What are the limits of life?
By 
Philip Ball2024-11-18T14:30:00
In search of design principles that would apply to living systems evolved anywhere in the universe
When Nasa’s Europa Clipper and the European Space Agency’s Juice missions reach Jupiter in 2030–31, one of their key objectives is to assess the habitability of the giant planet’s moon Europa, which has oceans of liquid water beneath its icy crust. But a big question is whether we’d know Europan life if we saw it, for life that arose and evolved independently from that on Earth could be reasonably expected to have a somewhat different chemical basis. But how different, really?