Search
Origin Of Life
There's an entire Universe out there. So, with all that space, all those planets, and all those chances at life, why do we all live here?
Origin of life studies have always focused on a set of strict environments that could give rise to life. Ante-life opens new possibilities.
In the beginning, genes weren't needed.
John Templeton Foundation
The road to intelligent life is a series of hard steps.
The answer to the age-old philosophical question of whether there is meaning in the Universe may ultimately rest upon the power of information.
John Templeton Foundation
There might be a hard limit to our knowledge of the Universe.
In the early 20th century, a young biochemist named Alexander Oparin set out to connect “the world of the living” to “the world of the dead.”
6mins
How did complex systems emerge from chaos? Physicist Sean Carroll explains.
Bathybius haeckelii was briefly thought to be the link between inorganic matter and organic life.
Yes, NASA's Perseverance rover found organics on Mars. So did Curiosity. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean anything in the search for life.
There's an extremely good chance that there is, or at least was, life on Mars. But is it native to Mars, or did it originate from Earth?
The emergence of life in the universe is as certain as the emergence of matter, gravity, and the stars. Life is the universe developing a memory, and our chemical detection system could find it.
John Templeton Foundation
Probably not. Even though we're still investigating the origin of life, the evidence suggests that cells came much later.
Was there ever life on Mars? Is there life on Mars now? Did it originate there or here, on Earth? All possibilities are fascinating.
5mins
Dr. Sara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist, who is questioning the very nature of life and how we’re attempting to find it elsewhere.
John Templeton Foundation
Shortly after planet Earth formed, life took a permanent hold on our surface. But just how common is such an outcome?
The James Webb Space Telescope finally could answer the age-old question of whether we are alone in the universe.
Finding out we're not alone in the Universe would fundamentally change everything. Here's how we could do it.
The Miller-Urey experiment showed that the building blocks of life could form in the primordial soup. But it overlooked one key variable.
How the search for alien life is taking place right here in our own Solar System. If you want to understand the origin of life in the Universe, you have three […]
The largest moon in our Solar System, often overlooked, is a water-rich world. Does that mean life? Here on Earth, life took hold very early on in our planet’s history, and […]
And could Earth-based life provide the seeds for biology elsewhere? Today, on Earth, there’s an enormous variety and diversity of life on our planet. Every single surviving lifeform appears, in […]
How many potentially habitable planets are there? We sincerely don’t know. One of the most compelling scientific goals humanity has set for itself is to find extraterrestrial life: biological activity originating […]
The history of the Universe is forever imprinted in our own bodies. We can learn a lot about the history of the Universe just by looking at each of our own […]
There’s a lot left to understand, ponder, and investigate. And there always will be. For hundreds of thousands of years — nearly all of human history — we had no definitive answers to some of […]
It’s not just for Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. Not even close. Shortly after Earth first formed first formed, life quickly took hold, thriving ever since. Both reflected sunlight on a […]
Is there life beyond Earth, even in our Solar System? This mission might be humanity’s best hope of finding it. The biggest question facing humanity might be, “Does life exists beyond […]