3 October 2020 | New Scientist | 5SCIENTISTS and science journalists often
share a weary refrain whenever a story
with a whiff of the extraterrestrial raises
its head: it isn’t aliens. It is never aliens.
While firm evidence of life beyond
Earth would be the discovery of the
century, we have been burned too many
times before – most notably in 1996,
when excitement about supposed fossils
in a Martian meteorite inspired the-then
US president Bill Clinton to make a
statement from the White House lawn.
President Donald Trump hasn’t made
any public pronouncements about the
discovery of phosphine, a molecule that
may have a biological origin, on Venus.
Yet it has tested the resolve of the “never
aliens” crowd. Could it really be that
after all the time we spent looking for
life on rocky Mars, it was waiting to be
discovered in the hellish clouds of Venus?Working out what is happening there
will require much more investigation,
with studies of Venusian chemistry (see
page 12) and a fleet of spacecraft explorers
(see page 14) now in the planning
stages. But even if we confirm that the
phosphine is produced by alien microbes,not some as-yet unknown geological
process, this isn’t Star Trek – we won’t be
chatting to these new aliens. If we want
to find intelligent life forms, we must
almost certainly look further afield.
Here, the size of the universe is both a
blessing and a curse. Our galaxy contains
billions of planets, so even if the odds oflife arising on a particular world are tiny,
there is a good chance it has happened
many times over. The possible detection
of the first planet outside our galaxy
(see page 17) only increases the odds.
Yet just because life may be common,
it doesn’t follow that intelligent life awaits
us in the stars next door. New work
suggests intelligence is rare and any
civilisations are likely to be thousands
of light years apart (see page 36). Barring
a way to break the speed limit of the
universe – which, granted, isn’t an
impossibility – we will probably never
receive a message from another world,
let alone galaxy-crossing visitors landing
a flying saucer at the White House.
So even if we do find aliens, they
probably aren’t going to be alien aliens.
For all intents and purposes, then,
we may really be alone. ❚Watch this space
Alien life could be present on Venus, but intelligence may be harder to find
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