WORT 89.9FM Madison · WICOR Seeks Extraterrestrial Life

Ask anyone familiar with science fiction tropes what an extraterrestrial lifeform looks like, and you’ll get a stock answer: a bipedal, upright, bilaterally symmetrical being that may sprout unusual appendages or have an abnormally large, bald head, but takes a generally humanoid form.  Think for a moment, though, about the dizzying variety life takes on this planet, from oak trees to octopi to fungi to deep-sea tube worms.  Now imagine a lifeform evolving on a completely different planet, with a completely different natural history.  Would we even recognize such a being as “alive?”  A new interdisciplinary research center at the University of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Center for Origins seeks to answer the question of what both extraterrestrial and early terrestrial life might look like, and to help in the search for such life elsewhere in the solar system and the universe.  Susanna Widicus Weaver is the Vozza Professor of Chemistry and Astronomy and one of the founding members at the Wisconsin Center for Origins.  Thomas Beatty is an Assistant Professor of Astronomy.  Widicus Weaver and Beatty both joined Monday Buzz host Brian Standing on November 20, 2023.

Illustration of exoplanet Trappist-1 b (based on James Webb infrared telescope data) by NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI).

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