When we’re contemplating the existence of life beyond our planet, it’s worth considering that we’ve discovered microbes inhabiting spaces on Earth where the idea of survival was previously inconceivable. These lifeforms are based on familiar DNA – so it’s life as we know it – but they exist in the deep trenches of our oceans, far away from sunlight. In the past, we believed life could only exist on a planet, a certain distance from its local star (so it has the right levels of radiation). Finding life on Earth thriving where we didn’t think it possible has opened our eyes to the concept that there might be moons able to support life too. We’ve only been actively reaching out for alien life for about a century — a mere blip in the long history of the solar system and of the universe overall. Evan Solomonides, an astrophysics and mathematics undergrad and researcher at Cornell University, suggests that it could take a while — about 1,500 years from now, to be precise — before we hear from any extraterrestrials.
In a paper submitted to the American Astronomical Society, Solomonides examines the probability of finding life. “We predict that under 1 percent of the galaxy has been reached at all thus far, and we do not anticipate to be reached until approximately half of the stars/planets have been reached.” Solomonides believes that we will have explore around half of the Milky Way galaxy before we hear anything, which will take a while since we’ve barely explored our own galactic neighborhood.
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