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 astro-biochemist 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, salt).

Steven A. Benner is a pioneering chemist, synthetic biologist and storyteller whose career has taken him from Harvard to NASA, via ETH Zurich. Throughout he has helped reshape the modern definition of life and the search for it beyond Earth.
Founding Director and Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Benner helped found the fields of synthetic biology and paleogenetics. In 2023 he was awarded the Harold Urey Medal from the International Astrobiology Society for the study of the origin of life.