Searching space for "weird life"
Life elsewhere in the universe might look like this... or it might look so different from us that we don't even recognize it as life. Image by PiradarchiC
Aliens usually exist in the realm of science fiction – you can find them in books, movies, TV, and questionable reports of close encounters. But as NASA gets closer to a real search for alien life, a report from the National Research Council suggests that we might have to scale down our dreams of extraterrestial monsters, and start to look for a very small version of what we’ve never even imagined.
Steven Benner is a scientist at the Foundation for Molecular Evolution. He said finding what’s called ‘weird life’ is like discovering microscopic life, we never knew it existed until we had the right tools to detect it. We spoke about how to begin the search, but first Lindsay Patterson asked him to define the unknowable.
