314 | Karen Lloyd on the Deep Underground Biosphere

Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the things that we've talked about many times here on the podcast is the idea of looking for life elsewhere in the universe, on other planets or moons here in the solar system, like Mars, Europa, Titan, maybe on exoplanets further away. And there's a bunch of obstacles to finding life elsewhere. We haven't found any yet.

We've had some hints of clues of things that might be life-related, but certainly nothing directly that could be characterized as life, partly because it's hard, right? Because you have to either fly far away or look very indirectly using some kind of signal, spectra, or even sample returns from some nearby planet. But the other thing that is making it hard is that we're not sure what to look for. There are characteristics that life has here on Earth that you can hope to find somewhere else, but maybe life somewhere else is still life, but nevertheless is very, very different, and therefore its characteristics or its signatures might be completely different.

So you would think that one super obvious strategy would be to make sure that we understand life here on Earth really, really well if we're trying to understand the entire space of possibilities for what life could be. And to a certain extent we know a lot about life on Earth, right? We have whole departments of biology and so forth in our universities, all devoted to studying life on Earth, because we don't have any examples of life elsewhere. But it turns out that there's still

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