Aliens?!

There's a study that says that most headlines that end in a question mark can be answered with "no." And, well, unfortunately, this is one of those supporting cases. At least for now. Now, when people think about aliens, they usually think about Area 51 (just Naruto run past the bullets, duh,) Roswell, UFOs, little green men with big black eyes dressed in jumpsuits... but the reality is that the search for extra-terrestrial life is much less fantastic than most science fiction would have you believe. The field of astrobiology is still in its infancy (how can you have a developed field without even a shred of evidence of what your field studies?) but that doesn't mean that hypotheses don't lead to experiments.

While scanning the skies for radio signals (mostly met with silence) is all well and good, most teams have taken a more reasonable approach to finding evidence of life on other worlds. Perhaps the most reliable method is searching for signs of elements and chemicals associated with life as we know it on other planets. But how do we find that? It's not like we can just send a probe to another planet to suck up some atmosphere and analyze it, if it were that easy, why not just send a camera and see for ourselves if there's life or not? Instead, we use a technique called spectroscopy; by analyzing the electromagnetic spectrum emanating from a star, we're able to note key differences in the light when a planet passes in front of its host star, and by analyzing the differences, we're able to discern details about the planet, like what the surface is made of, what's in the atmosphere, etc. This is crucial in searching for earth-like planets and alien life, because if a planet has an atmosphere not unlike our own, it could potentially support life at some level! We also search for certain clues, for example an abundance of methane (because of poop, yep I said it) could tell us that there's biological life on another planet since it decays much more quickly than other gasses in the atmosphere!

So while I'm very sorry to say that, no, we don't have evidence of alien life yet, you can let your sci-fi-loving mind rest assured that the search is on! And while intelligent extra-terrestrial life is more than likely a far-flung fantasy reserved for box office hits, it's not out of the question that bacterial, plant, or basic poopin' biological life exists elsewhere! Or you could just storm a government facility in the Nevada desert to get the answers you want.