NASA Expects To Find Alien Life Forms In Just A Few Years

Since the dawns of civilizations, humans have been looking up to the skies thinking that someone or somewhat is out there, in the Universe. Could be gods could be extraterrestrials or could be both, who knows?! However, discovering aliens would be the most significant scientific discovery. And now, NASA expects to find alien life forms in just a few years.

Surprisingly, NASA gave up its old approach regarding its programs that search for extraterrestrials, and the US space agency is now planning to adopt a more aggressive attitude in this regard to speed up the search for aliens. So far, even though the scientists found several habitable exoplanets, at least livable in theory, they couldn’t find evidence of alien existence. A new report from NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, called Biosignature False Positives, highlights NASA’s optimism in finding extraterrestrials.

“When trying to detect life on planets orbiting other stars, the direct observation of life (e.g., focusing on a single tree in an alien forest, or seeing an alien, or having the alien shake our hand) is incredibly unlikely. They might not even have hands to shake, which would make it impossible, in fact. Within the next several decades, however, it may be possible to observe indirect evidence for that life using the so-called biosignatures,” the report reads.

NASA Expects To Find Alien Life Forms In Just A Few Years

As the before-mentioned report outlines, we need to look for “biosignatures” in the atmospheres of the exoplanets. For Earth, for instance, these biosignatures are fossils, empty candy wrappers, and oxygen, among others, as the report reads. “Each of these observations provides indirect evidence, of varying strength, for the presence of extant, or extinct [alien life forms],” Biosignature False Positives states.

“In our search for [alien life] – whether within the earliest part of Earth’s geologic record, on planets within our solar system such as Mars, or especially for extrasolar planets [exoplanets] – we must infer the presence of life from its impact on the local or global environment. These biosignatures, often identified from the known influence of terrestrial organisms on the Earth’s atmosphere and surface, could be misdiagnosed when we apply them to alien worlds. The so-called false positives may occur when another process or suite of processes masks or mimics a biosignature,” the report adds.

“I simply want to point out the fact that the intelligence we might find and that might choose to find us (if it hasn’t already) might not be at all be produced by carbon-based organisms like us. How might that change the above assumptions about interstellar travel? Our typical life-spans would no longer be a limitation (although even these could be dealt with multi-generational missions or suspended animation), and the size of the ‘explorer’ might be that of an extremely tiny super-intelligent entity,” said Professor Silvano P Colombano, of NASA’s Ames Research Center.

In short, NASA expect to find alien life forms in just a few years by changing the current approach in its search for extraterrestrials with a more aggressive method based on looking for biosignatures.