![]() ![]() But NASA also has an astrobiology “strategy” describing where the agency sees promising lines of research – from the highly specific to the wide and broad - that the agency might support. Scientists across the country and around the world are diving into origin-of-life and life-beyond-Earth issues and developing exciting and cutting-edge work. Is the discovery of ET life similarly awaiting our coming of scientific age?Īstrobiology research is taking place because its time has come. Our experience with finding distant planets also makes you wonder: Will the search for the current or past presence of extraterrestrial life someday be viewed as a parallel to the earlier search for exoplanets? Men and women of science, as well as the lay public, intuitively assumed planets existed beyond our solar system, but these planets were identified only when our technology and thinking had sufficiently advanced. As with so many NASA missions, the broad and intense drive to find and understand habitable zone planets and moons both greatly enhances astrobiology and is informed by astrobiology. The search for exoplanets was born in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics, but it has always been intertwined with astrobiology as well. With advances in the instruments and knowledge that make possible the exoplanet hunt, the focus has been increasing refined to identify planets lying in habitable zones – at distances from their host stars that would allow water to remain at least periodically liquid on a planet’s surface. By now more than 5,000 exoplanets have been officially identified – via NASA missions such as the Kepler Space Telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Space Telescope ( TESS), the Hubble Space Telescope as well as ground-based observations - and billions more await discovery. Since ancient times, natural philosophers, then scientists, and untold interested others predicted, assumed even, that many other planets orbited their stars. The Pentagon, which refers to UFOs as unidentified aerial phenomena, has confirmed the authenticity of videos and photographs accompanying those reports.īefore that recent and still-unfolding news appeared, though, a hard-to-penetrate cone of silence has surrounded the whole question of UFOs, at least as far as the US government and military have been concerned.Consider, too, the revolution in understanding that has taken place since the mid-1990s regarding planets and moons in solar systems well beyond ours. It’s just that people connect the dots way too quickly.”īoth scientists and many civilians hold to the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.Īs a recent CNN story revealed, for years government and military officials alike ignored sightings of UFOs reported by both military and civilian pilots - just the sort of extraordinary evidence that might substantiate the reality of ETs. “The videos, the stories of Air Force and Navy pilots seeing mystery spacecraft, all of these things add up. “When you know that people aren’t telling you everything they know, you start filling in the blanks yourself,” said Impey. There are understandable reasons for such beliefs, Impey noted.įor decades, some people have been convinced that the US government has been harboring secrets about visitors from afar ever since 1947, when they believe an alien spacecraft supposedly crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. So, too, is the belief in alien life forms to begin with.Īccording to a 2018 Chapman University study, 41.4% of Americans believe that extraterrestrials have visited Earth at some time or another, and 35.1% believe that they have done so in recent times. The anthropomorphism - putting things that are not human in human form - is a constant. After World War II, they came in flying saucers, the latest and greatest technology we could imagine.” When zeppelins were invented, the aliens flew in dirigibles. ![]() “A couple of centuries ago, they came in galleons in the sky. “It’s a curious thing that for as long as we’ve imagined extraterrestrials, they look pretty much just like us,” observed Chris Impey, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona. This image from 2015 video provided by the Department of Defense, labeled Gimbal, shows an unexplained object at the center. ![]()
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