Kavli-IAU Symposium 2024 Public Lecture: Life in the Universe

Life on our home planet is incredibly diverse, but this is likely only a small fraction of the diversity of life forms that we can expect to find in the Universe.

Some of the more intriguing places to search for “more exotic” types of life are Europa´s subsurface ocean, Titan´s hydrocarbon seas, and the interior environments of rogue planets. We anticipate that planets with microbial life are common in the Universe and if such a planet stays habitable long enough, evolution will drive a subset of these life forms to become complex, and eventually intelligent.

But how does this square with the Fermi Paradox – the lack of conclusive evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life?  Some challenges but also possible solutions are presented at the end of the talk.