Like the old Copernican revolution, new technologies including AI tools, quantum modeling and powerful observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope are probing deeper into the universe to again better define our place within it.
Yet within this new age of exploration is also the prospect of sweeping federal cuts to scientific research, with nearly half of NASA’s science division on the chopping block.
aken together, this unique moment in history may indeed constitute a pivotal juncture in planetary science.
To get a better sense of where it stands, I sat down with Nathalie Cabrol, director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute.
In a wide-ranging conversation on the Space Minds podcast, we discussed the future of exploration, the quiet revolutions reshaping astrobiology, and why the search for life beyond Earth may reveal much more about ourselves and the nature of life itself than we might expect.
The following excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity, and begins with the consummate search for life in the universe and how different that life, if it exists, might be from that of Earth.
David Ariosto: I wonder if the public’s idea of the search of life is far too narrow. Is it just hubris and arrogance to think that other forms of life, particularly complex forms of life, would be distinguishable through our same sort of natural physical processes and how we detect things?
Nathalie Cabrol: Our search, whether you’re looking for microbes or looking for advanced beings, is still very anthropocentric and geocentric. When we say we’re searching for life, we are not searching for life. We are searching for the evolution of life and environment. Life doesn’t just appear through the strike of a magic wand, and who we are is the result of 4 billion years of evolution, and that includes this neural network [in our heads] here. The neural box that we have is completely attuned to the terrestrial environment where we evolved for so long, and there’s so many forms. And you have to think that this is exactly going to be the same for any type of life, whether simple or complex, anywhere else. And so thinking that they would approach questions the same way we do. Because, again, the way we think, the way we see the world, is really related to our convoluted thinking. They would be the same. I think this is a big, big step, you know, and so far, we are searching, following the central, centric and geocentric view, but this is what we have right now. Okay, and it’s not completely stupid for a number of reasons.
The fact is that the bricks that make us are very common. They are the most common stuff in the universe. And they are even more ancient than we thought they were. Thanks to James Webb, we know that. You know, we can see organic, complex organic molecules, 12 billion years in the past. So the chemistry that makes us is probably very common. That doesn’t say that we are going to look alike or think alike, just because there are so many, many possibilities. If only one thing changes [chemically], you change a lot of things … but if life is a universal principle, you know it’s going to organize itself in ways we cannot fathom at all. And to me, this is incredible. And if you really want to push the envelope to the very end, I would say this is the kind of life we can imagine with our current understanding of the physics that surrounds us in the universe, which is a reflection of the instruments we have.
DA: When you look at Mars and you think about the nature of this upcoming Mars Sample Return mission, is it your hope of a seminal moment that that’s coming up, not only in terms of the science, but in terms of what’s out there and where we stand within it?
NC: It’s definitely intriguing. And you know, if we were seeing this on an exoplanet, I would be a lot more prudent, because obviously we don’t know the environment on an exoplanet … This is different on Mars. On Mars, we know the environment fairly well now.
David Ariosto is co-host of the SpaceMinds podcast on SpaceNews, and author of the upcoming Knopf book, “Open Space: from here to eternity.”
This article first appeared in the August 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.