Creating life seems like it should be pretty straightforward, like a slightly more complicated

version of making a cake.

The writing gradients, we've roomed for a little variation.

There's some chemical reactions in there.

The right temperature on the oven.

The right amount of time.

And voila, you've baked up some moist, delicious life.

Assuming you followed the recipe correctly, it should turn out, right?

Well, maybe it's not quite that simple.

What if you don't have a real recipe?

Or what if you don't even know what a cake is?

Scientists have been trying for decades to understand how a bunch of molecules turn

into actual living organisms.

So far, attempts to create life in a laboratory haven't panned out, which means we're probably

missing some crucial ingredient or a necessary step.

And if we're having trouble baking life cakes here on Earth, it makes it harder for us

to know what cake looks like elsewhere.

And that's a big speed bump in our search for extraterrestrials.

I'm Laura Kranz, and this is Wild Thing, Space Invaders, a series about the search for extraterrestrial

life, where we're looking, what we're looking for, and why we hope we're not alone.

Let's go back to Amua Mua, that first interstellar object that caught our attention for a second.

And let's say for the sake of argument that Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who we heard

...