Meet the Neighbors

The search for life in the Universe is one of the biggest questions for humanity. In this explosive book, Steven Benner argues we've been looking in the wrong place. In 1976, NASA landed two Viking missions on Mars specifically tasked with looking for current (or extant) Martian life. Given how the results of the onboard experiments were interpreted, no space mission since has returned to search for life living on Mars today. With unparalleled access to the Viking archive, Benner explains why those results were misinterpreted, why it is possible that the Viking landers did find life, and why and how we can go back to be sure. In the fifty years since Viking, Mars science missions have studied questions of geology and past habitability, but deliberately steered away from the riskiest question: is anything alive there now? In Meet the Neighbors, pioneering astrobiochemist Steven Benner reveals why we’ve been looking the wrong way, and lays out the practical path to find life on Mars. Half a century on he reexamines Viking’s results, the politics that sidelined life detection, and the recent blueprint to search Mars’s best ‘refugia’ (caves, subsurface, ice, salts). But what even is life? Would we recognize it if we saw it? One of the founding figures in the field of synthetic biology, Benner then unveils agnostic life detection – tools that can spot biology even if it doesn’t look like ours. With sample-return on the horizon but no rover yet built to seek extant life, Meet the Neighbors is the definitive, urgent brief on where to go, what to measure, and why the next discovery won’t just change textbooks – it will rewrite our place in the universe.