How to Find Life Anywhere: The Universal Rules of Life

Sara Walker introduces Chris Kempes’s lecture: How to Find Life Anywhere: The Universal Rules of Life.

In our search for life beyond Earth we are confronted with a broad set of questions that challenge our basic understanding of biology: How different could life be in terms of what it is made of? How different might its functions be? What sort of environments does it inhabit and in what abundance? What ecology does it form? How complex is it? All of these questions force us to seek the most reliable signatures to search for in the universe. The solution to these challenges is that we need a set of universal rules for life that we can rely on anywhere in the universe and in any context. A ton of recent progress has been in uncovering some of these universal rules. This talk will focus on the rules of life that span the simplest life, bacteria and viruses, to the largest ecologies of forests and even cities, and then on how to apply these in our quest to discover life beyond Earth.