14 DAY TRIAL // Those daydreaming about having ET over for a cup of tea in the foreseeable future might want to rethink their plans. This is because, according to a new study authored by an international team of researchers, finding extraterrestrial life is more difficult than previously assumed.
In their paper on the matter at hand, scientists explain that, for the time being, specialists rely on identifying so-called biosignatures to establish whether or not some planets used to house or might still accommodate for life.
The researchers further detail that establishing such biosignatures boils down to pinning down the presence of certain chemicals such a methane and oxygen, which are considered to be evidence of past or present life.
The problem is that, according to Assistant Professor Hanno Rein with the University of Toronto Scarborough and his fellow researchers, it can sometimes happen that lifeless planets whose moons do not accommodate for any signs of life strikingly resemble planets that do have a biosignature.
Thus, scientists argue that, according to their investigations, the method now used to pin down biosignatures on planets outside our solar system can produce false positive results. This means that, all things considered, the search for life on other planets is more complicated than believed.
Assistant Professor Hanno Rein claims that, despite recent advances made in the field of science and plans to build new telescopes in the near future, it will probably still be a while until mankind has the right tools to identify a genuine biosignature and separate it from potential false positives.
“A telescope would need to be unrealistically large, something one hundred meters in size and it would have to be built in space. This telescope does not exist, and there are no plans to build one any time soon,” specialist Hanno Rein told the press in a recent interview.
Until now, the scientific community has confirmed the existence of 1,774 explanets, i.e. planets outside the solar system. However, it is believed that about 100 billion other planets might be floating about in the Milky Galaxy alone, which means that scientists still have quite a lot of work on their hands.
Assistant Professor Hanno Rein believes that, despite these drawbacks, there is no need to stop searching for signs of life on other planets altogether. On the contrary, he says that, “There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic that we will find hints of extraterrestrial life within the next few decades, just maybe not on an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star.”
Furthermore, “We should make sure we are looking at the right objects. We want to broaden the search and study planets around stars that are cooler and fainter than our own Sun. One example is the recently discovered planet Kepler-186f, which is orbiting an M-dwarf star.”