Abstract
Abstract This chapter explores the intersection between two related fields: synthetic biology and astrobiology. Pushing the engineering of life past traditional limits in molecular biology and expanding the envelope of life to forms never before extant, synthetic biologists are now beginning to design experimental ways of getting at what astrobiologists have long suspected: that the life known here on Earth is but a subset of vast combinatorial possibilities in the universe. The resonances between the future engineered possibilities of this world and speculations about possible biologies on habitable others are not merely happenstance. Indeed, there is a curious and compelling deeper history interlinking scientific speculation about new forms of life elsewhere in the universe with visions for the human-directed engineering of new forms of life on Earth. For decades, the astrobiological and the synthetic biological have mutually inspired each other and overlapped in powerful genealogical ways.
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