Astrobiology is a discipline that is expanding its field of investigation not only in the natural sciences, but also in the social sciences. It is for this reason that the ethical aspects are progressively emphasized leading to a point where the whole field requires a specific handling. The appellation ‘astrobioethics’ is now considered as not only relevant, but also a true issue for the future of Astrobiology. Astrobioethics is the subsection within astrobiology that is accountable for studying the moral implications of, for example, bringing humans to Mars, the Planetary Protection Policy, the social responsibility of the astrobiologist to society, etc. It is in this way that the present article outlines a path for astrobioethics, as being a fertile field of study and an opportunity to trade scientific knowledge in a transdisciplinary way.

As astrobiology progresses in its quest to discover life on other planets or to put ourselves in another one, so does its moral problematic. Astrobiology is not only part of natural sciences, but also deals with direct aspects of humanities. For this reason, this paper aims to briefly examine astrobioethics from the epistemological, religious and societal dimension. It also deals with different researches in this regard, in order to better understand the state of the art on this topic and that astrobioethics can help us not only on how we should relate with extraterrestrial lifeforms, but even with terrestrials.

Astrobioethics is an emerging discipline that studies, evaluates and analyses the moral, legal and social issues of the search for life in the Universe. As a new field of study, it requires an epistemological foundation to be able to be recognized as an academic discipline. In order to achieve this, it is important to understand the disciplinary nature of astrobiology as a transdisciplinary form of research, above the multi and interdisciplinary levels, although this does not necessarily mean discarding them. In addition, the questions and topics of each subdivision of astrobioethics studies are specified and explained in this paper.

The objective of this study was to identify attitudes towards the scientific search for extraterrestrial life among students from public and private universities in Peru. This research was inspired by similar studies, realized in Sweden, which used the same instrument adapting it to our reality. The process consisted of a survey of the Peruvian student population by targeting it in different regions of Peru. The sample consisted of 1237 students from different academic areas. The findings show that 92% of the students believe in the existence of life outside our planet, with differences between the subgroups surveyed.

The current advances in our exploration of Mars have made us think of the human species as a multiplanetary species. However, we have certain challenges before we can truly consider ourselves such a species, especially moral ones. Therefore, astrobioethics would be the right one to examine what it takes to consider ourselves a multiplanetary species. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the meaning and significance of being an inter- and multiplanetary species. To achieve this, a philosophical and critical analysis will be made, using as input aspects of biology, ethics and moral community. We conclude that to be a truly multiplanetary species, more than the technological aspects that allow us to reach other planets, a change at different levels will be needed.