Contending with the Truly Alien

Time and again, the indescribable foreignness of other worlds in our solar system has far surpassed our expectations and left us reconsidering what we thought we knew of our universe. And yet, as we search for life, our detection methodologies and biological expectations often presume that the life we are seeking is similar to the life we know from Earth: we rely primarily on the identification of well-established and widely accepted features associated with terran life, and on signatures of biologic processes such as particular classes of molecules and patterns within the molecular weights of fatty acids or other lipids. So, how might we contend with the truly alien? How might we break free from our ideas about life as we know it, and search instead for life as we dont know it? This talk will examine the search for life from the dawn of the space age, address new approaches to life detection, and consider the relevance of these techniques for the exploration of places like Mars, the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and exoplanets.