“In all likelihood, in the next 25 years, we’ll find evidence of life on another planet…” begins a new essay by author Dave Eggers in the Washington Post.
“In more than a dozen conversations with some of the best minds in astrophysics, I did not meet anyone who was doubtful about finding evidence of life elsewhere — most likely on an exoplanet beyond our solar system. It was not a matter of if. It was a matter of when.”
[A]ll evidence points to us getting closer, every year, to identifying moons in our solar system, or exoplanets beyond it, that can sustain life. And if we don’t find conditions for life on the moons near us, we’ll find it on exoplanets — that is, planets outside our solar system. Within the next few decades, we’ll likely find an exoplanet that has an atmosphere, that has water, that has carbon and methane and oxygen. Or some combination of those things.
And thus, the conditions for life. In a few years, NASA will launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will have a panoramic field of vision a hundred times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope. And on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — we’ll call it Roman from here on out — there will be a coronagraph, a device designed to perform something called, beautifully, starlight suppression. Starlight suppression is the blocking of the rays of a faraway star so that we can see behind it and around it. Once we can master starlight suppression, with Roman and NASA’s next astrophysics flagship, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, we’ll find the planets where life might exist.
To recap: For thousands of years, humans have wondered whether life is possible elsewhere in the universe, and now we’re within striking distance of being able to say not only yes, but here.
And yet this is not front-page news. I didn’t really know how close we were to this milestone until I visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., on a hot and dry day in June…
Eggers’ article is part of an ongoing series called “Who is government?” (For the series Michael Lewis also profiled the uncelebrated number-crunchers at the U.S. Department of Labor, while Casey Cep wrote about the use of DNA to identify the remains of World War II soldiers for America’s Veteran Affairs’ department’s.) But this week Eggers wrote that the work being done at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory “is the most inspiring research and exploration being done by any humans on our planet…”
“No billionaires will fund work like this because there’s no money in it. This is government-funded research to determine how the universe was created and whether we are alone in it. If NASA and JPL were not doing it, it would not be done.”
Eggers emphasizes later that “doesn’t mean it’s intelligent life, or even semi-intelligent life. It could be bacteria, or some kind of interstellar sea cucumber. But whatever form it takes, we are close to finding it…”
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