We often get derailed in conversations about alien life by focusing on little green men and the like, but the reality of trying to find life is much more profound: As astrobiologist Lynn Rothschild told us, we really only have one data point for understanding what life is. How then do we define life? What if it's significantly more diverse than we understand? This is one classic solution to the Fermi paradox: maybe we haven't found alien life yet because we simply can't comprehend forms alternative to what we see on Earth. Perhaps, in essence, our definition of life is too narrow. If that were the case, just about everything we understand about life on Earth would be thrown up in the air.

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