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newsFeb 3, 202317:56pending

Are we looking for aliens in all the wrong places?

The Big Story

About this episode

Much of humanity's search for extraterrestrial life has focused on, well, our kind of life—the conditions that make possible the biology we see on Earth. But what if the conditions that make life possible are far from what we imagine? What if we don't actually know what "life" is, even? Woah, dude...

Seriously, though, in recent years scientists have been working to reframe our parameters in hopes that we'll find unlikely life, in unlikely places. What might that look like? The possibilities are infinite.

GUEST: Sarah Scoles, science writer, reporting in Scientific American

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Are we looking for aliens in all the wrong places?

The Big Story

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