Starts With A Bang Podcast #73 — Ocean Worlds And So Much More

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 basic ways to do it. One is to search for intelligent aliens directly: through a program such as SETI. Another is to search for life in Solar Systems beyond our own: looking for bio-signatures, or perhaps bio-hints, on extraterrestrial worlds many light-years away. But within our own Solar System, there are a plethora of worlds, including the ice-and-liquid-rich bodies we have, that are fascinating candidates for life of non-Earth origin.

There’s so much to explore and so many different aspects of what’s out there that I went into an incredibly far-ranging conversation with our podcast guest, planetary scientists and NExSS postdoc Dr. Jessica Noviello, that we wound up talking for nearly two full hours, and still couldn’t cover everything we wanted to! Still, it was an amazing conversation for me and I hope it is for you, too. Enjoy it!

Starts With A Bang is written by Ethan Siegel, Ph.D., author of Beyond The Galaxy, and Treknology: The Science of Star Trek from Tricorders to Warp Drive.