Is There a Life on Earth?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

This is really appreciating what we are studying and understanding it withot before even thinking about meddling. This does not terrifor me. It is not pan permia. I called it protos permia a. That again, tit. Soits i sort of impoversing the capacity of these planets to express their own unique forms of life that are not genetically related to or look nothing like us. As sagon said, that you know, and me may be studying these problems and really thinking about these smay give us that sense of protecting what we have a little better. And i think when we talk about we got to say what we have. Such exercise may allow us to

In the question to understand the biology of life, we are (so far) limited to what happened here on Earth. That includes the diversity of biological organisms today, but also its entire past history. Using modern genomic techniques, we can extrapolate backward to reconstruct the genomes of primitive organisms, both to learn about life’s early stages and to guide our ideas about life elsewhere. I talk with astrobiologist Betül Kaçar about paleogenomics and our prospects for finding (or creating!) life in the universe.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Betül Kaçar received her PhD in biomolecular chemistry from Emory University. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also principal investigator of Project MUSE, a NASA-funded astrobiology research initiative and an associate professor (adjunct) at Earth-Life Science Institute of Tokyo Institute of Technology. Among her awards are a NASA Early Career Faculty Fellow in 2019, and a Scialog Fellow for the search for life in the universe.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.