When will we find evidence of life beyond earth?

Scientists have been searching for life beyond earth for a very long time. So far, they haven’t found any evidence. How long will it be until they do?

Under the ice

Nobody can quite agree. Some scientists say it might happen within 10 years, some presume 25 years, and others expect nothing in the next 50 years.

So, we may just find evidence of life beyond earth at some point during this century. That could be in the form of microbes on Mars, our neighbouring planet. Or something in the atmosphere of our other neighbour, Venus. Or something swimming in the oceans under the layer of ice covering Europa, one of the moons orbiting the giant planet of Jupiter.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (or a later, more advanced version), we could find evidence of life in matter contained in the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars.

Huge spaceships

There’s life, and then there’s intelligent life. In other words, extraterrestrials who have the technology to send a message to earth. Astronomers have spent the last sixty years and more listening out for these signals.

They’ve also been looking out for something else: visible activity by extraterrestrials very far away from earth. Think mind-blowingly large spaceships or structures that have been built around stars to harvest their energy.

Unintelligible messages

You can spend hours, days and years searching for life in all kinds of ways... and still find nothing. We might strike it lucky and soon identify something that can be clearly classed as a bacterium on Mars. Astronomers might detect something that is unmistakeably a signal sent by a distant civilisation.

On the other hand, extraterrestrial life might be so different from our own that we’re unable to identify it as such. A message might be so unintelligible that we don’t even realise that something is trying to communicate with us.

Answered by Jean-Paul Keulen