Is There a Solution to Life's Origins?

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We miss a big opportunity if we don't truly understand this extra sample that our planets process through ance in the past. So i to wind things up, i have to ask you a philosophy question. It's your fault, because you wrote a provocative article in eon about exactly this philosophy question. Of course, we're looking for life elsewhere. And whether or not we find it, we'll probably go there ourselves. But you made hen interesting suggestion that we could just see the possibility of life on other planets. Forget about sending actual living things or even people. We could, like, send the chemistry to other planets and let life evolve there. If we could do that, should

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.

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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.

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