Life in the Universe was originally published by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as the proceedings of a conference held at the NASA Ames Research Center in 1979. It was designed to address the broad questions of life in a roughly chronological sequence, dealing in turn with present theories of the physical and chemical events in the story of cosmic evolution, with the environments in which life can originate and evolve, to the evolutionary patterns which allow the emergence of complex biological systems, including intelligent beings, and finally to the possibility that we may now be able to detect the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life.