Guest post at Scientific American

Scientific American has been good enough to put a post up from the Life, Unbounded coffers. You can catch it at their guest blog spot. In it I present a short discussion about some of the practicalities of looking for 'habitable' planets - those showing evidence of an entrenched biosphere. Just to stoke things a little I make the suggestion that if we abandon the strategy of studying a few worlds in great detail (with great difficulty) that we might be able to address the global question of whether there is any life out there. We sacrifice pesky details, like knowing exactly which planets have biospheres, but maybe succeed in answering whether any in a particular class have organisms lolling about. Of course I paper over the enormous difficulties in doing even this, but it's fun to throw the idea out there.