Science is supposed to be about finding and assessing facts. But when the topic turns to extraterrestrial life, much public discussion seems aimed simply to keep up hope that “They’re Out There.” There’s nothing wrong with that in principle, as long as we acknowledge the nature of the situation. Otherwise, we are building empires of the imagination.
A few stories that hit the fan this year seem to fit that description.
At Aeon, a planetary scientist and an astrobiologist argue that extraterrestrial technology could be “lurking in our backyard” while we patiently search for evidence of the simplest life forms:
But the idea of discovering technosignatures within our own solar system, on Mars, the Moon or even on Earth, is far harder to accept. One reason is that science simply isn’t prepared for it. Theoretical discussions are limited, and serious search efforts remain rare. In mainstream scientific circles, the topic is still considered fringe – which only reinforces the lack of rigorous enquiry into solar system technosignatures.
The deeper issue, though, may be psychological and political. A close encounter with alien technology could spark geopolitical instability. Unlike some abstract suggestion of a distant exoplanet signal, a discovery near Earth would carry the weight of perceived threat. World governments might scramble to respond, not out of curiosity, but fear. To consider such a possibility would demand new strategies, new science and a level of intellectual risk we’ve so far resisted. And if the discovery does ever come, it could provoke fear, confusion or overreaction.
Ravi Kopparapu and Jacob Haqq Misra, “Have they been here?,” April 18, 2025
This is basically a science fiction premise with a flourish of sociology. We have found no hard evidence of any kind of alien technology that would justify a search for it. The search is really for emotional gratification.
Seeded By Aliens?
At the BBC’s Science Focus, Jonathan O’Callaghan offers another take on panspermia, the idea that life came to Earth from somewhere else in the galaxy. “Scientists are now seriously asking if humans were seeded by aliens. Here’s why”:
That idea is gaining traction thanks to a pair of missions – NASA’s OSIRIS-REx and Japan’s Hayabusa2 – that, in the past few years, have returned rocks from asteroids back to Earth.
Analysis of those samples suggests that some of the building blocks of life are present in the asteroids, raising the prospect that those same building blocks, and perhaps even life itself, could have been delivered to Earth.
It’s “absolutely” plausible, says Dr Jason Dworkin, project scientist on the OSIRIS-REx mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. “Early Earth had a bombardment of material.” (September 14, 2025)
The word “plausible” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. A thesis can be plausible without any evidence whatever. It need only remain within the rules of reasonable speculation.
They Come in Peace
At Medium, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb enthuses about the aliens we might meet:
Finding extraterrestrial siblings would inspire us to reach out beyond the limited experiences we had so far on our home planet. There are richer opportunities in our cosmic street than available at home…
Rolf [Dobelli] asked: “And why should we expect aliens to be kind to us and not have the gangster mentality?” I explained that gangsters often have a short life because they engage in conflicts and play Russian roulette under risky circumstances. Any interstellar visitors to our back yard must have survived under duress for billions of years. They might abide by the principle of “survival of the kindest.”
“Finding a Meaning to Our Existence from Extraterrestrial Siblings,” Sep 20, 2025
There is a novel lurking in there but not a taxpayer-funded research program.
Time to update SETI?
From Gizmodo: In an excerpt from his new book, John Gertz argues it’s time to ditch SETI’s old dogmas and rethink how we prepare for first contact. Gertz, a former Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) chairman, admits that there is no evidence of any other life in the universe. But, he says,
The very fact that the universe is so silent and ET is not obvious may support an argument for pessimism. Perhaps benign alien civilizations are in the majority, but they know something that newbies such as ourselves do not, namely, that the universe is a very dangerous place, and there are some really bad actors out there. They therefore intentionally keep quiet and low profiles, lest they provoke the bad actors.
from Reinventing SETI: New Directions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Oxford University Press 2025) (September 27, 2025)
Perhaps. We usually speculate about behavior when guessing the intentions of entities of whose existence we are already certain. Here we are asked to speculate about the psychology of intelligent aliens without finding so much as a single extraterrestrial bacterium.
Coming down for a landing …
Gertz believes that human civilization is relatively recent: “the oldest civilization may be five or more billion years in advance of us” At Science Alert however, Matt Williams turns the tables: Maybe we got smart first. Highlighting a recent paper by astrophysicist David Kipping, he breaks with Carl Sagan‘s Principle of Mediocrity and emphasizes Earth’s unusual nature — perhaps the first suitable home for intelligent life.
But wait. That’s very like the Privileged Planet hypothesis. Such reflections are more commonly associated with belief in a Creator than with belief in countless ET civilizations. And the only thing Privileged Planet’s ideas have going for them is a much closer relationship to facts.
The question looms: How much can science avoid facts while retaining the character of science?
Denyse O’Leary is a freelance journalist based in Victoria, Canada. Specializing in faith and science issues, she has published two books on the topic: Faith@Science and By Design or by Chance? She has written for publications such as The Toronto Star, The Globe & Mail, and Canadian Living. She is co-author, with neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul. She received her degree in honors English language and literature.
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