In the first experiment in the study, Varnum and his co-authors analyzed how the media covers extraterrestrial discoveries. They looked at five events: the discovery of pulsars in 1967, which were not immediately recognized as natural; Ohio astronomer Jerry Ehman's detection of the “Wow!” radio signal in 1977 (the signal's source remains disputed); the 1996 announcement of fossilized microbes in a Martian meteorite; the strange behavior of Tabby's Star reported in 2015; and 2017's discoveries of exoplanets that exist within distant habitable zones.

Varnum cautioned that these results do not reflect how the rest of the world might respond. Vakoch echoed that sentiment. Past research on extraterrestrial civilizations suggest that Americans tended to view aliens in a more black-and-white way than residents of China, for instance, he said. “Chinese participants were able to imagine contact would lead to both risks and benefits,” whereas Americans either thought the discovery would be “all good or all bad, but not both,” he said.

Given these results, Pennycook said he would be “pretty confident” that, if NASA announced the discovery of alien microbes tomorrow, Americans would react positively.

important political implication

“the most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world”.

astrobiology provides an important evolutionary perspective on human affairs.

It is simply not possible to consider searching for life on Mars, or on a planet orbiting a distant star, without moving away from the narrow Earth-centric perspectives that dominate the social and political lives of most people most of the time

First, astrobiology is inherently multidisciplinary. To search for aliens requires a grasp of, at least, astronomy, biology, geology, and planetary science.

Consider the fact that lots of people claim to have seen ghosts, and will be pleased to tell you what they saw. But the case for the existence of these shrouded spirits isnt what you would call convincing. You dont read a lot about the parameters of ghosts in scholarly journals.

Yet another resolution for the so-called Fermi Paradox is that weve been singled out for special treatment:

Some even insisted that there was no paradox at all: the reason we don't see evidence of extraterrestrials is because there aren't any.

The first thing they note is that the Fermi Paradox is a remarkably strong argument.

here are no extraterrestrials anywhere among the vast tracts of the Galaxy

where is everybody?

Colonization of the Milky Way should be a quick exercise.

Enrico Fermi

he central question of the paper was then: how would the beings send out their message?

But it wasn't until the close of the 1950s that anyone proposed a credible way to look for these distant, hypothetical neighbors. The space age had dawned, and science was anxious to know what lay in wait beyond the confines of our thin, insulating atmosphere. The Russians had, in 1957 and 1958, launched the first three Sputnik satellites into Earth orbit; the United States was poised to launch in 1960 the successful Pioneer 5 interplanetary probe out toward Venus. We were readying machines to travel farther than most of us could imagine, but in the context of the vast reaches of outer space, we would come no closer to unknown planetary systems than if we'd never left Earth at all. Our only strategy was to hope intelligent life had taken root elsewhere and evolved well beyond our technological capabilities—to the point at which they could call us across the empty plains of space.

The ancient Greeks were the first Western thinkers to consider formally the possibility of an infinite universe housing an infinite number of civilizations. Much later, in the 16th century, the Copernican model of a heliocentric solar system opened the door to all sorts of extraterrestrial musings

Looking beyond our solar system, astronomers have now discovered over four hundred planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy. In general, the exoplanets detected so far are supermassive and huggingtight orbits around their sun;this is simply because the effects of big planets orbiting close to a star are easiest to spot. Theirhot, bloated atmospheres are not the sort of place for life to begin, but over time we have been finding more and more Earth-like worlds. The expectation is that within the next few years wewill discover a true Earth twin. The next step will be trying towork out what this new world is like.

Astrobiology is a bright new field of science, concerned with the possibility ofexisting life beyond theEarth –of extraterrestrial life.

So it seems as though ancient Mars ticked all the necessary boxes for providing basiclife-support as a planet. There is the distinct possibility that itexperienced its own independent genesis of life, perhaps even before Earth became alive. The problem today is that Mars has suffered somesortof environmental catastrophe.

observations by NASA's Kepler space telescope suggest that nearly every star in the sky hosts planets — and many of these worlds may be habitable. Indeed, Kepler's work has shown that rocky worlds like Earth and Mars are probably more common throughout the galaxy than gas giants such as Saturn and Jupiter.

Recent discoveries suggest that the solar system and broader Milky Way galaxy teem with environments that could support life as we know it, Grunsfeld said.

Humanity is on the verge of discovering alien life, high-ranking NASA scientists say. "I think we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years,"