In April, NASA expanded the search for life on other planets with the launch of its exoplanet survey satellite, TESS. From War of the Worlds and Arrival to SETI and Stephen Hawking, both pop culture and scientists feed the expectation that the discovery of extraterrestrial life will be a sudden event. History teaches us the opposite. Even with TESS, we shouldn’t expect a stunning discovery of extraterrestrial life anytime soon. In fact, we shouldn’t expect it at all.
That’s not to say we’ll never find evidence of life, but rather that there’s a long, difficult road between suggestive evidence and established fact. We’ve been collecting and critically examining the former for more than four centuries, and we’ve still never reached the latter. In 1610, less than a month after Galileo published the first telescopic observations of the moon, the great astronomer Johannes Kepler declared that they provided evidence of life. Since then, as new instrumentation and methods have allowed us to look further and more clearly into space, scientists have repeatedly sought—and found—evidence of extraterrestrial life. In 1638, Royal Society founder John Wilkins drew on the best scientific data available to agree that the moon likely hosted life. Not until the late 19th century did most practicing astronomers, based upon slowly improved data coming from slowly improving telescopes, become sure that Kepler and Wilkins were wrong.
"When we discover alien life?" Huh? We already have. Mainstream scientists need to get their heads out of their asses and objectively and honsetly look at the voluminous evidence. To read more, click here.