Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life - Free course announced

[Sudhanva]

Dear All

I am enrolling for the free on line course from Edinburgh University on - Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life. The tweets predict 100,000 global students for this.

Course Syllabus
Week 1: What is life and what are the definitions of life? What do we know about the origin of life and what are the current hypotheses for how it originated on the Earth?
Week 2: What was the environment of early Earth like when life first emerged and what do we know about life on the earliest Earth? How did life evolve to cope with survival in extreme environments? What have been the major evolutionary transitions of life on the Earth?
Week 3: What are the prospects for life on other planetary bodies in our Solar System and how do we go about searching for it? What conditions are required for a planet to be habitable?
Week 4: How do we search for Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars and how would we detect life on them?
Week 5: What are the possibilities for intelligent life elsewhere? How would we deal with contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence and what would be the impact on society? Who would represent Earth?

This is available at https://www.coursera.org/course/astrobio

Also there is a course on Galaxies and Cosmology from CALTECH  - the link is https://www.coursera.org/course/cosmo

Regards

Sudhanva

[Ian]

is that Caltech course the one that has a calculus pre-req? Sounds like a job for MarkS

[Sudhanva]

Yes, the CALTECH course looks like "knowledge of physics at a comparable level, and math at a level of calculus or higher"....

Way beyond my knowledge framework.

[Mac]

If you want a good book then have a look at

An Introduction to Astrobiology
by Iain Gilmour abd Mark A Sephton
ISBN:0-521-54621-4

It was a pre requisite for when i studied it at UCLAN.

Mac.