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Speculative evolution is a subgenre of science fiction and an artistic movement focused on hypothetical scenarios in the evolution of life, and a significant form of fictional biology. [1] It is also known as speculative biology [ 2 ] and it is referred to as speculative zoology [ 3 ] in regards to hypothetical animals . [ 1 ]
Xenobiology (XB) is a subfield of synthetic biology, the study of synthesizing and manipulating biological devices and systems. [1] The name "xenobiology" derives from the Greek word xenos, which means "stranger, alien". Xenobiology is a form of biology that is not (yet) familiar to science and is not found in nature. [2]
Nucleic acids may not be the only biomolecules in the universe capable of coding for life processes. [1]Astrobiology (also xenology or exobiology) is a scientific field within the life and environmental sciences that studies the origins, early evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe by investigating its deterministic conditions and contingent events. [2]
Rare Earth was succeeded in 2003 by the follow-on book The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of our World, also by Ward and Brownlee, which talks about the Earth's long-term future and eventual demise under a warming and expanding Sun, showing readers the concept that planets like Earth ...
The possibility of life-forms being based on "alternative" biochemistries is the topic of an ongoing scientific discussion, informed by what is known about extraterrestrial environments and about the chemical behaviour of various elements and compounds. It is of interest in synthetic biology and is also a common subject in science fiction.
In its review of Evolving the Alien, the London Review of Books commented that Cohen and Stewart's speculative approach is useful in exposing errors in conventional thinking, and is "painlessly educative" on the current state of the applicable sciences, but criticized their "naive optimism" with respect to future technological breakthroughs in human space travel.
Xenoarchaeology, a branch of xenology dealing with extraterrestrial cultures, is a hypothetical form of archaeology that exists mainly in works of science fiction. The field is concerned with the study of the material remains to reconstruct and interpret past life-ways of alien civilizations.
From the early 1960s, molecular biology was increasingly seen as a threat to the traditional core of evolutionary biology. Established evolutionary biologists—particularly Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and George Gaylord Simpson, three of the architects of the modern synthesis—were extremely skeptical of molecular approaches ...