![]() Put forward in 1961 by astronomer Frank Drake, the list remains mostly blank. ![]() A well-known list of the data needed to determine the likely abundance of life-bearing worlds, though highly conjectural, is known as the “Drake equation.” While the chances of finding life elsewhere remain unknown, the odds can be said to be improving. The goal: unambiguous evidence of another living, breathing world. Working with scientists across NASA, as well as academic and international partners, his team and others are helping to design and build the next generation of instruments to sift through light from other worlds, and other suns. I’ll be planning a party if we find it.”ĭomagal-Goldman co-leads a team of exoplanet hunters who, in the years and decades ahead, are planning to do just that. “I hope it’s there,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, a research astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Is there life beyond Earth? So far, the silence is deafening. What's Out There? The Exoplanet Sky So FarĪnd finding non-intelligent life is far more likely Earth existed for most of its history, 4.25 billion years, without a whisper of technological life, and human civilization is a very late-breaking development. No convincing evidence of advanced technology – artificial signals by radio or other means, or the telltale sign of, say, massive extraterrestrial engineering projects – has yet crossed our formidable arrays of telescopes in space or on the ground. Observing signs of possible microbial life in exoplanet atmospheres is currently just out of reach. We have yet to find another “Earth” with life, intelligent or not. The ingredients in the recipe for earthly life – water, elements associated with life, available sources of energy – appear to be almost everywhere we’ve looked. A healthy percentage of them are small, rocky worlds, of a similar size and likely similar composition to our home planet. Our galaxy is crowded with exoplanets – planets around other stars. The good news: We know vastly more than any previous generation. ![]() As humanity casts an ever-wider net across the cosmos, capturing evidence of thousands of worlds, an ancient question haunts us: Is anybody out there?
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