For a long time, that's been a confounding problem in the search for life beyond Earth: If alien life looks nothing like it does on our planet, if it abjures DNA and RNA for building blocks utterly strange, how could
robotic explorers even know that they've discovered it?
Remote sensing suggests that there are
even younger and
even more diverse basalts on the Moon, waiting for future
robotic or human
explorers to investigate, Jolliff said.