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Habitability is a continuous property of nature

Nature Astronomy volume 4, pages 294–295 (2020)Cite this article

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To the Editor — In their recent Comment, Cockell et al.1 argue that the habitability of an environment is fundamentally a binary property; that is to say, an environment can either support the metabolic processes of a given organism or not. The habitability of different environments, they argue, may have different degrees that could be determined at least in theory by answering the question: ‘is this environment habitable to a given organism?’ ‘More’ or ‘less’ habitable environments could then be related by the number of yes or no answers given to what is fundamentally a series of binary questions and decisions.

In my opinion, there are at least three implicit assumptions made for this line of reasoning that are implausible and that sabotage the conclusions. The first is in the genetic diversity of the organisms. The wording of Cockell et al. suggests that the organisms subjected to a hypothetical yes/no inquiry are in fact as distinct as, for example, the cyanobacterium Cylindrospermum and the domestic pig, Sus domesticus. This implicit assumption of a biologically discontinuous sample of organisms is key to the logic of the binary interpretation of habitability.

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Fig. 1: Habitability ranking based on a binary interpretation of habitability.

References

  1. Cockell, C. S., Stevens, A. H. & Prescott, R. Nat. Astron. 3, 956–957 (2019).

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  2. Heller, R. & Armstrong, J. Astrobiology 14, 50–66 (2014).

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  3. Wittgenstein, L. Philosophische Untersuchungen (Suhrkamp, 1953).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) under PLATO Data Center grant 50OL1701.

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  1. Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Göttingen, Germany

    René Heller

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  1. René Heller
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Correspondence to René Heller.

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Heller, R. Habitability is a continuous property of nature. Nat Astron 4, 294–295 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-020-1063-x

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