Life Beyond Earth: Will We Know It When We See It?

If there is alien life in the universe, it’s a fair question to ask what extraterrestrials would think of humanity and its foibles. In a recently discovered essay by Winston Churchill titled “Are We Alone?” he wrote that he wasn’t “immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilization” and that he doubted that humans “are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.”

The Times reported that Churchill sent the 11-page essay to his publisher a few weeks after Britain entered World War II in 1939.

“I am not sufficiently conceited,” he wrote, “to think that my sun is the only one with a family of planets.”

The search for alien life has come a long way since Churchill’s essay, even if humanity has not. In a profile of the astrophysicist Sara Seager, Chris Jones wrote in The Times that the Harvard University professor was exploring the darkness of the cosmos for an Earth-like exoplanet.

“Common sense suggests a presence that we can’t confirm,” Mr. Jones wrote of the possibility that we are not alone in the universe. “Seager understands that we won’t know they’re out there until we more truly lay eyes on their home and see something that reminds us of ours. Maybe it’s the color blue; maybe it’s clouds; maybe, however many generations from now, it’s the orange electrical grids of alien cities, the black rectangles of their lightless Central Parks. But how could we ever begin to look that far?”

Ms. Seager is working on just that with her starshade project. The starshade is about 30 meters across and shaped like a sunflower. It would be launched into space to block the glare from the theoretical twin sun that Churchill also imagined. That glare might be what’s keeping her from finding what she seeks.

“With the big light extinguished, the little lights, including a potential Earth-like planet and everything it might represent, will become clear,” Mr. Jones wrote. “We will see them.”

It’s also possible that Ms. Seager is searching for beings that already know we're here — and they’re amusing themselves with us.

The late William D. Hamilton, a renowned evolutionary theorist, was quoted by Robert Wright in The Times as being open to the likelihood of “extraterrestrial manipulators.”

“There’s one theory of the universe that I rather like — I accept it in an almost joking spirit — and that is that Planet Earth in our solar system is a kind of zoo for extraterrestrial beings who dwell out there somewhere,” Dr. Hamilton said.

Our alien zookeepers, he said, occasionally “insert a finger and change a little thing. And maybe those are the miracles which the religious people like to so emphasize.”

Even though Dr. Hamilton reiterated his “almost joking spirit,” he added that “it’s a kind of hypothesis that’s very, very hard to dismiss.”

In that same spirit, the American comedian Conan O’Brien recently declared his belief in aliens. He is even producing a TV series about them called “People of Earth.” But he is less enthusiastic than Churchill, Ms. Seager and Dr. Hamilton about who might be waiting for us in the darkness of deep space.

“I think when we do encounter life on other planets it’s going to be extremely disappointing,” Mr. O’Brien said. “I just don’t think it’s going to be the spaceship and these creatures with giant heads and huge eyes. It’s going to be some sort of three- celled organism that grows on a rock and is really into pornography.”