Although the search for habitability is a much-vaunted objective in the study of planetary environments, the material requirements for an environment to be habitable can be met with relatively few ingredients. In this hypothesis paper, the minimum material requirements for habitability are first re-evaluated, necessarily based on life “as we know it.” From this vantage point, we explore examples of the minimum number of material requirements for habitable conditions to arise in a planetary environment, which we illustrate with “minimum habitability diagrams.” These requirements raise the hypothesis that habitable conditions may be common throughout the universe. If the hypothesis was accepted, then the discovery of life would remain an important discovery, but habitable conditions on their own would be an unremarkable feature of the material universe. We discuss how minimum units of habitability provide a parsimonious way to consider the minimum number of geological inferences about a planetary body, and the minimum number of atmospheric components that must be measured, for example in the case of exoplanets, to be able to make assessments of habitability.

中文翻译：

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最小宜居单位及其在宇宙中的丰富度

尽管在行星环境研究中寻找宜居性是一个备受吹捧的目标，但对于宜居环境的物质要求可以用相对较少的成分来满足。在这篇假设论文中，首先重新评估了宜居性的最低物质要求，必须基于“我们所知道的”生活。从这个有利的角度，我们探索了在行星环境中出现的宜居条件所需材料最少数量的例子，我们用“最小宜居图”来说明。这些要求提出了一个假设，即宜居条件可能在整个宇宙中都很普遍。如果这个假设被接受，那么生命的发现仍然是一个重要的发现，但可居住的条件本身就是物质宇宙的一个不起眼的特征。我们讨论了最小可居住性单位如何提供一种简约的方式来考虑关于行星体的最少地质推断数量，以及必须测量的最少大气成分数量，例如在系外行星的情况下，以便能够进行评估宜居性。