I recently had a conversation with Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, and one part I found particularly interesting was his view on how close we might be to detecting life beyond Earth.
He suggested there could be around a billion planets in the Milky Way with conditions broadly similar to those of early Earth, including temperatures that could allow liquid water to exist.
The challenge is detecting anything in their atmospheres. A planet can be around a million times fainter than its host star, making it incredibly difficult to separate the planet’s light and analyse its atmosphere. But new telescopes are beginning to make this possible.
Rees described some of the atmospheric evidence as still being “a little tentative”, but offered this estimate:
“Within 10 or 20 years, I think we may, if simple life is widespread, have evidence of that.”
He was considerably less optimistic about finding intelligent life. He suggested that the transition from simple organisms to complex animals may have depended on a series of unlikely events, and that technological civilisations might only exist for a relatively short period.
I’d be interested to hear from people who follow exoplanet research: does a 10 to 20 year timeframe for finding evidence of simple life seem realistic, or is it too optimistic given the difficulties of interpreting atmospheric signatures?
The relevant section starts at 36:50:
https://youtu.be/WcVt-ozVtgw?is=ZDjDhjrW96BoyRHC
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