Mono Lake -- Brine shrimp dart in the shallows along this weirdly tower-studded lakeshore, and clouds of alkali flies darken patches of the lake's salty surface. But Richard Hoover, a onetime solar physicist, collects only a few of those mundane creatures.
He is on the hunt for stranger prey.
Glass tubes cram his pockets as he gathers samples of muck from the lake's rough and rubbled bottom. Some of the samples, he hopes, will reveal the presence of "extremophiles," microbes that inhabit some of the most bizarre environments on Earth.
An infinite variety of life forms has been found in environments that more familiar organisms can't tolerate. Hoover hopes that some of these places just might resemble the extreme environments where life may once have thrived on other worlds in our solar system.
Perhaps, Hoover muses, extremophiles might thrive beyond Earth even now.
The space probes that examine red-hued Mars, or giant Jupiter's icy moons Europa and Callisto, or ringed Saturn's smog-shrouded satellite Titan, are spurred by the possibility that life may well be far more widespread in the solar system -- or at least may once have existed in extreme environments other than on Earth alone.
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