Almost daily, someone, somewhere, reports seeing a UFO. Many of those claims are accompanied by shaky or blurry videos. Even the U.S. Navy has released videos from fighter jets of UAP flying objects that the military can’t explain. Yet, despite all of that anecdotal evidence, the majority of astronomers believe that there is not a shred of hard evidence of extraterrestrial visitations. Most astronomers do, however, believe that life does exist in locations other than Earth, perhaps even in our own solar system. Even NASA’s official position is that extraterrestrial life seems almost inevitable, and perhaps it is time we seriously prepare for finding it.
In a new scientific commentary led
by NASA’s chief scientist, James Green, the space agency’s researchers believe
now is the time to create a framework for reporting evidence of
extraterrestrial life. “Our generation could realistically be the one to
discover evidence of life beyond Earth,” the team writes. It is quite unlikely,
the researchers believe, that a single event or discovery will unambiguously
prove the existence of alien life. It is far more likely, they state, that the
discovery of such life will be a long-term process with evidence coming in
piecemeal. Our ideas and beliefs will likely change as a result of scientific
study. “History includes many claims of life detection that later proved
incorrect or ambiguous,” the researchers state. We need, they say, to “recast
the search for life as a progressive endeavor, where we convey the value of
observations that are contextual or suggestive but not definitive and emphasize
that false starts and dead ends are an expected part of a healthy scientific
process.”
The researchers want to avoid
splashy headlines that prove upon further analysis to be a false discovery of
alien life. They feel we need to establish criteria for a “confidence of life
detection” (CoLD) scale. The lowest levels of the CoLD scale might be
represented by possible identification of plausible biosignatures, signs that
an alien planet might be able to support life. Higher levels of the CoLD scale
should be reserved for specifically defined measurements of the existence of
life. Their goal is to establish a common set of criteria for progressively
establishing the existence of alien life.
I suppose the highest level of the
CoLD scale might be when an alien spacecraft lands on the White House lawn, or that
of some other major world capital, and holds a press conference unequivocally
announcing their existence.
Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for
the Oklahoman newspaper. On the
following day, I post that same column to my blog page.
