
Living Universe
Astronomers, biologists, and planetary scientists take on the question of whether life exists beyond Earth, tracing the search from the first exoplanet discoveries to the hunt for microbial life on Mars and the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The film moves through observatories and research labs, letting researchers explain how they define a habitable zone and what chemical signatures in a distant atmosphere would count as evidence of biology. It also looks at the origins of life on Earth itself, using extremophiles found in deep-sea vents and desert salt flats as stand-ins for the kinds of organisms that might survive on other worlds. Rather than settling on an answer, the film treats the question as an active scientific project with real missions, real telescopes, and real disagreements about how likely life is to have arisen elsewhere. It closes on the scale of the search itself: billions of stars, a handful of confirmed exoplanets studied closely, and a search that has barely begun.