Professor Lewis Dartnell, Professor of Science Communication, was interviewed on BBC Radio Leicester about extremophiles and how resilient life could exist on other planets.
In the interview, Professor Dartnell talks about extremophile organisms and how they survive in environmental conditions deemed as extreme. He said: “A lot of life living today in very hostile extreme conditions are called extremophiles, extreme loving life forms, and a lot of the early life on Earth would have been extremophilic as well.”
He added: “What we’ve learned from the extremophiles is the incredible range of conditions that life on Earth can survive under, and so these extremophiles which are like survival superheroes on Earth, they essentially define the outer boundaries life on earth can survive.”
He said: “The exciting thing for astrobiology and the search for life on other planets’ moons is that the survival envelope of terrestrial life overlaps the conditions on other places beyond the earth.”
