NPR

Is Humanity Unusual In The Cosmos?

Commentator Adam Frank talks with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb about exo-civilizations, techno-signatures, and the search for alien life — living or long-gone.
Artist's rendering of the first planet outside of our solar system to be imaged orbiting a brown dwarf star, called the 2M1207 system.

We're entering uncharted territory.

For more than 2,000 years, we humans have been arguing about life and, in particular, intelligent life in the universe. But arguing was pretty much where it always ended.

For all that time, we never had any evidence or any data that could raise the discussion above two people with different opinions yelling at each other.

But this era may well be nearing its end.

The "exoplanet" revolution of the last 20 years has shown us that the universe is awash in alien worlds. More exciting, we now have methods where the atmospheres

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