Scientific Controversies: Aliens

There may be more planets in the Milky Way galaxy than there are stars, some hundreds of billions. So where are all the aliens?

We have sent landers to Mars, collected Moon regolith, returned samples from asteroids, beamed messages into space, and listened patiently for any replies. As Enrico Fermi famously asked, “Where is everybody?”

To go beyond our solar system, we have launched ambitious satellites to scan other planetary systems for signatures of life. If you could travel near the speed of light a few hundred years in any direction, you would encounter a thousand planets. That scale of human space exploration is presently beyond our capacity, but it’s not beyond imagination. If we could, we would. We would explore other worlds with spacecraft and probes and astronauts. So why hasn’t anybody explored us?

Or have they? The mystery and speculation around UFO’s, or in more modern parlance Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), suspiciously shadows our own technological progress. These phantom visitors are always just barely ahead of us, unimaginatively humanlike in body and spirit. Still, is it possible?

The discovery of aliens could be imminent, whether they be a vast biomass of microbes or a spacefaring civilization. The horizon in the scientific search for extraterrestrial life has vastly expanded and the pace of discovery has dramatically accelerated. Deep space observations of biological and technological signatures are now feasible. Anticipate that your favorite alien conspiracy theories may be debunked, but that you will be rewarded with even wilder, authentic possibilities.

Join astrophysicists Adam Frank and David Kipping with host Janna Levin for a conversation on the search for extraterrestrial life. From exoplanets to alien biospheres, from technosignatures to UAPs, the evening will explore the astronomical search for aliens and the implications of such a discovery for life on our own planet.

Have a question for the speakers? Click here to submit your question.

Books by the speakers, including The Little Book of Aliens by Adam Frank, will be available for purchase with a book signing to follow. DJ Black Helmet will provide rare grooves and ambient soundscapes throughout the evening. Stargazing in the garden with the Amateur Astronomers Association will open and conclude the night.

Adam Frank is an award-winning astrophysicist, author, and science communicator whose work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN, NPR, and numerous science documentaries. He is the Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester. His current work focuses on life in the Universe, the search for technosignatures of other exo-civilizations, along with climate change and the “Astrobiology of the Anthropocene.” His newest book are The Little Book of Aliens and The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience. He served as science consultant for Marvel’s Doctor Strange, and is about to launch a newsletter called Everyman’s Universe.

David Kipping is a Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University and Director of the Cool Worlds Lab—a team focussed on the study of exoplanets orbiting in and around the habitable zones of their stars. He also runs the Cool Worlds YouTube outreach channel, with approximately a million subscribers, which discusses active research topics in astronomy more broadly and our place in the Universe.

Janna Levin is the founding director of sciences at Pioneer Works and the founding editor-in-chief of Broadcast. She is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her most recent book is Black Hole Survival Guide.

This program is supported by the Simons Foundation's Science, Society and Culture division, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology, bridging the two cultures of science and the arts.