The Different Environments Where We Can Look for Life

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We've had this somewhat recent change of mind that moons of big planets are just as good a place to look for life as planets. So why would they be better? Because they're smaller and they can hold on to water. They're not as hot. They actually have a surface. We like surface. Why, why does Europa, why historically was Europa better at holding on to water than Mars? That I actually don't know. I know why Mars lost water. Why did Mars lose water? Because it never developed plate tectonics. If you develop plate Tectonics, you can recirculate your water. You can have water vapor in the atmosphere that gets spit out of

Scientists can’t quite agree on how to define “life,” but that hasn’t stopped them from studying it, looking for it elsewhere, or even trying to create it. Kate Adamala is one of a number of scientists engaged in the ambitious project of trying to create living cells, or something approximating them, starting from entirely non-living ingredients. Impressive progress has already been made. Designing cells from scratch will have obvious uses is biology and medicine, but also allow us to build biological robots and computers, as well as helping us understand how life could have arisen in the first place, and what it might look like on other planets.

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Katarzyna (Kate) Adamala received her Ph.D. working with Pier Luigi Luisi at the University of Rome and Jack Szostak at Harvard. She is currently an assistant professor of Genetics, Cell Biology, and Development at the University of Minnesota. She is a member of the Build-A-Cell international collaboration, which brings together multiple groups to work on constructing artificial life.

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