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Artist's impression of the Phoenix Lander landing on Mars.

Phoenix's atmospheric measurements of isotope ratios of carbon and oxygen gave evidence for liquid water on the surface now or in the recent geological past.Also its 2008 observations of possible droplets on its legs suggested new ways that water could be stable temporarily on Mars. These observations lead many scientists to reassess the present habitability of Mars

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Astrobiology

Some of the main pages are:

Astrobiology

• Astrobiology
• Abiogenesis - about natural process of how life arises from non living matter
• Panspermia - transfer of life between plaents on meteorites.
• Terrestrial analogue sites
• Murchison meteorite

Life on Mars

• Possible Present Day Habitats For Life On Mars
• Life on Mars
• Present day Mars habitability analogue environments on Earth
• Viking program

• Allan Hills 84001 - the meteorite with tiney structures resembling cells

Life in other locations

• Hypothetical types of biochemistry
• Life on Titan
• Life on Venus

Planetary protection

• Planetary protection
• Interplanetary contamination
• Planetary protection for a Mars sample return

Guidelines

• I set this up after a bizarre situation in Wikipedia where the original for Possible Present Day Habitats For Life On Mars was deleted by editors who knew almost nothing about the topic, and most read none of the cites. Some hadn't read the first paragraph. For instance, none of them seemed to know that searching for such habitats and for signs of extant life in them is one of the top science goals of NASA and ESA.
• In Wikipedia your editing can be boldly rewritten or deleted altogether by people who don't know anything about what you wrote and never read the sources. They can delete an article with over 100 cites by attracting enough people who also know nothing about it to vote to delete it. Mine was an extreme case but I know of many who have had such experiences, including myself also on previous occasions, of large amounts of material an editor worked on, sometimes for years, just deleted in a period of a few days. There is usually nothing you can do about it.
• See my Alice In Wonderland Sanctioning In Wikipedia - Blocked For Covering NASA's Science Goal To Search For Habitats For Life On Mars‽

So, the idea was to set up a wiki where if you contribute a good astrobiology article it is safe from being arbitrarily deleted by people who know nothing about the topic. If you've wanted to make encyclopedic articles about astrobiology but find Wikipedia frustrating as an editor, this may be useful.

With that background in mind:

• Will proceed more like scholarpedia where if someone contributes a good and substantial article, or has done substantial work on it, then they are treated as the main author and others are expected to ask them to approve significant changes.

• Similar also for collaborative articles. It's only me editing at present. But anyone can in join in working on it. The idea again is to respect content contributed by other editors. Hopefully don't need a lot of guidelines.

Otherwise similar to wikipedia - mainspace articles to be reasonably encyclopaedic, please keep to well sourced statements.

Vision

• I don't think the voting method for Wikipedia works all that well, as it tends to sprawl with no overall vision, and major decisions made because on that day or week 41 people turned up to vote who thought one way and 39 the other way or something.

I'm admin and will be final authority if needed for anything. Hopefully it will be a friendly place :). But I'll make the final decision if necessary, for instance, on how to categorize pages, on what is and is not included etc.

Because this is on Miraheze at present, anyone can join in editing and there is no pre-approval stage. But I can block people from the wiki if necesesary - and in practice, not likely to be a problem, it doesn't get the attention of vandals, trolls etc of Wikipedia.

Robertinventor (talk) 16:29, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

Scope

• Astrobiology in its broadest sense.

• Not Biology in general - e.g. extremophiles only if of special interest to astrobiolgy. Origins of life but mainly as it relates to abiogenesis, or ideas of astrobiology.

• Not SETI. Except in as far as it relates to the biology of extra terrestrials.

• Not fictional treatments of astrobiology in science fiction movies / books / TV series.

Re-use of the material

Much of the material here originates in Wikipedia and is attributed to them as required. The re-used material has to be licensed under the same license, so any content here that originated in Wikipedia is automatically under the same license, CC by SA, that it can be re-used by anyone, for any purpose, including commercially, so long as it is attributed correctly.

That includes Wikipedia itself of course. They are welcome to use any of this content back in Wikipedia so long as it is released with a suitable license, as is the case for all the material that originated there.

Blogs

I've also set up a test blog, where one can post original research or opinions and points of views. , whatever one wants related to astrobiology:

• Robert Walker's Blog

I haven't decided how to do it yet - may have a special "Blogs" namespace or may put it in user space. Either way, idea is to link to your blog from the main page.

Robertinventor (talk) 00:53, 30 August 2018 (UTC)