“I want to draw the similarities with alien life, and we have these questions. They're the same questions that we would be asking if we could get a sample from Europa or if we could get a sample from Mars. I think the parallels are partly in how we study them. They're teaching us how to look for strange life, but then they're also teaching us about what’s possible with life, and they're so close to the edge of what is and isn't life that it really helps us to sort of — I don’t know. I don’t know where to draw that line personally, but they at least show us that that line is maybe closer to non-life than we would have thought, than I would have thought.”

Karen G. Lloyd is the Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies and Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in leading publications such as Nature and Science. She is the author of Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth.

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