Scientists might contain their excitement while they await confirmation via follow-up missions.
(SETI stands for the “search for extraterrestrial intelligence.”) “How do you announce that?” Seth Shostak, an astronomer with the California-based SETI Institute, told The Daily Beast. Imagine, for example, that NASA’s Europa Clipper probe-which is due to launch in 2024 on a mission looking for signs of life on Jupiter’s moon Europa-detects possible fleeting evidence of organic molecules under that world’s icy shell.
The Mystery Behind a Nearby Alien Beacon Is Solved The magnitude of the question of whether we are alone in the universe, and the public interest therein, opens the possibility that results may be taken to imply more than the observations support, or than the observers intend.” “With this privileged potential comes responsibility. “Our generation could realistically be the one to discover evidence of life beyond Earth,” Green wrote. In a paper published in Nature on October 27, NASA’s James Green proposed what he described as a “framework for reporting evidence for life beyond Earth”-a plan for how to confirm whether we've really found aliens. Even if our extraterrestrial company is merely some microbe, living or long-dead.Īnticipating mounting evidence of alien life, and also anticipating that the media might mischaracterize that evidence, NASA’s good-natured chief scientist wants to put some guardrails on the story-by placing potential evidence of alien life on a seven-step scale that ranges from interesting to definitive.
If this summer’s spasm of excitement over “ UFO sightings” is any indication, the public is primed to run with any evidence, however thin, that we’re not alone in the universe. It’s only a matter of time and scientific rigor before we find it. There’s a growing consensus in the scientific community that there’s alien life out there, somewhere, in some form or another.
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