Closing In On Alien Life

Shawn Domagal-Goldman, a research exobiologist based at NASA Headquarters, predicts that we will find an "alien Earth"-- a world similar to Earth in size and composition, and orbiting within the habitable zone of its parent star-- by 2014. The prediction is based largely on the data being gathered by NASA's Kepler planet hunting spacecraft, which has already found thousands of candidate exoplanets. Candidates have to be confirmed before being officially recognized as worlds.

Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute is holding to a prediction he made that we will find a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization within the next twenty years. With the continued development of the Allen Telescope Array, SETI searches will become increasingly wide-ranging over that period, making Shostak's inkling more plausible.

Scientists generally are careful about making bold assertions. They don't want to end up looking stupid any more than anybody else does. So, when two scientists make such predictions, perhaps the rest of us should note that we may be getting close to answering in the negative the fundamental question: "Are we alone?"