Chapter 1At the Brink of Finding Life in the Cosmos


These worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time.

—Carl Sagan, Cosmos

The First Images from a New Spacecraft

The foam on my Portuguese espresso tastes a little bitter, but I hardly notice. For the past hour I’ve been staring at the images on my computer screen, a live feed from NASA’s recently launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The screen is dark now, and my own thoughts are wandering into that darkness, into what mysteries of the cosmos it will reveal.

Watching the flawless launch of the JWST on a late-December day in 2021, scientists from every continent focused intently on each step of the launch. From liftoff to observations, JWST had 344 single points of potential failure—each one of which alone could take down the entire system—so although we were relieved every time something went right, we knew that there were still hundreds of things that could go wrong.

With my eyes glued to NASA TV (and to our team’s Slack channel, where colleagues in every time zone commented on the success of each step), I kept reminding myself to breathe—in and out, in and out. There was nothing any of us could do because the rocket had lifted off and was on its way to its final destination in space, a place about one million miles away called the second Lagrange point, L2. New York Times reporters Dennis Overbye and Joey Roulette described the image of JWST blasting off into space beautifully, as looking like “a tightly wrapped package of mirrors, wires, motors, cables, latches and willowy sheets of thin plastic on a pillar of smoke and fire.” It also carried the dreams of thousands of scientists like me, hoping to catch a glimpse of the cosmos that had been beyond our reach—and our view—until now.

The JWST is the first telescope capable of capturing just enough light with its 21.3-foot (6.5-meter) mirror to explore the chemical composition of the atmosphere of other rocky worlds. Size is the key to collecting light. Imagine a bucket—the larger it is, the more rainwater it can catch in a downpour. The telescope’s mirror operates the same way—the larger it is, the more light it can collect.

The cheering of the crew in the control room at the successful separation of the telescope from the rocket interrupted my thoughts. The final image from the launch broadcast was a close-up of the telescope drifting into the darkness of space, with a mesmerizing view of Earth’s blue globe in the upper corner.

It would take months before the JWST successfully navigated each of the remaining hurdles as this beautiful bundle of mirrors, cables, and solar panels unfurled. After that it had to slowly cool to the freezing temperatures at which it could begin to operate.

It was only when examining the first signals that we proved we had beaten the odds. Having cleared every point of potential failure, this amazing telescope operated flawlessly, providing the first glimpses of a new way to see our cosmos—and a taste of the astonishing discoveries yet to come.

One of the most stunning images captured by the JWST is of the Eta Carinae Nebula, about seven thousand light-years away. This stellar nursery, where stars and new planets are just forming, looks like celestial art painted by a cosmic brush. But it’s not just the birth of new worlds that the JWST is unveiling. An image shared with the public in July 2022 by President Joe Biden, a day before the first official NASA data release, revealed a time when the universe itself was in its infancy. In the JWST deep-field image, you can see thousands of galaxies scattered like glittering dots across the black canvas of space, contained in an area of the sky that, viewed from Earth, is about the size of a grain of sand. Their light took more than thirteen billion years to reach us, sending us a message from a time long before Earth was born. On its journey to our telescope, some rays were bent as they passed a massive cluster of galaxies. Matter and light interact, so this ancient light was warped into the beautiful arcs seen in the image, revealing relativity’s pull over space and time.

This view of ancient galaxies fills me with wonder—and hope. There are billions of stars in this image, ancient echoes of other possible worlds. In this tiny corner of our cosmos, planets could have been formed countless times, and yet our now and their now do not intersect because of the vastness of space between us. While some stars—like those in the deep-field image on my computer screen—are lost in time to us, a myriad of closer stars remain—with intriguing worlds circling them. And now we can explore the closest ones.

In science, by finding new ways of seeing, such as catching the light from dimmer objects in the huge mirror of the JWST, we are able to detect what we could only imagine before. New insights transform our understanding. These images are a touching testament to the cooperative spirit of humanity: it took thousands of people from all corners of the world to make that vision a reality.

Among the first images released, one revealed a detailed view of the light from a scorching, puffy giant planet, WASP-96b, shrouded by layers of clouds, haze, and steam. It blasts around its star twice a week. While devoid of life, the JWST image proved that the space telescope can explore the atmospheres of other, smaller Earth-sized planets given more time. Places where life could thrive. As a member of one of the scientific teams behind the JWST, I work with a creative group of scientists to explore these new worlds on our cosmic horizon.

Discovering life on another planet would forever revolutionize our entire worldview.

So Where Is Everyone?

Let’s assume, for a moment, that the universe is teeming with life. In that case, the obvious question is: Where is everyone? In my introductory astronomy class, “From Black Holes to Undiscovered Worlds,” I ask my students to suggest possible explanations for why we have had no credible record of alien visitors to date. I am going to skip all discussion of supposed UFO sightings here, since the subject is full of poor observations and would require a book-length reply like Carl Sagan’s thought-provoking The Demon-Haunted World, one of my favorite reads. Among many other insightful points, Sagan asks why alien species that have surpassed us so monumentally in technology that they can travel from star to star would need to abduct a whole person to study. Even a comparatively less advanced species like us humans has developed the technology to take DNA samples from hair or saliva. Wouldn’t collecting these samples from unsuspecting humans be a much more effective way to study them than beaming people up into their spaceships one by one? For the record, most of my students’ theories involve either doomsday scenarios—alien civilizations have destroyed themselves before they can reach out to find others—or the endless void—we haven’t seen anyone else because we are the only life the cosmos ever produced.

This puzzle of absent aliens is not new. Enrico Fermi, the Italian-American physicist and Nobel Prize winner, famously posed the question “Where is everybody?” in a conversation on the possibility of extraterrestrial life in 1950. If technological civilizations are common in the universe, surely some would have developed sufficiently to visit or at least contact us by now? This mystery is known as the Fermi Paradox; the discrepancy between the absence of evidence for advanced extraterrestrial life and the high likelihood that it should exist. Casting a dark shadow over the conversation at the time was the fact that scientists were in the midst of developing nuclear weapons that could wipe out civilization on Earth.

How abundant might intelligent civilizations be within our vast universe? One way of thinking about this was proposed by the American astronomer Frank Drake, a pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), who in the 1960s developed a systematic process to assess SETI’s prospects. Searching for what he called “a whisper we can’t quite hear,” he wove together a number of factors in a framework that is called the Drake Equation. The seven interlinked factors began with well-constrained estimates of the rate of star formation, educated guesses on the likelihood of which ones might have planets circling around them, and the fraction of these capable of nurturing life, before continuing on to wild speculations about the probability of life actually evolving, to the fraction of life-forms that might develop intelligence, and the even smaller percentage that might be capable of interstellar communication. The very last factor of the Drake Equation poses a question that can evoke either boundless enthusiasm or chilling pessimism about our chances to connect with any alien civilization: How long can technological civilizations survive?

The vastness of space is only occasionally dotted with stars, with enormous distances between them. For me, these become much easier to imagine when I shrink them in my mind to the scale of everyday objects. Let’s reduce our solar system—from the Sun to the outermost planet, Neptune—to the size of a cookie with a diameter of about two inches. How far away do you think the Sun’s closest neighbor is? Two cookies away? Five? One hundred? It is much farther than that—nearly nine thousand cookies. Or, on the same cookie scale, about four football fields away. To chart the distances between stars in the cosmos, you need larger units than miles or kilometers, or cookies. Using a light-year as our cosmic yardstick makes it easier to comprehend these unimaginable expanses.

Light travels at an incredible speed: about 190,000 miles (~ 300,000 km) per second, or an astonishing 6 trillion miles (~ 9 trillion km) per year. It takes light only about one second to travel between the Earth and the Moon, about 240,000 miles (~ 380,000 km), and a mere eight minutes to cross the distance from the Earth to the Sun. In those eight minutes, light travels a relatively tiny cosmic distance of 93 million miles (~ 150 million km). The closest neighboring star to our Sun is Proxima Centauri, at an enormous distance of 25 trillion miles (~ 40 trillion km) away. Even light takes about four years to travel that vast distance. So as well as conveying distance, a light-year scale tells us how long it takes for light to make the trip. We humans are starting to venture into our solar system, but these distances are small compared to the spaces separating the stars.

Our galaxy is about one hundred thousand light-years across. If a civilization had the means to navigate at even 10 percent of the speed of light, it could, in principle, cross the galaxy in about a million years. In principle. Most of the travel time would be spent voyaging through empty space: even a trip between our Sun and its closest stellar neighbor would take decades. Most of the trip would be endlessly boring because the distances between stars are so vast. And moving at such breakneck tempo would be exceedingly dangerous, since, running into even a small grain of interstellar material at that speed could result in disaster for the spacecraft and everyone on it. A million years is a long time compared to a human lifetime, or even to humanity’s evolution, but some stars and their planets are much older than ours. If older civilizations exist, our galaxy might already contain their outposts, relics, or signals indicating advanced technology. But we have not encountered any yet. (Nor have we traveled very far from home.) So, as my students often suggest, do we lack alien visitors because the distances between habitable worlds are just too vast to navigate?

Let’s leave reality and get inspired by solutions presented by science fiction. While I personally love the idea of moving at faster-than-light speed, like the fictional starship Enterprise in the sci-fi Star Trek franchise, warp speed is most likely impossible to achieve, even in the future, because our universe is bound by the laws of physics. Based on everything we know, faster-than-light travel is a barrier we cannot cross. In an alternative visually stunning vision imagined in Luc Besson’s 2017 film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, through complex but possible marvels of technology, enormous space stations navigate the cosmos while their passengers experience the wonders of the universe. The fictional spaceship contains a vast metropolis that is home to species from a myriad of alien worlds.

For now these possibilities to cross the galaxy are beyond us. But perhaps there is another way aliens might reach us. Since light travels at an astonishing speed, that means messages encoded in radio signal can travel fast. Often, the word “light” is used only to describe the narrow range of electromagnetic radiation that our eyes have evolved to see. Imagine that you are holding a prism, a wedge of glass, and you pass a beam of white sunlight through it. A brilliant cascade of colors emerges ranging from deep reds to vibrant violets: the spectrum of visible light. Yet, what you see is but a minute portion of the full range of electromagnetic radiation that extends far beyond our human sight, into the infrared and ultraviolet, radio waves and gamma rays, all different notes in this grand cosmic composition of light.

One way to find advanced, communicating civilizations would be to collect radio signals being beamed our way that are not naturally occurring. While astronomical objects like galaxies generate radio signals as well, scientists are looking for signals that stand out, maybe—a kind of cosmic greeting. But these interstellar greetings would dissipate in the vastness of space. Every doubling in distance reduces the signal strength to one-quarter of its previous volume, so at a certain distance, even the loudest shout becomes an imperceptible whisper—and that is assuming anyone is listening. Astronomers are looking for these radio signals but they have not found any yet. Does that really mean that there is no other life in the cosmos?

The Great Silence

Giant traveling space stations are not yet available, and we can’t break the known laws of physics, so this Great Silence of the cosmos looms dauntingly. This has led scientists (and my students) to suggest the possibility that even if life had existed somewhere else in the past, some barrier like a cataclysmic event has destroyed it and prevented civilizations from venturing into our galaxy—a Great Filter, so to speak, that has so far prohibited alien intelligence spreading through the cosmos. This Great Filter could lie in our past. For instance, maybe it is astonishingly complicated to start life on a planet. Or what if it’s easy for life to begin but almost impossible for it to get past the earliest microbe stage? If alien life did become intelligent and technologically savvy enough to build satellites and capable of sending spaceships traveling through a planetary system, that technology might also be powerful enough to destroy every corner of their planet. Or the cataclysmic filter could lie in our future. How hard is it for a civilization to survive its own technological growth? Maybe other life-forms have destroyed themselves before they could travel to the stars. A very depressing thought. But on the bright side, in that scenario, they are a much bigger danger to themselves than to us. Nuclear bombs and climate change are just two of many possibilities that could lead to the destruction of a civilization.

But why do we automatically assume that other civilizations would even want to visit or communicate with us? Let’s set aside the issue of what atmosphere and environment potential alien visitors would need to survive; how intriguing would Earth appear as a destination?

Imagine that you could visit one of two planets: the first is five thousand years younger than Earth, and the second is five thousand years older. Both show signs of life and are at a similar distance. Which one would you pick? Whenever I ask this question, most people pick the older, more advanced planet. Let’s assume a fictional alien civilization was given the same choice. Using that reasoning, our spectacular planet becomes a bit less interesting. Don’t get me wrong, Earth is my favorite planet, but in terms of technology, we are just getting started. True, twelve astronauts have visited the lunar surface, but so far, human beings have not even reached the nearest planet, let alone the nearest neighboring star. Given a choice, would Earth really be the planet to pick—yet? In the optimistic case of a cosmos teeming with friendly worlds, the Earth is not yet at the grown-ups’ table.

The premise that anyone who could call us would do so immediately, seems flawed, making the Great Silence less eerie.

Talking to a Jellyfish

If we ever found another civilization that we could communicate with using radio signals or visible light—both of which travel much faster than spacecraft—I often wonder what we would say. What questions would we ask? And how would we ask them? It seems unlikely that they would understand English, Chinese, Spanish, or any of the other thousands of languages spoken on our beautiful planet. The experience might end up being like a human trying to talk to a jellyfish. I’ve attempted that; the results were less than promising. And in that case, the jellyfish was right there in front of me. I could see it and could have touched it (but I refrained), and I listened for any sounds it might make in an attempt to learn its language (with no success). Note that I am not an expert at interspecies information exchange, though there are other scientists worldwide studying the communication of dolphins, whales, chimpanzees, and dogs, among others—they might fare better. To interpret and understand other species, it is critical to observe actions and other visual cues and combine these with your interpretation of sounds. It is a daunting task. Imagine how much harder it would be with a civilization you couldn’t even see? An advanced interstellar civilization trying to converse with a less advanced one would be a bit like humans trying to interpret the movement of a school of fish, which is dynamic, purposeful, and even beautiful but, ultimately, puzzling in its intentions.

Even though humans are only at the beginning stages of our attempts to communicate with other species, spacefaring civilizations should have something in common with humans. To find other civilizations and correspond over cosmic distances, they’d need to understand how the cosmos works. And while humans have employed many methods to do that—from reading tea leaves to random guessing—there is only one accurate way to figure out how planets move and how spacecraft and radio signals operate: the scientific method. The scientific method is brutal in that it does not care what you hope to find, but that is also its greatest strength: with new facts, new ideas emerge and replace outdated notions. It forces you to find reliable information—a key any species would need in order to discover new planets and to send or search for messages, let alone invent safe means of space travel to get there.

Here Be Bananas, Aliens, and Dragons

I once began a lecture in my introductory class by holding up a banana and asking my students, “Could this banana be an alien?” Let me be clear: I don’t think a banana is an alien—or at least I think it is extremely, extremely unlikely. But a banana was the only unusual object I could find in my backpack, and I wanted to make a point. How do we really know if something is an alien or not?

To find life in the cosmos, we need to stretch our minds and search at the limits of technology. Not only do we need to work at the edge of knowledge, but we must ask the right questions and overcome our own biases. The human brain has evolved to spot patterns—a great evolutionary trait for people who were once hunted as prey. If your ancestors spied hungry lions hidden in tall grass before the lions sneaked up on them, they survived. If there were a few false alarms and a bit of energy wasted in fleeing unnecessarily, that was not as bad as being surprised by lions on the prowl. So our ancestors learned to recognize the presence of predators by the smallest changes in the environment—bending grass, a sudden eerie quiet, or slight movement in the bush. Many tiny signals together could alert them to danger. That ability to discern patterns is still useful, but it can also make us think we see things that are not actually there.

Take, for example, the human face many people thought they recognized in some old NASA images of a rock formation in the Cydonia region of Mars. This led to endless wondering about whether aliens had left us a message inscribed in the Martian landscape. But isn’t it curious that it was a human face and not, say, the face of a dog or a panda? Perhaps that revealed an unconscious hope that aliens were just like us. Clearer photos later showed that these Cydonia rocks could be mistaken for a face-like image only at low resolution and when the sunlight hit them just right. But the episode serves as a helpful reminder that our species’ ability to see patterns can be misleading when we try to make sense of new information. One of the advantages of the scientific method—or disadvantages, depending on whom you ask—is that it requires you to accept what the nineteenth-century British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley called “the great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”

Asking the right questions helps us determine what is a real pattern and what is just random noise. Let’s return to my banana and start asking questions. What is the banana made of? Where did it come from? Does it resemble other items we are familiar with? Does it share chemical or genetic properties with other recognizable Earth objects? Does it behave in a novel way? As it turns out, we know from hundreds of years of agriculture where bananas grow, we know that they have grown on Earth for a long time, and we know how they evolved on our planet. So we can be pretty sure that bananas are not aliens, and we can use the same thought process to determine that neither you, me, nor your coffee cup is an alien. However, other claims are not so easily dismantled.


Copyright © 2024 by Lisa Kaltenegger