 This week, I'm talking about astrobiology. It's the search for life in the universe through studying life here on Earth. It's actually a combination of a bunch of different disciplines of astronomy, and geology, and biology. It's this incredibly exciting multidisciplinary discipline. Astrobiology is all about exploring the extreme boundaries of life here on Earth so that we can know what to look for in the cosmos. Extreme life forms might be able to live in crazy environments. We're talking about environments that are more extreme than living with your roommates. What I love so much about astrobiology is, to me, it's sort of like art. You get to play with the palettes of Earth in space to see what the universe can essentially create in terms of life forms. Scientists at Cornell actually recently created just that. They created a color palette of microorganisms that live on the surface of the Earth. And they created it as sort of an alien Pantone guide for how we could detect different life forms on exoplanets. It's this beautiful palette of 137 different colors and shapes and sizes of greens and reds and blues and all these different beautiful colors. These colors actually correspond to actual microorganisms that live everywhere from deserts to oyster ponds to all different places on the surface of the Earth. I guess in a weird way, you could call it a mood board for microbes in our galaxy. This is incredibly cool because one day, when we are able to actually image exoplanets, we could hold up this alien Pantone guide and actually discover what types of life forms might be causing different pigments on different planets. But what about life as we don't know it? What if instead of using Earth as our palette, we used some other place in the solar system as our palette? What if we used Titan, the moon of Saturn as our palette? Well, this is something that was actually asked by a team of chemical engineers and astronomers at Cornell. And they actually determined what sorts of life forms could possibly exist on Titan. Titan is an incredibly awesome moon. It has a dense atmosphere and it has lakes of methane and ethane on it. So it's an incredibly unique sort of place in our solar system. By using Titan as essentially their palette to paint with, these chemical engineers and astronomers actually created a template for life that could exist on Titan. They created a cell membrane that is composed of nitrogen. This cell membrane composed of nitrogen could possibly exist on Titan. Both of these projects point to incredibly exciting futures in space exploration, futures in which we can image exoplanets and futures in which we can actually send submarines to the surface of Titan, the latter of which is actually a concept that's being explored by a project under the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program. Astrobiology, to me, is all about expanding the pigments to play with in our paint-by-numbers exploration of the universe, which is an incredibly beautiful thing to think about. Thanks so much for geeking out with me this week. Remember to subscribe on YouTube, leave a comment, and contribute to the Patreon campaign so that people like me can geek out with you week to week.