"We'll Know It When We See It": The Trouble with Finding (Al

"We'll Know It When We See It": The Trouble with Finding (Alien) Life by Julie Nováková : Clarkesworld Magazine


Science Fiction & Fantasy
 
The Trouble with Finding (Alien) Life
— by Julie Nováková —
Last month, NASA’s
Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars to investigate current and past conditions on the Red Planet and search for life. With it, an old but still burning question inevitably arises: when—
if—we find alien life somewhere, are we going to recognize it?
The question is far less trivial than it sounds. The odds are we won’t encounter a technological civilization or travel beyond our solar system anytime soon. There are tantalizing environments in our own backyard: Mars, which had liquid water long ago and still has large amounts of water ice with potential lakes underneath its polar ice caps, and possibly hydrothermal systems under ground; Venus, whose past remains mysterious to us and which may have possessed water oceans once, too; moons such as Europa or Enceladus, with vast amounts of liquid water hidden underneath their icy shells; Titan’s exotic methane-ethane seas . . .

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