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urability



Urability is a term that you probably haven't heard before. It was coined in 2022 by David Deamer, Francesca Cary, and Bruce Damer in a paper entitled [ Urability: A Property of Planetary Bodies That Can Support an Origin of Life ]. Those with an interest in astrobiology may immediately recognise this as similar to the concept of habitability; but the crucial distinction between these two properties is that while habitability determines whether life could persist in an environment, urability determines whether life could originate in that environment.

For example, here on Earth we have extremophiles that thrive in conditions of extreme heat, salinity, or pH. These harsh environments are therefore habitable (albeit to a strange class of organisms), but are not particularly welcoming for simple microbial life - which would be unlikely to arise there in an abitrary time.