Should We be Searching for Life as We Know It?

How can we design a strategy for the search for life elsewhere - or to understand what the future will hold for life on Earth and beyond - without extrapolating from pre-biotic chemistry and evolution? The origin and evolution of life often seems an unpredictable oddity, based on the quirks of contingency. Celebrated by the late Stephen Jay Gould in several books, “evolution by contingency” has all the adventure of a thriller, but lacks the predictive power of the physical sciences. Not necessarily so, replied Simon Conway Morris, for convergence reassures us that certain evolutionary responses are replicable. In other words, can we predict an alien life-form?

Speaker: Lynn Rothschild, NASA Ames