Scientists have proposed a new way to search for alien life through the lens of computation, which is described as “a fundamental measure of living systems” in a new study.
The research proposes looking for extraterrestrial life in so-called “computational zones” that could encompass a much wider range of habitats than traditional “habitable zones,” which are areas where liquid water might exist on a planetary surface in similar conditions to those found on Earth when the earliest forms of life emerged.
Computational zones, in contrast, are areas in which information can be processed, and could include any environment with three principal characteristics—capacity, energy, and instantiation (or substrate)—which could include overlooked substellar objects, such as brown dwarfs, the subsurface oceans of ice moons like Europa, or massive artificial structures, such as Dyson spheres.To read more, click here.