In Science, A Healthy Skepticism Is A

What We Want Is Another Sample Of Life, Which Is Not On Our Tree Of Life At All. All Life That We've Studied So Far On Earth Belongs To The Same Tree. We Share Genes With Mushrooms And Oak Trees And Fish And Bacteria That Live In Volcanic Vents And So On That It's All The Same Life Descended From A Common Origin. What We Want Is A Second Tree Of Life. We Want Alien Life, Alien Not Necessarily In The Sense Of Having Come From Space, But Alien In The Sense Of Belonging To A Different Tree Altogether. That Is What We're Looking For, "life 2.0."

Searching For Alternative Life On Earth Might Seem Misconceived, Because There Is Excellent Evidence That Every Kind Of Life So Far Studied Evolved From A Common Ancestor That Lived Billions Of Years Ago. Yet Most Of The Life That Exists On Earth Has Never Been Properly Classified.

If We're Thinking About Old Civilizations, Those That Formed A Long Time Ago And There Were Stars And Planets Around Long Before Earth Even Existed, Then These Are Going To Be Towards The Center Of The Galaxy. That Is The Place To Look If You Think There Are Ancient Civilizations That Have Made Beacons Or Some Other Way Of Attracting Our Attention.

For Millennia Mankind Has Believed That Nothing Can Come Out Of Nothing. Today We Can Argue That Everything Has Come Out Of Nothing. Nobody Has To Pay For The Universe. It Is The Ultimate Free Lunch.

Cancer Is Not Something Confined To Human Beings. It's Found In All Multi Cellular Organisms Where The Adult Cells Proliferate, So It's Widespread In The Biosphere. It's A Phenomenon That Is Deeply Related To The History Of Life Itself, So By Studying Cancer I Think We Can Illuminate The History Of Life Itself And Vice Versa.