EDIT: …. and that’s a wrap! Thank you all for your great questions. We had so much fun answering them. We look forward to interacting with you again in the future! Hi Reddit! We are Martin Van Kranendonk, Tara Djokic, Dave Deamer, Bruce Damer, Jonti Horner and Graham Lau from several institutions around the world. We are Astrobiologists and our research concerns the origin and evolution of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere in the Universe. Martin and Tara published a paper in Nature in May this year which offers the oldest evidence of life on land found in a hot spring environment: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15263. Their findings pushed back the earliest known evidence of life on land by a staggering 580 million years and has huge implications for the search for life on Mars. Watch this short video about their work: https://youtu.be/UdMKO2l-DzA Martin, Tara and Dave also wrote an article for Scientific American on the story behind their stunning findings. Their research represents an important piece of evidence in the Terrestrial Origin of Life Hypothesis conceived by Bruce, and supported by many lab experiments conducted by Bruce and Dave. Jonti’s research includes the search for planets orbiting other stars (exoplanets), the formation and evolution of our Solar system, and the nature of habitability. Graham’s research focuses on characterising the geochemistry of rare mineral forms in extreme environments and he is interested in how biology on Earth relates to the search for extraterrestrial life on worlds such as Mars and Europa. So far we can be certain that life has emerged once in the Universe: on Earth. NASA and other space agencies are working on designing probes and rovers that can be sent to other planets and planetary objects in the solar system to look for signs of life. The discovery of water on Mars in 2015 is a watershed moment for the Astrobiology community and we are anticipating many such important discoveries in the near future. It is an exciting time to be an Astrobiologist and we look forward to your questions! We will be back at 3pm ET to answer your questions. Ask us anything! Prof. Martin Van Kranendonk [MVK] website, Professor of Geology at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and the Director of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology Tara Djokic [TD] website, PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, Australia Prof. Dave Deamer [DD] website, biologist and Research Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA; author of ‘First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began’ Dr Bruce Damer [BD] website, associate researcher in the Department of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California at Santa Cruz, USA Associate Prof. Jonti Horner [JH] website, astronomer and astrobiologist in the Computational Engineering and Science Research Centre at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia Dr Graham Lau [GL] website, astrobiologist and science communicator at Blue Marble Space