Obama is right about aliens

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Now for something completely different — and very hopeful.

President Obama touched off a minor kerfuffle over the weekend by casually dropping the conclusion that he believes in aliens. Podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen asked the former president during a lightning round of questions: “Are aliens real?”

“They’re real,” Obama answered, adding: “But I haven’t seen them. And, they’re not being kept in Area 51.”

The answer immediately raised eyebrows online, forcing the former president to put out a longer statement to clarify exactly what he meant: “I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there. But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”

Obama’s position is hardly controversial among anyone who spends much time thinking about the possibility of life beyond — as I phrased it on my book tour about UFOs, “The math is on the side of the aliens.”

But what a lot of people have missed though is that year after year, the science is rapidly evolving about just how likely it is that life and the building blocks of life are remarkably common across our universe.

Add to that our rapidly evolving understanding that the universe is both bigger than we have fathomed and that more stars have more planets that would be habitable by life as we understand it, and the math has tipped even more in favor of aliens since I was studying this even a few years ago.

All Obama appears to be saying in his answer is that he believes the math of what’s known as the Drake Equation. Readers of my book on UFOs and the evolving search of extraterrestrial life will remember that 1961 thought experiment by Frank Drake, which outlined the rough math of extraterrestrial life:

The equation tries to calculate (N), the number of advanced civilizations in the Milky Way that we would be able to communicate with — you can follow the exact equation reasoning here, but it basically ends up being a semi-predictable thought experiment along the lines of: What fraction of stars have planets, what fraction of those planets are habitable, what fraction of those habitable planets develop life, what fraction of those habitable planets that develop life develop intelligent life, etc.

In the years since, we’ve come to understand that the numbers behind all of these variables are even bigger than we’ve imagined. Sure, there might be only a few habitable planets per star or galaxy, but at the largest scale there are far far far far more galaxies than we imagined — regular discoveries from the James Webb space telescope are blowing our mind.

As I explained in my book, “Pointed at a single patch of the night sky that we believed was dark, [the JWST] uncovered 94,000 previously unknown galaxies in just that single corner. The math is incredible: The average galaxy is estimated to have perhaps 100 million stars—although the largest, known as supergiants, can contain 100 trillion.”

As late as the 1990s, we didn’t know there was a single planet beyond our own solar system — now scientists regularly discover hundreds in single studies. Today, according to NASA’s tracker, we know of 6,107 “exoplanets” spread across 4,554 stars, and we’re surely just getting started.

We actually believe now that most stars have planets. Just take the math of that quote above: In one tiny corner of the universe where we thought there was nothing, it turns out that there 94,000 galaxies, each with 100 million or more stars, each star of which likely has planets, and some fraction therein of which are habitable by life as we understand it.

Or the math even more simply of the photo above: You’re looking at a photo of a tiny fraction of the night sky that would appear completely dark and empty to you that actually represents 30,000,000,000 — thirty billion!— or more stars, each of which likely has one or more or even lots of planets circling in, some chunk of which are habitable. (In my book, I quoted a recent estimate that there are one sextillion habitable planets across the universe.)

We’ve just started to understand what those exoplanets are like — and yet already, a team at the University of Cambridge announced in April last year: “We found the strongest evidence to date of possible biological activity on an exoplanet.” That remarkable discovery focused on an exoplanet named K2-18b, which is about eight times the size of Earth and about 124 light years away and within the so-called “habitable zone” of the star that it orbits — not too hot, not too cold, like Earth. Scientists reported detecting the chemical fingerprints of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and/or dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) — two things that on Earth are only produced by microbial life like marine phytoplankton.

(Just marvel at that preceding sentence for a moment: Science has advanced to the point where we can look at a star 124 light years away — i.e., study light that left the star when William McKinley was president and Thomas Edison’s cutting-edge technology was the phonograph — and refine it sufficiently to study a distinct planet orbiting that star and detect in that tiniest of pinpricks the specific characteristics of specific chemicals. Amazing! And we’re just getting started!)

Add to that the idea that our evolving understanding of life’s history here on earth, how we’ve come to understand that life started here effectively as early on Earth as it could — within perhaps just a half-billion years after earth’s formation, a blink of an eye cosmically — and it hardly seems possible that life could be that un-common across the universe.

Our science, astronomy, and understanding of the mysteries of universe is advancing right now in leaps and bounds. In December alone we saw two meaningful advances by Japanese scientists in the understanding of the commonality of life. First — in a study that I will confess I barely understand — a team at the University of Tokyo found that the creation of Earth was aided by the shockwave of an nearby exploding supernova. You don’t really need to understand why that matters, except that it helps scientists draw the conclusion that there are probably more places in the universe like us than we thought.

“A key question in astronomy is how ubiquitous Earth-like rocky planets are,” the team led by Ryo Sawada explained. “Our results suggest that Earth-like, water-poor rocky planets may be more prevalent in the Galaxy than previously thought.”

That same month another team of scientists announced they found that the building blocks of life exist on an asteroid that has a slim chance of hitting earth in 2182. “All five of the canonical nucleobases in DNA and RNA, and phosphate, were previously found in [the asteroid named] Bennu samples,” researchers led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University said in December. “Our detection of ribose means that all the components of RNA are present in Bennu.”

Again, you don’t really need to understand what they found beyond its impact: It’s an exciting, related discovery because one of the questions about how life arises is where those first building blocks of life came from — one theory has always been they arrived here from other places. And now here we have apparent confirmation that there are objects transiting space carrying exactly what they would need to have in order for the building blocks of life to be moving around outer space.

We’re also learning that objects transiting between solar systems may not be that uncommon; before 2017, we’d never detected an interstellar object. Then we found “Oumuamua,” and in the years since, we’ve already found two more, “Borisov” in 2019, and then last year a comet named “Atlas.” Presumably, now that we’re looking harder and technology is getting better, we’re going find even more. Maybe interstellar travel of objects is actually remarkably common.

Last year saw another remarkable breakthrough about how life — or at least the possibility of life — might not even be that uncommon in our own solar system: Organic molecules turned up in “alien seawater” from one of Saturn’s moons, hinting at the amazing possibility that maybe the moon known as Enceladus might harbor underwater hydrothermal vents akin to what we have on Earth — strange systems that have proven to be particularly rich sources for life here.

(If you’re a fan of this stuff — and who wouldn’t be? — you should sign up for 404 Media’s Saturday science newsletter, The Abstract, which is my favorite weekly read on weird mind-bending science.)

Writing and studying the science of extraterrestrial life in recent years fills me with excitement and hope — and one of the things I always stress in my talks about this is how thinking about all the discoveries we have yet to make and all the incredible things we still have to learn is one of the best arguments for why we need to take such care of ourselves as a human race and our planet at large: We’re protecting the ability for future humans to unlock all that they’re going to unlock if given the time. (Want your mind blown about this more: Read Toby Ord’s book.)

What you quickly realize in looking at the Drake Equation is the whole ballgame is the final variable: (L), the Length of time an advanced civilization survives and thrives.

If (L) is only a few thousand years or only a few tens of thousands of years, then life and intelligent life is probably both enormously common across the universe but that each pinprick of life is functionally alone in its corner of the universe when it exists.

If (L) is millions or even billions of years, then our universe probably teems with life and intelligence civilizations existing at the same time — life that we might someday detect signs of.

Looking around at planet earth at the start of 2026 there are any number of reasons — climate change, nuclear war, AI — to believe that human civilization doesn’t get another 10,000 years. (Heck, I wake up some mornings and wonder if humanity gets another hundred years!) But if we take care of each other, take care of our planet, and carefully manage future emerging technologies, from genetic engineering to AI, who knows what we’ll discover — and where we might someday find life?

One of my favorite stories from my book tour was talking about the life of Sister André: The French nun, born Lucile Randon, died the year before my book came out — she was born in 1904 and when she died was the world’s oldest validated person, aged 118 years and 340 days. In her single lifetime, we discovered everything we know about the theory of relativity and quantum physics. A single lifetime represents effectively all of our modern understanding of physics!

I often say that our history is much more recent than we realize, but similarly virtually all of our science is much more new than we imagine — and we almost surely understand far less of the world around us and universe beyond than we think we do.

Just imagine what we might discover in the next human lifetime? Imagine what science we might unlock in 1,000 more years — or 10,000 years?

The math is on the side on the aliens, but we should do more on our planet to make sure that math is on the side of humanity too. We have to do everything we can to make (L) as large a number as possible.

We should all wake up each day and remember that we are the keepers and protecters of all of the world’s great discoveries still-to-come.

Thanks for reading!

GMG

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