Carl Pilcher, former director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, is confident that we eventually will contact extraterrestrial life. It’s “just inconceivable,” he says, that Earth is the only life-bearing planet “when there are over 100 billion stars in this galaxy, and over 100 billion galaxies in the universe.”
According to research from 2017, people most likely to believe in the existence of aliens have a low adherence to a specific religion but a strong desire to find meaning.
A variety of space missions are slated for liftoff in 2022, including explorations of Mars, the Moon, and an “unexplored potato-shaped world in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.” By summer, the first images and data are expected from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which last week launched into orbit to explore exoplanets.
