THERMOBASE BIOSIGNATURE PLAUSIBILITY EXPLORER

If we detected this gas out there, would it mean life?

Set a hypothetical environment's temperature, pH, and oxygen regime. This tool looks at which known thermophilic metabolisms could plausibly survive there, and weighs the gases they'd produce against how easily each one could come from ordinary geology instead of biology.

RESEARCH PROTOTYPE Not a detection instrument. Built from a 512-organism thermophile dataset; probabilities are correlational — a hypothesis-generating lens, not a verdict. Built on ThermoBase (DiGiacomo, McKay & Davila, 2022, PLOS ONE, CC0) — view the original dataset →
HOW TO USE THIS
01 Set an environment — drag the sliders or pick a preset 02 Read the pathway bars — physiological plausibility at those conditions 03 Open a species card — real missions, and what the risk rating means

Environment

Temperature70°C
35°C109°C
pH7.0
0.59.7
Oxygen regime
Jump to a real-world analog
WHERE THIS SITS IN THE DATA

Plausibility read-out

READING THESE TWO NUMBERS TOGETHER
Low abiotic risk
High abiotic risk
High
plausibility
Strong candidatebiology readily makes this, geology doesn't
Ambiguous signalexpected from biology \u2014 but geology makes it too
Low
plausibility
Weak signalnot much biological support either way
Weak & confoundedunlikely from biology, and geology explains it anyway