14 DAY TRIAL // If we are serious about searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, then we should significantly widen our area of research, say experts. They explain that most efforts are currently focused on worlds that look just like our own, and add that this approach is very limiting.
With recent studies showing that liquid oceans may exist under the surface of Pluto and moons such as Saturn's Enceladus and Jupiter's Europa, it should be fairly obvious by now that we can move away from researching exoplanets within their stars' habitable zones exclusively.
“We propose an Earth Similarity Index which provides a quick screening tool with which to detect exoplanets most similar to Earth,” says Washington State University astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, as quoted by Space.
With this tool at our disposal, it may become a lot easier to identify worlds that may support microbial lifeforms. In fact, the most recent evidence point that such objects may exist within our very own solar system.