ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2025
Modelling exo-biospheres for biosignature predictions.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Chance and purpose in the evolution of biospheres.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Searching for signs of alien life-biosignatures-on distant planets requires general hypotheses on the evolution of biospheres, and how life interacts with and influences its planet. We will not be able to visit a distant planet to directly observe any alien life and thus measuring properties of a biosphere such as organism abundance or reproduction rate is impossible. This paper provides an overview of two life-environment coupled models and analyses how their results might aid in guiding our search for biosignatures. The first model is of a simple methanogen biosphere and demonstrates that the 'strength' (i.e. the concentration of a gas in the atmosphere) of the biosignature is only very minimally impacted by the population dynamics of the biosphere. This reduces the number of assumptions needed to predict biosignatures for a given metabolic pathway. The second model is of an evolving life-environment coupled system-the Tangled Nature model-and demonstrates that the most probable trajectory for an exo-biosphere is to diversify over time owing to a mechanism known as sequential selection with memory. These models can inform our search for alien life in the galaxy.This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'Chance and purpose in the evolution of biospheres'.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.