Is there anybody out there? That's the big question scientists are asking in the emerging field of astrobiology. Its practitioners bring together expertise from a variety of disciplines in their quest to determine whether there is life beyond our green and pleasant home planet.
"The question of whether we are alone in the universe or not is something that every single one of us has wondered about at one point," says Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiology researcher at University College London and author of Life In The Universe: A Beginner's Guide. "Whatever the answer, I think it would profoundly change our understanding of where we came from and our place in the cosmos."
At first glance the prospects of finding life elsewhere in our own solar system don't look good, since every planetary body other than our own is either scorching hot or ferociously cold. Then again, we know that on Earth life can flourish in the unlikeliest locations, from polar ice caps to hydrothermal vents reaching 113C.
The first place to look has naturally been our neighbouring planet, Mars. When Nasa dispatched two Viking spacecraft to land on the Red Planet in the 1970s, they sent equipment designed to carry out experiments to test whether there might be microorganisms in the Martian soil.
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