Carl Zimmer: belief

Transcript context

…I have some questions about your other books. How much do you think there’s life on icy moons, typically in oceans? In my book, Life’s Edge, I was writing about how far we can push our concepts of life and can we think about life elsewhere. I certainly think that the icy moons of the outer solar system are the most interesting place to look for life. Mars — that’s great, that’s fine. I wish them well as they’re digging through the dust and the dirt. But imagine drilling down through the ice and sending a probe into a huge ocean. What is that world like? It might have life in it, or at the very least, it might have some really interesting chemistry. Maybe these are places where life has yet to form. I can’t say whether there’s life there or not, but there’s certainly good reason to think that there might be life there, and if there isn’t, that might be a place to get some clues about how life begins on places like our own planet. What’s your point estimate for there being life on the icy moons in our solar system?…

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