Are we ready for E.T.?

Are we alone? Is life around us a cosmic accident that only happened once on this lonely planet, making human beings the only technological civilization anywhere? Or is the universe teeming with life, and perhaps even intelligence and self-awareness?

These questions have haunted humanity for millennia. Science is now poised to take a fantastic leap forward in answering them.

Over the next few decades, we will finally gain hard data that will help us answer our questions about alien life. But as we come ever closer to that milestone, another equally pressing question emerges. What would finding alien life—or not—mean for us all?

Over the last few decades, the science of astrobiology—the study of life in its cosmic context—has exploded. We have discovered that most stars in the sky host a family of worlds. Many of those stars host a planet that orbits at the right distance for liquid water to exist on its surface, one of the prerequisites for life to form.

Powerful instruments including the James Webb Space Telescope can peer into the atmospheres of these alien worlds to search for “signatures” of life’s activity. Biosignatures include oxygen in the atmosphere that likely would not be there without life to produce it.

Finding life of any kind beyond Earth would represent the most ground-breaking discovery in human history. Life, unlike any other physical system in the universe, creates, innovates and goes beyond itself. If you give me a star right after it forms, the laws of physics allow me to predict its future billions of years from now (other than small details). With a microbe, on the other hand, we simply cannot say what will happen over billions of years. Evolution could yield something as weird as a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face (a kangaroo).

That remarkable creative power means that even a single additional example of life out there would imply that, likely, there are a lot more examples. And if we allow for the possibility of other intelligent, technologically capable species, then it becomes truly impossible to know how far life can go.

Everything we understand about ourselves and the universe we inhabit would change. So are we ready?