Astrobiology Science Conference 2017 (LPI Contrib. No. 1965) 3217.pdf HABITABILITY METRICS FOR ASTROBIOLOGY. Abel Méndez1, Dirk Schulze-Makuch2, and Guillermo Nery3, 1Planetary Habitability Laboratory, University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo (
[email protected]), 3Technical University Berlin, Germany (
[email protected]), 3University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo (
[email protected]). Introduction: On Earth, habitability is generally izing a habitat and describing its complexity. None of correlated with the presence of life, but this will not these indices alone intend to summarize all the habita- necessarily be the case for all habitable planets. There bility details of a system as sometimes assumed. might be many planets on which habitable conditions Habitability and Biosignatures: How habitability for Earth-like life prevail, but where the origin of life, and biosignatures are correlated is a standing problem for which the conditions are expected to be much more in astrobiology. For example, planets with high ESI constrained, never took place. Also, a biosignature on a (i.e. more similar in size and insolation as Earth) or non-habitable planet could be interpreted as a false- PHI should be more likely to show the presence of positive or suggest a type of life with which we are not gases in their atmosphere (i.e. oxygen and methane familiar, among other explanations. Therefore, it is together), which can be interpreted to have a biological necessary to include quantitative measures of habita- cause. It will take many exoplanet observations in the bility to properly assess not only the distribution of following decades to test this and similar hypothesis.