Cooperative agents and the search for extraterrestrial life

The primary purpose of this paper is to suggest how a cooperative agents exploratory approach could be useful in searching for extraterrestrial life. Certain features of cooperative agent approaches such as distribution of varied functions in space and time, and increased reliability and robustness through redundancy, map well to the requirements of searching for extraterrestrial life. This paper will outline the advantages of cooperative agent approaches and, more specifically, scenarios and architectures that might be used to leverage a cooperative agents approach to enable the effective and efficient search for extraterrestrial life.