Scientists have spent decades searching for alien life by identifying specific molecules — a new study suggests that was never going to be enough on its own, and what they were missing was hiding in plain sight

Scientists have spent decades searching for alien life by identifying specific molecules — a new study suggests that was never going to be enough on its own, and what they were missing was hiding in plain sight

Searching for life on other worlds has never suffered from a shortage of interesting places to look. The difficulty has been more fundamental: there is no reliable way to distinguish chemistry that life produces from chemistry that the universe produces on its own. Organic molecules associated with life on Earth, including amino acids and fatty acids, can form without any biological input. They appear in meteorites. They emerge from laboratory e…