Have you ever played hide-and-seek in a new place? It’s much harder than playing at home. You only know the obvious hiding spots: under the bed, in the closet, behind the couch. The trick is trying to think of hiding spots you can’t even imagine. How do you search in places you never thought could be hiding spots?
That is kind of what scientists like me do when we look for alien life; we’re trying to think of new ways to look for life. In the meantime, we’re looking for life by looking for life like us because that’s what we can imagine.
Looking Nearby
The closest place to look for extraterrestrial life is on planets within our solar system.
