Why We Haven't Yet Found Life in the Universe

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Life is deeply coupled to planets and like Earth's evolution has been completely dependent as a planet on life. We're we're bracketed by Venus and Mars yeah completely different from each otherYeah it's a warning right so yes exactly um but then you get into tight end which is a moon of SaturnUm that we actually have a mission now dragonfly that NASA's gonna send to Titan but Titan could be alive but as a moon maybe maybe doesn't have so like it maybe never. If if you think about life as a planetary scale process or some kind of chemical organization and something happening Um that's kind of like almost life but maybe doesn't make the transition to sell your life in the kind

We are all alive, but “life” is something we struggle to understand. How do we distinguish a “living organism” from an emergent dynamical system like a hurricane, or a resource-consuming chemical reaction like a forest fire, or an information-processing system like a laptop computer? There is probably no one crisp set of criteria that delineates life from non-life, but it’s worth the exercise to think about what we really mean, especially as the quest to find life outside the confines of the Earth picks up steam. Sara Imari Walker planned to become a cosmologist before shifting her focus to astrobiology, and is now a leading researcher on the origin and nature of life. We talk about what life is and how to find it, with a special focus on the role played by information and computation in living beings.

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Sara Imari Walker received her Ph.D. in physics from Dartmouth college. She is currently Associate Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, and Associate Director of the ASU-Santa Fe Institute Center for Biosocial Complex Systems. She is the co-founder of the astrobiology social network SAGANet, and serves on the Board of Directors for Blue Marble Space.

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