The key course themes are the origins of life, the evolution of life/intelligence, and the searches for life. You should find at least three, and preferably more, recent (i.e., within the last 3 years) sources on which to base your report. Books, magazines or newspaper articles are acceptable, as are internet web pages if you identify your sources and conclude they are providing reliable information. (For example, NASA or ESO web pages are suitable. Wikipedia may be used in a supplementary fashion only. TV documentaries and blogs are not acceptable sources of information. Unacceptable sources are articles from the Daily Mail, Buzzfeed, Fox, Natural or Breibart News. Any publication with a fringe topic (i.e., creation, alternative medicine, etc.) should be treated with caution. Your report should not use the lecture notes or the required text as primary references, and neither should it use matter copied directly. Your paper must go into more depth and detail than the textbook or the class notes on your specific topic. Footnotes and detailed referencing are not required, but your paper must include a bibliography containing the sources from which material was taken. If you use a figure or table, you must cite the source at the place where the figure or table appears. Your paper will be graded on its relevance to our course, on its originality (i.e., its synthesis of different sources and contrasting or competing ideas), on its detail and on the quality of the research you performed in its writing.
Some Possible Topics for Term Papers:
0. Recent Discoveries Concerning Extrasolar Planets
1 The Fermi Paradox and Its Resolution
2 Recent Discoveries Concerning Extremophiles
3 Recent Discoveries Concerning Terrestrial Mass Extinctions (don’t describe all of them, focus on discoveries relevant to one or two.
5 Can Interstellar Travel Be Made Practical in Terms of Realistic Physical and Financial Limits?
6 Recent Discoveries About the Possibility of Life on Mars, Europa or Titan (don’t write about all 3)
7 Recent Discoveries About How the Brain Evolved
8 Recent Discoveries Conerning the Earliest Appearance of Life on the Earth
9 Recent Discoveries Concerning the Origin of Humanoids
10 Ice Cores and What They Tell Us About the History of the Earth and Life
11 Asteroid and Comet Impacts: What is the Risk and What Should We Do?
12 Oxygenation of the Earth’s Atmosphere and/or Snowball Earth and Their Roles in Evolution
13 What Role Do Supernovae or Mergers of Neutron Stars Play in the Extinction of Life?
