I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear In Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

If you find even a speckle of life somewhere, what that means is that life must be everywhere.

It must be distributed throughout the cosmos and I think living in a world where you look

up at the sky and you know that around all of these other stars, they are planets and

they are some life forms, whatever shape they take.

I think just puts me into even a deeper connection with the cosmic surroundings.

That's Lisa Kaltenegger.

She's an expert at figuring out how to tell which of the billions of planets out there

might have life on them.

She's finding ways to read the skies that are ingenious and she's awfully good at explaining it.

This is great that you can be on the show because you are such a good communicator.

You're clear and vivid and you're funny too.

Thank you very much.

Great to have you on the show.

I heard you say once that you hope to find life on other planets in our lifetime.

I have an obvious question but I'm kind of curious to know what your answer is to the question

why?

One of the things that I find most amazing, I find most amazing about the time we live

in is that we live in the time that humankind for the first time has the technology that we

can actually figure out whether we are alone in the universe.

What I mean by that is we know how to look for signs of living organism on another

world and we are building right now the telescopes who will be big enough to get enough light

...