Life Beyond Earth: When and How Will it be Found?

Astrobiology is the study of life on the universe. It uses an understanding of the nature and history of life on this planet to frame expectations for biology beyond Earth. Starting in 1995, astronomers have discovered exoplanets: planets orbiting other stars. Over 5300 have been confirmed, and it’s likely there are more planets than stars in the universe. There are ten billion habitable worlds in our galaxy, all of which have the raw material for biology.

The stage is set for the first detection of life beyond Earth. It might come within the Solar System, but the suitable space missions are technically challenging, expensive, and take more than a decade to plan and deliver to their destinations. It’s more likely that microbial life will be detected by its alteration of an exoplanet atmosphere. The James Webb Space Telescope and several upcoming telescopes in space and on the ground can make this type of observation. It’s also possible that more advanced forms of intelligent life will be found through evidence of their technology.

A panel of expert astrobiologists will discuss various strategies for detecting life beyond Earth, and debate which is most likely to succeed and when. Proof that biology is not unique to this planet would be one of the most profound events in the history of science.

Participants

Chris Impey

University Distinguished Professor, Astronomy, University of Arizona

Chris Impey is a University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. He has over 220 refereed publications on observational cosmology, galaxies, and quasars, and his research has been supported by $20 million in NASA and NSF grants. He has won eleven teaching awards and has taught three online classes with over 350,000... read more! »

Lisa Kaltenegger

Founding Director, Carl Sagan Institute to Search for Life in the Cosmos
Associate Professor, Astronomy, Cornell University

Lisa Kaltenegger is the Founding Director of the Carl Sagan Institute to Search for Life in the Cosmos at Cornell and Associate Professor in Astronomy. She is a pioneer and world-leading expert in modeling potentially habitable worlds and their detectable spectral fingerprint. Lisa Kaltenegger served among others on the National Science Foundation’s Astronomy and Astrophysics... read more! »

David Kipping

Associate Professor, Astronomy, Columbia University
Director, Cool Worlds team

View Papers / Presentations »

David Kipping is an Associate Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University and the Director of the Cool Worlds team. His group studies the exoplanet demographics, detection techniques and the search for exomoons, for which his team found the first two candidates. Kipping has also published extensively in astrostatistics, astrobiology and technosignatures, with a particularly speciality... read more! »

Rebecca Oppenheimer

Curator & Professor, Department of Astrophysics, Division of Physical Sciences, Richard Gilder Graduate School

Dr. Rebecca Oppenheimer is a Professor in the Department of Astrophysics and a curator at the American Museum of Natural History. As a comparative exoplanetary scientist she studies objects orbiting stars other than the Sun by trying to see them directly and to dissect their chemical compositions. Dr. Oppenheimer is the co-discoverer of Gliese 229B,... read more! »

Sara Seager

Astrophysicist
Professor Physics, Planetary Science, Aeronautics & Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Professor Sara Seager is an astrophysicist and a Professor of Physics, Professor of Planetary Science, and a Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she holds the Class of 1941 Professor Chair. She has been a pioneer in the vast and unknown world of exoplanets, planets that orbit stars other... read more! »

Thank you for this panel discussion and the privilege to be an audience member from a great distance, though brief temporal delay. A similar disjunction, considered in relativistic scales between galactic civilizations, means we may forever be confined to conversations across centuries or millennia. This forbidding circumstance may even create the wistful scenaria that Dr. Kipping has evoked in his fantastic “Cool Worlds” videos–civilizations learning of each-other long after the demise of the “senior discussant,” who would logically be more evolved by perhaps a billion years or more, and so the more likely to have faced insurmountable requirements for persevering, or to have volitionally transcended the iteration we thought we just met! This wistful possibility is, in my opinion, more of an inevitability for the junior civilization. Given the daunting prospects and contingencies that face the endeavors of a pioneer generation, we might want to anticipate the very human frailty of discouragement.
I propose that a multi-disciplinary committee be launched to parallel the entire, impassioned, millennia-consuming search for life beyond Earth. This committee, which would ideally be peopled by urban-wilderness planners, evolutionary ecologists, psychology ethicists and cognitive futurists, including young-aged idealists as well as elders of experiential burnish, and entrusted to seek meaning and purpose from disappointments in astrobiologic exploration, so that deep frustration will not doom the search in any one lifetime and will also find applications for lessons learned, for data accumulated and even for future course adjustments. We would be only human to feel defeated before defeat is truly the case, but we will be fully human if we anticipate and adjudicate our own feelings of dejection. I hold a very pessimistic expectation of life emerging anywhere else, given the soul-straining set of requirements for abiogenesis. But since it did at least once, and we know the outcome AS the outcome, we are impelled to prove our value & our valor, both, in wrenching apart the implausibilities we once sailed through in evolution as the eukaryotic rascal popping out of a warm, little, but very crowded pond to become the lovable, belligerent, omnivorous, bipedal, sweaty, romantic, placental, ironic, hypergyrencephalic metazoan we greet with a groan each morning in the mirror.

One comment on “Life Beyond Earth: When and How Will it be Found?”

DennySmith says:

April 9, 2023 at 11:00 am

Thank you for this panel discussion and the privilege to be an audience member from a great distance, though brief temporal delay. A similar disjunction, considered in relativistic scales between galactic civilizations, means we may forever be confined to conversations across centuries or millennia. This forbidding circumstance may even create the wistful scenaria that Dr. Kipping has evoked in his fantastic “Cool Worlds” videos–civilizations learning of each-other long after the demise of the “senior discussant,” who would logically be more evolved by perhaps a billion years or more, and so the more likely to have faced insurmountable requirements for persevering, or to have volitionally transcended the iteration we thought we just met! This wistful possibility is, in my opinion, more of an inevitability for the junior civilization. Given the daunting prospects and contingencies that face the endeavors of a pioneer generation, we might want to anticipate the very human frailty of discouragement.
I propose that a multi-disciplinary committee be launched to parallel the entire, impassioned, millennia-consuming search for life beyond Earth. This committee, which would ideally be peopled by urban-wilderness planners, evolutionary ecologists, psychology ethicists and cognitive futurists, including young-aged idealists as well as elders of experiential burnish, and entrusted to seek meaning and purpose from disappointments in astrobiologic exploration, so that deep frustration will not doom the search in any one lifetime and will also find applications for lessons learned, for data accumulated and even for future course adjustments. We would be only human to feel defeated before defeat is truly the case, but we will be fully human if we anticipate and adjudicate our own feelings of dejection. I hold a very pessimistic expectation of life emerging anywhere else, given the soul-straining set of requirements for abiogenesis. But since it did at least once, and we know the outcome AS the outcome, we are impelled to prove our value & our valor, both, in wrenching apart the implausibilities we once sailed through in evolution as the eukaryotic rascal popping out of a warm, little, but very crowded pond to become the lovable, belligerent, omnivorous, bipedal, sweaty, romantic, placental, ironic, hypergyrencephalic metazoan we greet with a groan each morning in the mirror.