual thing,” says Frank. “I felt this powerful sense of awe and sacredness about the vast sky, and the fact that I was just one story out of an infinity of stories.”

Frank wishes everyone could look at science with the same kind of awe and wonder. But , he knows that’s a tall order, one with economic ramifications.

“The nation that controls the scientific high ground controls the future,” says Frank, who’s confident that the public’s faith in science will make a comeback—but it will take time.

Q&A with Adam Frank

What does it mean to be a scientist?

Frank: People go into science because they have intense curiosity. Every kid is basically a scientist; they like to poke things to see what happens. Fortunately, we can turn that curiosity into a lifetime’s work. If you loved watching ants as a kid, you become an entomologist. If you loved staring at the stars, you become an astronomer. Being a scientist also means being an engineer who likes to build things to see if they work. A scientist is just a person who’s willing to stay with a question for hours, days, weeks, or years. You go to sleep at night and can’t wait to wake up and get back to the problem you’re working on.

So, what appeals to you most? The question, the search for an answer, or the answer itself?

������԰�:��No matter what answer I get, I just go on to the next question, so it’s the inquiry—the absorption in the question—that matters. When I work on a mathematical derivation, I’ll put my head down and get started, then suddenly five hours have gone by and I didn’t notice at all. You just disappear into the work. I think the same happens with musicians and artists. And there’s this sense, especially with the deeper questions, that something extraordinary is waiting to be seen just over the horizon. So for me, it’s the journey that is so engaging.

What are the biggest misconceptions that people have about science and scientists?

������԰�:��I remember seeing that showed the public trusted scientists more than they trusted people in other professions. But in the same poll, the public said scientists don’t have feelings like other people do. They apparently got that notion from watching TV shows where scientists were portrayed like Mr. Spock on Star Trek. That, of course, is the biggest misconception. Scientists fall in love, we get pumped when our baseball teams win (the Mets, thank you very much), we’d throw ourselves in front of a bus to help our kids—there’s fundamentally no difference between a scientist and anyone else.

According to a released in February 2022, the American public’s trust in scientists has dropped significantly in the last couple of years. What do you think accounts for that?

������԰�:��A lot of it has to do with the COVID pandemic. Because the data were new and constantly changing, the scientists couldn’t always get it right in the beginning. But then, very quickly, they figured it out, which is why we had a vaccine in less than a year. On top of that, the pandemic became politically polarized, with experts like Dr. Fauci being villainized. Also some very well-funded people have been leading efforts for years to subvert the public’s understanding of science. This is particularly true of climate science since it threatens the bank accounts of folks in the oil and coal industries. But sowing distrust in science is a very dangerous and slippery slope. You can’t just point to one area of science and call it a hoax. It will spill over into other areas of science. And the problem with that is that science is a central pillar of this country’s success. Now all this misinformation and science denial is being spread for purely political ends, and we’re going to pay a real price for that if we don’t correct it.

Some science skeptics cast doubts on the COVID vaccine because it seemed to have been developed too quickly. How do you respond to that concern?

Frank: The problem is they don’t understand that the technologies behind those new vaccines had been in the works for years because of government-funded research. We were lucky that these developing biotechnologies were easily turned into COVID vaccines. The problem is most people don’t understand how research works, how scientists as a community work together for years to establish what they know and what they don’t know.

What do people need to understand about the process of scientific research?

������԰�:��More than being able to quote the facts of science, what we really need is for people to understand its methods. I like to talk about the 3 “S’s” of science: spitballs, supertankers, and stadiums. Let’s take the question, “Is coffee bad for you?” Every other day you hear news of a research study showing it is bad for you or, no wait, it’s actually good for you. But every research paper is just a little spitball that’s being shot at the supertanker of science. It takes a supertanker seven miles to turn around. That means all those spitballs have to line up on the same side to make the supertanker change course. In other words, any individual research study doesn’t mean much by itself. Finally, who’s steering the science supertanker? Everybody!—a stadium’s worth of scientists. A consensus has to develop in the scientific community before you can say science “knows” something. What does this tell us about coffee and health? It tells us science doesn’t know yet. When you see all those reports going both ways it tells you the science isn’t decided. This is the opposite of something like climate change where all the studies have been saying the same thing for, like, 30 years. When scientists argue, it’s over things at the edge of research—over questions that have not yet been resolved. It takes time to resolve those kinds of questions.

What is the price that we pay for science misinformation?

������԰�:��The implications are very simple. The nation that controls the scientific high ground controls the future. Germany before World War II was a scientific powerhouse. It is, after all, the birthplace of quantum mechanics. With the Nazis, it was clear that the nation was moving toward authoritarianism and much of their scientific talent left for the United States. So if the United States continues down this road of science denial, the best and brightest of the world won’t come here. It’s really about our nation’s capacity to be an economic powerhouse.

What’s the best way to gain the trust of the skeptics?

������԰�:��I think they need to understand how science works. We don’t gain their trust just by telling them about results. They need to understand how scientists know what they know. Skeptics should also be encouraged to imagine life without science. They should think about the robotic hip replacement that allows their grandma to walk around again. It’s not like a special version of science is used to study climate and another used to make hip replacements; it’s the same science. The same process is used in the research that leads to medical devices, cell phones, computers, vaccines, and climate understanding.

It seems that the science deniers have been able to make effective use of social media and sound bites. How can you counteract that?

������԰�:��Maybe over time, we’ll become savvy media consumers, but right now we’re just in the grips of insanity.

But there’s one more problem which is even deeper. People used to be humble about their ignorance. I’m ignorant about many things, but I’m not going to parade that around. If I don’t know something, I’ll admit it. But somehow, we’ve gotten to a point where ignorance has become a hallmark of pride. And that’s a social matter. You wouldn’t want to fly in a plane piloted by a knucklehead who had no experience but was blowing off steam about how “he didn’t need experts telling him what to do.”

Are you hopeful?

������԰�:��I’m always hopeful, because what’s the alternative? But we may be in for a rough time for the next few decades as we try to sort this out. There are people gaining advantages both economically and politically from all the polarization, and they’re throwing science into the mix. Those are the forces that are going to take time to work out.

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The collective activity of life—all of the microbes, plants, and animals—have changed planet Earth.

Take, for example, plants: plants ‘invented’ a way of undergoing photosynthesis to enhance their own survival, but in so doing, released oxygen that changed the entire function of our planet. This is just one example of individual lifeforms performing their own tasks, but collectively having an impact on a planetary scale.

If the collective activity of life—known as the biosphere—can change the world, could the collective activity of cognition, and action based on this cognition, also change a planet? Once the biosphere evolved, Earth took on a life of its own. If a planet��with life has a life of its own, can it also have a mind of its own?

These are questions posed by Adam Frank, the Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the , and his colleagues at the Planetary Science Institute and ��at Arizona State University,��in a . Their self-described “thought experiment” combines current scientific understanding about the Earth with broader questions about how life alters a planet. In the paper, the researchers discuss what they call “planetary intelligence”—the idea of cognitive activity operating on a planetary scale—to raise new ideas about the ways in which humans might tackle global issues such as climate change.

As Frank says, “If we ever hope to survive as a species, we must use our intelligence for the greater good of the planet.”

An ‘immature technosphere’

Frank, Grinspoon, and Walker draw from ideas such as the Gaia hypothesis—which proposes that the biosphere interacts strongly with the non-living geological systems of air, water, and land to maintain Earth’s habitable state—to explain that even a non-technologically capable species can display planetary Intelligence. The key is that the collective activity of life creates a system that is self-maintaining.

For example, Frank says, many recent studies have shown how the roots of the trees in a forest connect via underground networks of fungi known as mycorrhizal networks. If one part of the forest needs nutrients, the other parts send the stressed portions the nutrients they need to survive, via the mycorrhizal network. In this way, the forest maintains its own viability.

Right now, our civilization is what the researchers call an “immature technosphere,” a conglomeration of human-generated systems and technology that directly affects the planet but is not self-maintaining. For instance, the majority of our energy usage involves consuming fossil fuels that degrade Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. The technology and energy we consume to survive are destroying our home planet, which will, in turn, destroy our species.

To survive as a species, then, we need to collectively work in the best interest of the planet.

But, Frank says, “we don’t yet have the ability to communally respond in the best interests of the planet. There is intelligence on Earth, but there isn’t planetary intelligence.”

Toward a mature technosphere

The researchers posit four stages of Earth’s past and possible future to illustrate how planetary intelligence might play a role in humanity’s long-term future. They also show how these stages of evolution driven by planetary intelligence may be a feature of any planet in the galaxy that evolves life and a sustainable technological civilization.

• Stage 1 – Immature biosphere: characteristic of very early Earth, billions of years ago and ��before a technological species, when microbes were present but vegetation had not yet come about. There were few global feedbacks because life couldn’t exert forces on Earth’s atmosphere, hydrosphere, and other planetary systems.
• Stage 2 – Mature biosphere: characteristic of Earth, also before a technological species, from about 2.5 billion to 540 million years ago. Stable continents formed, vegetation and photosynthesis developed, oxygen built up in the atmosphere, and the ozone layer emerged. The biosphere exerted a strong influence on the Earth, perhaps helping to maintain Earth’s habitability.
• Stage 3 – Immature technosphere: characteristic of Earth now, with interlinked systems of communication, transportation, technology, electricity, and computers. The technosphere is still immature, however, because it is not integrated into other Earth systems, such as the atmosphere. Instead, it draws matter and energy from Earth’s systems in ways that will drive the whole into a new state that likely doesn’t include the technosphere itself. Our current technosphere is, in the long run, working against itself.
• Stage 4 – Mature technosphere: where Earth should aim to be in the future, Frank says, with technological systems in place that benefit the entire planet, including globally harvesting energy in forms like solar that do not harm the biosphere. The mature technosphere is one that has co-evolved with the biosphere into a form that allows both the technosphere and the biosphere to thrive.

“Planets evolve through immature and mature stages, and planetary intelligence is indicative of when you get to a mature planet,” Frank says. “The million-dollar question is figuring out what planetary intelligence looks like and means for us in practice because we don’t know how to move to a mature technosphere yet.”

The complex system of planetary intelligence

Although we don’t yet know specifically how planetary intelligence might manifest itself, the researchers note that a mature technosphere involves integrating technological systems with Earth through a network of feedback loops that make up a complex system.

Put simply, a complex system is anything built from smaller parts that interact in such a fashion that the overall behavior of the system is entirely dependent on the interaction. That is, the sum is more than the whole of its parts. Examples of complex systems include forests, the Internet, financial markets, and the human brain.

By its very nature, a complex system has entirely new properties that emerge when individual pieces are interacting. It is difficult to discern the personality of a human being, for instance, solely by examining the neurons in her brain.

That means it is difficult to predict exactly what properties might emerge when individuals form a planetary intelligence. However, a complex system like planetary intelligence will, according to the researchers, have two defining characteristics: it will have emergent behavior and will need to be self-maintaining.

“The biosphere figured out how to host life by itself billions of years ago by creating systems for moving around nitrogen and transporting carbon,” Frank says. “Now we have to figure out how to have the same kind of self-maintaining characteristics with the technosphere.”

The search for extraterrestrial life

Despite some efforts, including global bans on certain chemicals that harm the environment and a move toward using more solar energy,��“we don’t have planetary intelligence or a mature technosphere yet,” he says. “But the whole purpose of this research is to point out where we should be headed.”

Raising these questions, Frank says, will not only provide information about the past, present, and future survival of life on Earth but will also help in the search for life and civilizations outside our solar system. Frank, for instance, is the principal investigator on a NASA grant to search for technosignatures of civilizations on planets orbiting distant stars.

“We’re saying the only technological civilizations we may ever see—the ones we should expect to see—are the ones that didn’t kill themselves, meaning they must have reached the stage of a true planetary intelligence,” he says. “That’s the power of this line of inquiry: it unites what we need to know to survive the climate crisis with what might happen on any planet where life and intelligence evolve.”

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Can the laws of physics untangle traffic jams, stock markets, and other complex systems?

Gourab Ghoshal is using the fundamental laws of physics to untangle the complex systems behind human behavior, urban planning, and social networks.

Do aliens exist? Are aliens real? Technosignatures may hold new clues

Adam Frank is searching for “technosignatures,” or the physical and chemical traces of advanced civilizations, among the 4,000 or so exoplanets scientists have found so far.

We think we’re the first advanced earthlings—but how do we really know?

In a compelling thought experiment, Adam Frank wonders how we would truly know if there were a past civilization so advanced that it left little or no trace of its impact on the planet.

Adam Frank, the Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor of at the , has been awarded the 2021 Carl Sagan Medal for excellence in public communication in planetary science, presented by the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the . The award is named in honor of the late Cornell University astrophysicist, astronomer, and educator, who brought science to millions of people worldwide with his PBS series Cosmos and the 1980 book of the same name.

The on this year’s Carl Sagan Medal recipients recognizes Frank for “founding continuously sustained efforts and solid platforms from which science can be distributed to the public in an accessible form.”

Frank cofounded the National Public Radio’s 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog, contributes frequently to the New York Times, and created the “Confronting the Big Questions: Highlights of Modern Astronomy.” The 13.7��blog, which Frank maintained for seven years and ended in April 2018, attracted more than 13 million yearly visits. Frank is a regular on-air commentator for NPR’s news show All Things Considered and contributes to other publications including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Scientific American.

Says University President Sarah C. Mangelsdorf, “Adam Frank is a tremendous ambassador for research, science education, and the URochester. The Sagan Medal is wonderful recognition of his important work to spread scientific knowledge to people of all ages, all over the world.”

An ‘evangelist of science’

A self-described “evangelist of science,” Frank regularly writes and speaks about subjects ranging from intelligent life forms in the universe to climate change, from high-energy-density physics to the importance of science and its funding. He recently appeared on NBC’s Today Show to discuss the science behind alien civilizations and UFOs, and authored a op-ed on the subject. He also appeared on CNN, providing live coverage with Anderson Cooper of Jeff Bezos’s inaugural space flight.

Frank has been awarded several prestigious honors for his work in communicating about science, including the American Physical Society’s 2020 Joseph A. Burton Forum Award for his “multi-channel promotion of public understanding of physics, of science in general, and of the relationship between science and society, using methods and venues that effectively engage and provoke discussion among policy makers, scientists, and the public regarding important issues.”

He has authored four popular books arguing for the beauty of science and against science denial. Frank’s most recent book, Light of the Stars (W.W. Norton, 2018), which NPR deemed “a valuable perspective on the most important problem of our time,” received starred reviews from both Booklist and Kirkus Reviews and was awarded the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Award for Science. In it, he argues that human civilization can survive climate change by learning from the experiences of extraterrestrial civilizations.

Frank also served as science advisor for Marvel’s Doctor Strange and has appeared on numerous science documentaries such as Netflix’s Alien Worlds.

The 2021 Carl Sagan Medal will be presented to Frank at the organization’s 53rd annual meeting, which will take place virtually in October 2021.

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One bright spot was the endurance of science.

“Throughout all our turmoil, American science has not wavered,” Frank writes in a piece for NBC News. “Instead, American science in all its forms—the institutions, individuals and culture—has not only remained solid through the crises, but also provided us a path out of the darkness.”

Frank notes several striking examples of scientific breakthroughs in 2020: while vaccines usually take decades to develop, researchers worked tirelessly and used cutting-edge genetic science to deliver a COVID-19 vaccine in fewer than 12 months; artificial intelligent techniques based on Google’s DeepMind pinpointed breast cancer cells with higher accuracy than doctors could; and the privately owned company SpaceX safely launched American astronauts into space.

These achievements show that greatness is possible, Frank writes, “when we work together and hold fast to the truth.”

Frank’s research is in the general area of theoretical astrophysics, and in particular, the hydrodynamic and magneto-hydrodynamic evolution of matter ejected from stars. A self-described “evangelist of science,” Frank has also been awarded several prestigious honors for his efforts to communicate about science. His most recent book,����(W.W. Norton, 2018) was awarded the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Award for Science.

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