Maybe It’s Time To Stop Snickering About Aliens

So we are already going to be looking at a lot of stars to hunt for planets. And when we find those planets, we are going to look at them for basic signs that life has formed. But all that effort means we will also be looking in exactly the right places to stumble on evidence of not just life but intelligent, technology-deploying life. It’s as if your job was to look through lost-and-found wallets all day gathering dollar bills. Since you’re already looking in the wallets, there is some chance you might stumble on a winning lottery ticket in one of them, too.

Of course, the odds of finding a winning lottery ticket are low. In the same way, seeing something unusual around a star is probably not evidence of an alien civilization. But given the large-scale exoplanet observations we are doing anyway, perhaps it’s time to start thinking about how to think about the whole alien thing. David Grinspoon, the Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, put it succinctly when he told me:

“Lots of astronomers have been discussing all the possibilities for the light curve pretty responsibly. But some are really up in arms at even the mention of aliens. I think that’s a mistake. Clearly, some things are more probable than others. But we have to learn how to handle these things [and] how to not to handle them.”

I think Grinspoon is right. If we do lots of exoplanet observations, then we are bound to see new things. For most of them, we will find “natural” explanations. But for some of them we may also need to, at least, consider the possibility of something more than natural.

And that would mean going beyond snickering.