As far as humanity can prove, ET is purely hypothetical.
Yet there are morebelieversthan skeptics.
Even in the scientific community.
But famed Italian physicist Enrico Fermi took a different perspective.
Fermi was best known in his time for being one of the architects of the first atomic bomb.
In essence, Fermi asked a simple question: if aliens exist, where are they?
And in each one there are trillions of stars that could be surrounded by planets.
The sheer number of possibilities makes it obvious, to them, that alien life must exist.
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Otherwise, the evidence continues to support a ground-truth where were alone.
Unless we change the calculus.
Luckily for us,NASAs planning a mission to Marstowards the end of the 2020s that could change everything.
But what if both our species and our closest intelligent neighbors are simply looking in the wrong places?
When the Mars mission launches, NASA is sending the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope along for the ride.
Rogue planet
Free-floating planets, or rogue planets, are planets that appear to have formed non-traditionally.
It eventually gained mass and became the lovely little fixer-upper we call home.
But rogue planets dont orbit a star.
One things for certain: theyre hard to find and even harder to observe.
But, when the Roman telescope finally gets to its destination, that could change.
(A)I, researcher
This is possible thanks to modern artificial intelligence.
In filtering this information … [the system will] overcome an extremely limited data transmission rate.
NASA hopes itll find rogue planets out there, and lots of them.
Some scientists believe there are trillions of free-floating planets in our galaxy alone.
Dark planets, dark lifeforms?
This beggars the question ofwhat we might find on rogue planets.
But, as it turns out, some of these planets may actually be warm.
We have creatures on Earth that have evolved in the dark, but none of them are intelligent.
How would a sentient species whod never examined a suns radiation choose to look for extraterrestrial life?
