Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com.

I'm Cody Goff. And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about how finding an information data home could help us find intelligent alien life with help from

astrobiologist Caleb Sharf. You'll also learn about how animals sniff out

viral infections and how you could boost your memory by reading out loud.

Let's satisfy some curiosity.

Yesterday, Caleb Sharf told us how humans and information have a symbiotic relationship,

where neither of us could survive without the other.

But as an astrobiologist, Caleb is interested in more than just life on Earth,

and he thinks extraterrestrial civilizations must have a similar relationship with their data.

Caleb Scharf is the director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center and the author of the new book The Assent of Information. Books, Bits, Gen genes, machines, and life's unending algorithm.

We asked him what an astrobiologist is doing, studying information.

I work in astrobiology, which is all about the quest to understand whether or not there's life elsewhere in the universe but also how life comes to be, the origins of life.

And so we do spend time looking at planets around other stars and speculating about

you know how what what the requirements for life are in the universe as a whole and that

actually does connect intimately, I think, to the

ascent of information, the book and the ideas and that because the other piece of this is that externalized information, that data o represents in us a technological civilization.

And one of the things in astrobiology that we're very interested in, apart from just looking for

any signs of life, whether it's microbes or other things, is looking for signs of technology, signs

of life elsewhere that has manipulated its environment to the same kind of degree that we have.

And beneath that there may be data owns.

There may be this externalised information as well, because that's the pattern that has happened here.

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