A divulgação científica sobre a astrobiologia e o papel dos fóruns de discussão

Abstract

The search of life outside of the Planet Earth, the Astrobiology, is a field of study that is extremely complex, because of the diversity of natural processes that permeate living beings. The internet access, along with the establishment of new social media platforms that adopt a user-friendly interface, like the Reddit, increased the mistrust around sources of methodical investigation, about information shared through traditional media, like newspapers. This study aims to examine any differences of acceptance between scientific findings of different areas that compose Astrobiology. To collect the data concerning Astrobiology in social media selected the forum called “Astrobiology: The study of life in the universe” and five themes were created to classify the analyzed posts. Lastly, to analyze the existence of any factor that may result in more engagement to a specific theme, were applied an investigation of tendences, to verify which factors affected the scientific production in certain thematic areas or the increasing of interest around that theme that motivated the sharing on the forum. During the social isolation, due the pandemic scenario caused by to CoViD-19, the interest in Astrobiology became expressive in the analyzed forum. The members have shown a high capacity for critical thought and high levels of scientific literacy, which demonstrates the relevant role of scientific dissemination, done by the crowdsource in this community.