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This mission is going to kick off a
breathtakingly ambitious campaign to

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return samples from Mars to earth and as
an astrobiologist who spends my life

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working on biosignatures, there could be
nothing better. So, just to understand,

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you know, most of what we do now is we try to
work with data that's coming back from

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orbiters, coming back from rovers, and the
idea of having actual samples from Mars

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that have been carefully selected and
returned to our planet in our

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laboratories where we can scour them and
hit them with everything we've got

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I mean, it's just gonna be a huge
paradigm shift for the kind of work we do.

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Well, there's plenty of amazing things
that this mission could discover but

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like every astrobiologist you ask I'm
going to say, of course, evidence for life

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and I guess I should qualify that like
there are different types of life we

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could find evidence for ancestrally
related life the the same kind of life

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we have here on earth that perhaps are
just caught from the next planet over

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and of course that would be tremendously
exciting in its own right it would give

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us a chance to replay the tape of
evolution on another planet and

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rerun that experiment and see what turns
out but what gets me most excited is

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this idea of an independent Genesis; 
a kind of life that's unlike any life

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that we've ever seen before
and specifically when I think about the

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work that my group does we're really
interested in this idea of agnostic biosignatures

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or a type of like evidence
for life that doesn't presuppose the

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same molecular framework as life here on
earth or the same underlying

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biochemistry and sometimes it feels
like trying to imagine a color that

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you've never seen before. You know,
figuring out ways that we could look for

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chemical complexity or unexpected
accumulations or elements or isotopes

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that would be suggestive of life
that could be just completely different

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from anything we'd seen before and I
just think that would be better than