Somewhere, on a perhaps still undiscovered planet, life exists. I’m sure of it. I hope there will soon be confirmation. I hope it’s intelligent life, but I’ll settle for the most simple forms, for plants, for flowers, for anything that has a cyclic existence.
Let me tell you why. It has nothing to do with any religious beliefs or a quest for scientific knowledge, and it’s not because some may want to somehow rush to that planet if ours becomes inhospitable. It’s beyond all of that.
My father loved the opera. He couldn’t always grasp the lyrics, but he knew the plots and the themes and he understood the characters. The operatic world was far removed from his own, but it helped him appreciate the contours of each of his days. What he heard and saw on those stages – and later listened to on tapes and CDs – was possibility. Possibility is the wonder and the awe one experiences upon accepting the notion that horizons, even if drawn to keep us at bay, also serve as a challenge to propel us forward.
Finding life elsewhere won’t just mean we’re not alone. It won’t just mean that we may have to rethink entrenched ideas. It will, instead, tell us that whatever limitations we have encountered, whether forced upon us or much too willingly accepted, can be defeated. And, in that moment of discovery, we’ll know that all of the external or self-imposed machinations that have been used to keep us afraid, to keep us apart, and to keep us from seeing the inherent connections between every living thing on Earth no longer hold sway.
Indeed, when the announcement is finally made, possibility will take precedence over everything.
The Hubble, James Webb and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, telescopes are space-based observatories that are bringing the moment of discovery, of possibility, closer. Next year, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will join them. It will be able to block starlight, making it easier to directly observe planets outside of our solar system, known as exoplanets, and will be able to quickly survey immense swaths of space that can lead to the detection of countless new worlds that might support life.
The Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction in Chile, is expected to be fully operational in 2030. It will study the biosignatures of exoplanets, determining which have oxygen and other gases that form the building blocks of life as we know it. When completed, its primary mirror will be nearly 130 feet in diameter.
Meanwhile, TESS has already identified some 20,000 objects as possible exoplanets. That information enables the Webb to provide further analysis, potentially adding to a growing list of alien worlds.
Looking even further ahead, the expected launch around 2040 of the Habitable Worlds Observatory, or HWO, promises advanced technology with ever greater analytical ability than any of the telescopes that have come before it. In a universe of billions of galaxies, some of which contain hundreds of billions of stars, the HWO is either going to confirm what the Webb or the ELT have found, or it will be the first to definitively announce that life may be even more abundant than we could have imagined.
Oh, we will most definitely learn that life exists elsewhere. But we don’t have to wait until then to begin to redefine horizons, to begin to focus not on what separates us, but rather on everything that binds us together. We can begin to fully accept that and recognize the value of everyone and everything. We don’t have to wait to make possibility our watchword. We can begin to live as if we’ve already found life on some unimaginably distant piece of rock orbiting a star not unlike our own.
I’m hoping, and choose to believe, that extraterrestrial life will help us take a new look at our own. For all of the magic that exists in the people and places that make up our home, we can do so much more to bring that magic closer, to make it the source of what will enable us to zoom past all limitations.