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TED Fellows: Shape Your Future

May 2021

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The search for microscopic aliens

Astrophysicist and TED Fellow Sarah Rugheimer searches for aliens -- but not the cartoony green kind. She's looking for extraterrestrial microbes by studying how these single-celled organisms emit gases, which could reveal evidence of them throughout the cosmos. Wondering if we're really alone in the universe, Rugheimer identifies two big hurdles to confirming life on another world and offers insight into what finding it might mean for us.

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Astrophysicist and TED Fellow Sarah Rugheimer searches for aliens -- but not the cartoony green kind. She's looking for extraterrestrial microbes by studying how these single-celled organisms emit gases, which could reveal evidence of them throughout the cosmos. Wondering if we're really alone in the universe, Rugheimer identifies two big hurdles to confirming life on another world and offers insight into what finding it might mean for us.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

About the speaker

Sarah Rugheimer

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Sarah Rugheimer looks for signs of life on other planets by studying the telltale chemical signatures on distant planets.

Sarah Rugheimer | The Great Courses | Listen

Searching for Extraterrestrial Life

In this audio popular science lecture series, I walk through the current landscape of finding habitable Earth-like planets, how life might have originated on Earth and how we might find alien life in our own Solar System and on distant exoplanets.

Sarah Rugheimer | Harvard Horizons, 2014 | Watch

"Spectral Fingerprints of Another Earth"

In this six-minute talk, I discuss how we can detect signs of life on planets orbiting other stars and the influence of high energy radiation on those signatures.

Robert M. Hazen | The Great Courses | Explore

"The Origins of Life"

How did life evolve? This fascinating series by Robert M. Hazen goes through what we know, and don't yet understand, about the scientific quest to find out how the early Earth went from a hellish volcanic world to one teaming with life in only a few hundred million years. This course series, and the related book by Hazen, Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins, are why I became an astrobiologist.

Alexandra Witze | Nature, 2021 | Article

"Life on Venus claim faces strongest challenge yet"

Alexandra Witze discusses the controversies surrounding the claimed detection of phosphine, a potential biosignature, in the atmosphere of Venus. Ultimately, it will be years before science will fully tease out the truth of the Venusian atmosphere.

Stuart Firestein | Oxford, 2016 | Book

Failure: Why Science is So Successful

Stuart Firestein argues that ignorance and failure drive science. The scientific process is messy, filled with uncertainty. It is our willingness to welcome the ignorance, failure and mistakes that allows us to succeed in understanding our world.

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