Question: is there ET life and if there is how will we get to it

Susan Cartwright answered on 4 Jun 2020:

At present, we don’t know whether there is ET life or not. We have no evidence that there is, but our technology is not quite up to the point where we can easily search for such evidence: as the saying goes, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” I think it more than likely that ET life does exist: there are literally billions of suitable planets in our Galaxy alone, and all the evidence is that the chemicals necessary for life are not difficult to make.

How we would get to it is another question. If there is life in our solar system – and there could be, but it would be very simple life: alien bacteria, not alien intelligence – then we can send probes to study it, although we would have to be very careful not to destroy it in the process. If we discover evidence of life on planets around other stars, then it is much more difficult. With our current technology we could send an unmanned probe to another star, but it would take thousands of years to get there, and I am not at all sure that it would still be working when it did (electronics does break down, and interstellar space contains things like cosmic rays that could damage it). If we discovered alien intelligence, we might be able to communicate with it rather than visiting physically, but even then it would take years and perhaps centuries to get an answer! And we have been listening for signs of alien communication for over half a century now, and have not detected any convincing signals, which suggests that actively communicating alien civilisations probably aren’t common.

So my conclusion is that we may quite soon find evidence that there is life out there, but physically visiting it, unless it is in the solar system, is not possible in the foreseeable future. Sorry!