Extraterrestrial life | EPFL Graph Search

Extraterrestrial life or alien life is life which may occur outside Earth and which did not originate on Earth. No extraterrestrial life has yet been conclusively detected. Such life might range from simple forms such as prokaryotes to intelligent beings, possibly bringing forth civilizations that might be far more advanced than humanity. The Drake equation speculates about the existence of sapient life elsewhere in the universe. The science of extraterrestrial life is known as astrobiology. Speculation about the possibility of inhabited worlds beyond Earth dates back to antiquity. Early Christian writers discussed the idea of a "plurality of worlds" as proposed by earlier thinkers such as Democritus; Augustine references Epicurus's idea of innumerable worlds "throughout the boundless immensity of space" (originally expressed in his Letter to Herodotus) in The City of God. In his first-century poem De rerum natura (Book 2:1048–1076), the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius predicted that

Science, Democracy, and the Pursuit of Aliens

Jérôme Baudry

In 1902, a contributor to Popular Science affirmed that “The era of the amateur scientist is passing; science must now be advanced by the professional expert.” Throughout the twentieth century, amateurs have been increasingly excluded from the production of scientific knowledge. But since the 1990s, under the banner of “citizen science”, a growing number of initiatives have involved, once again, amateurs in science, with the goal of democratizing science, promoting scientific literacy, and solving big data problems. The creation of SETI@home at UC Berkeley in 1998 embodied all these aims. Within six month, it had attracted more than one million participants analyzing radio signals from space on their personal computer searching for signs of extraterrestrial life. The initiators of the project and the media constructed the image of the participant along the lines of an imagined amateur scientist making discoveries outside of scientific institutions, while contributing to the making of a global scientific citizenship. Infused by libertarian, countercultural, and cyber-utopian ideals, SETI@home seemed to capture the scientific aspirations of a new generation. But the tens of thousands of online biographical sketches left by the participants present a more nuanced picture. These traces offer a unique window into the self-fashioning of the participants into different kinds of “amateurs”, “volunteers”, and “hobbyists” with various views about professional science and its place in society. These sources helps us better understand the recent reconfigurations of the amateur scientist and, more generally, the struggles over the legitimacy of professional expertise.

2019

On the adjustment, calibration and orientation of drone photogrammetry and laser-scanning

Emmanuel Pierre Quentin Clédat

Centimetre level precision mapping is essential for many applications such as land-use, infrastructure inspection, cultural heritage preservation, and construction site monitoring. However, the acquisition and its preparation (in particular the setting of a ground control point network (GCPs)) are still expensive or even impossible in cluttered or dangerous areas. The recent development of UAVs together with the miniaturization of the sensors is a promising evolution for reducing costs and expand opportunities. The sensors embedded on the drone: GNSS antenna, IMU, camera and (optional) LIDAR are light and often low-cost. The low quality of their raw measurements must be counterbalanced by their rigorous modeling in order to obtain accurate final results: if we cannot expect the sensors to be error-free, one must model these in order to correct them. This is achieved by in-situ calibration or on a dedicated calibration field, together with a rigorous fusion of the raw data acquired by the different sensors with the so-called bundle-adjustment method. This thesis proposes several models to describe the behavior of the sensors, in order to hybridize them rigorously in the bundle-adjustment. Consistent datasets have been acquired on the field specifically to assess the relevance of both the sensor models and their hybridizing in complex photogrammetric processing. The contribution of this thesis could be divided into two mains categories. On one hand, this thesis suggests tools and recommendation to improve directly the procedures achieved by end-users using current UAV-mapping commercial solutions (in particular for the GCPs placement, for the choice of the camera calibration and model and for the flight-plan). On the other hand, this thesis put forward exotic methods (methods considered as exotic at the time of the writing of the thesis) such as Photo-LIDAR hybridizing and collaborative mapping achieved by a terrestrial-aerial tandem (a terrestrial vehicle holding a LIDAR, GNSS, imaging and inertial sensors followed by a drone conceived to proceed to airborne photogrammetry) or an aerial-aerial tandem (two drones flying in formation to proceed to airborne photogrammetry). The contribution of this thesis will permit to reduce costs, to improve the quality of mapping products and to enlarge the possibilities of mapping: in particular, map cluttered or inaccessible zones which are nowadays considered as difficult or even impossible to map.

EPFL2020

The microbiome of cryospheric ecosystems

Tom Ian Battin, Massimo Bourquin, Susheel Bhanu Busi, Leïla Ezzat, Stylianos Fodelianakis, Tyler Joe Kohler, Grégoire Marie Octave Edouard Michoud, Hannes Markus Peter

The cryosphere includes those parts of Earth where water or soil is frozen, such as snow, ice, glaciers and permafrost soils. Here, the authors present a global inventory of cryospheric microbial communities and their genetic repertoires. The melting of the cryosphere is among the most conspicuous consequences of climate change, with impacts on microbial life and related biogeochemistry. However, we are missing a systematic understanding of microbiome structure and function across cryospheric ecosystems. Here, we present a global inventory of the microbiome from snow, ice, permafrost soils, and both coastal and freshwater ecosystems under glacier influence. Combining phylogenetic and taxonomic approaches, we find that these cryospheric ecosystems, despite their particularities, share a microbiome with representatives across the bacterial tree of life and apparent signatures of early and constrained radiation. In addition, we use metagenomic analyses to define the genetic repertoire of cryospheric bacteria. Our work provides a reference resource for future studies on climate change microbiology.

NATURE PORTFOLIO2022

On the adjustment, calibration and orientation of drone photogrammetry and laser-scanning

Emmanuel Pierre Quentin Clédat

EPFL2020