So far, we know of only one place in the universe in which life has begun and thrived: Earth. This raises many questions around the prevalence of life in the universe, including consideration of the possibility that we are special, and that our Solar System had just the right conditions and ingredients for life to begin on our planet. Despite the persistent challenges in detecting extra-terrestrial life, there is now a wealth of evidence that rocky planets around other stars are common. In addition, everywhere we look in interstellar space, we find an abundance of key molecules, including water and organic molecules, that are needed to seed the surfaces of potentially habitable planets. In this podcast, Catherine Walsh discusses the recipe needed to build a habitable world, and present the current state-of-the-art in our quest to detect the ingredients needed to seed life on planets.
Kenneth R. Lang, The Life and Death of Stars (Massachussetts: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Elizabeth Tasker, The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth (Bloomsbury Signma, 2017).
Lucas Ellerbroek, Planet Hunters: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life (Reaktion Books, 2017).
Andrew H. Knoll, Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth (Princeton University Press, 2015).