- It's interesting how people are taking a new approach to searching for extraterrestrial life. Rather than searching for water, oxygen or DNA which is how our bodies work they are thinking of [[Changing System]] all together. - They are trying to define what makes life and search for those kind of molecular structures so they are not biased by what it is on Earth. - This kind of shift in paradigm thinking is important I feel in lot of work. It's really hard to remove our experiences and biases in lot of the work and I can imagine how difficult it is here in particular because of how everyone literally lives on the earth from day one. ----- "LAB’s research doesn’t count on ET having specific biochemistry at all, so it doesn’t look for specific biosignatures. LAB aims to find more fundamental markers of biology, such as evidence of complexity—intricately arranged molecules that are unlikely to assemble themselves without some kind of biological forcing—and disequilibrium, such as unexpected concentrations of molecules on other planets or moons. These are proxies for life as no one knows it." - [Link](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-search-for-extraterrestrial-life-as-we-dont-know-it/) "We had this hypothesis that there are more binding sites on something complicated like a cell than a small particle" - [Link](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-search-for-extraterrestrial-life-as-we-dont-know-it/)