Zurich and SETI Institute Launch Joint Chair on Life's Origins

The ETH Zurich and the SETI Institute have announced a new cooperation, centred on a newly advertised assistant professorship in "Earth and Planetary Evolution" at the university's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. The post is to play a central role at the Centre for Origin and Prevalence of Life (COPL), according to a joint press release from the two institutions cited by GreWi.

Both bodies frame the arrangement around shared questions. "Both the SETI Institute and the COPL investigate how life emerges and how widespread it might be in the universe," the press release states. The SETI Institute is based in California; the COPL sits within the Zurich department hosting the chair.

Separately, researchers have published work on interstellar objects. Sean N. Raymond of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux at the Universite de Bordeaux, Nathan A. Kaib of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson and a third co-author found that some interstellar bodies can, under certain circumstances, be permanently bound to another star, in this case the Sun. The finding follows the 2017 discovery of 1I/'Oumuamua and two further interstellar objects, which established that the solar system is regularly crossed by bodies from other planetary systems; such objects usually travel on open trajectories and leave again.

Other recent work concerns Venus. A study reports that the planet's extremely acidic clouds, at altitudes of roughly 48 to 64 kilometres where temperatures are milder and closer to Earth-like, might not merely preserve certain biological molecules but could allow them to form complex structures. The Venus surface is considered hostile to life because of its extreme temperatures, and the clouds are roughly 98 per cent composed of a substance the excerpt does not name in full.

NASA's Perseverance rover reached the inner edge of Jezero Crater in September 2023, where mission scientists had expected sedimentary rocks along the shoreline of an ancient lake. Orbiters had detected strong carbonate signals in the area, called the "Margin Unit"; on Earth, carbonates frequently form in shallow ocean and lake environments capable of supporting life. A further item argues that advanced civilisations pushing computing to its most powerful and efficient state would produce a distinct energy signal detectable from Earth.