Required Reading in Astrobiology

I’ve recently started the process of writing an Astrobiology 101 segment in The Cosmobiologist on Substack.

I realized that while working on pieces there, it could be fun to develop a list of “required readings” as well as other bits of media and info that would be most helpful to someone trying to build a large, generalist understanding from across the realms of astrobiology.

I’m going to slowly add pieces here, so please don’t worry if this looks incomplete. I’ll be adding little bits each week or two over the coming years.

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Research Articles:

Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations. Written by Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, this paper first presented what is known as the Kardashev Scale. The concept of quantifying civilizations based on their energy production/consumption has come a long way since this paper, but it is still worthy reading for understanding where the idea came from.