Lately, there has been more peer discussion about how we go about searching for life off planet earth. A few places within our solar system were identified as good targets to begin the search for life, among them: the Moon, Mars, Titan and Enceladus. We need to begin the search with patience. 

Our Moon is the closest celestial body to us. The LRO is currently taking pictures, but a new mission to establish an out post on the moon should begin. Why not get very good about getting to…

For at least the last few meetings we have discussed the idea of LUCA. A name for the evidence that suggests that all life, bacterial, archaeal, and eucaryal, all formed from a common organism. Woese suggests that LUCA, or the root of the universal phylogenetic tree, could not have equivalent metabolically to "modern cells." In his paper, Woese seems to dismiss the idea of a metabolism-first world instead providing evidence for horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in an RNA-first…