The researcher from the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics (IAC), Héctor Socas, said this Friday that a sign that there is extraterrestrial life could be found "tomorrow", or within 10 or 50 years, so that every day when he gets up he says "today could be the day".
During a talk on the occasion of a conference on the search for extraterrestrial life, Héctor Socas, director of the European Solar Telescope Foundation, asked not to lose sight of how "fortunate we are" to live in the current era, as it is the first generation that can begin to have hope of answering that question during their lifetime.
Héctor Socas recalled that humanity has wondered if there is life outside Earth at least since it began to write down thoughts, and, he stressed, the answer has "always" been beyond the reach of humans until a few decades ago.
From the middle of the last century it began to be a "legitimate" question for science, and now, Héctor Socas continued, it is not known if there will be an answer "tomorrow, within 10 or 50 years".
But it could be tomorrow and in Héctor Socas's opinion, there is not enough awareness that at any moment evidence can be found of past life on another planet, or traces of pollutants, and for this researcher, living with that uncertainty is "wonderful".
What "powerfully" draws Héctor Socas's attention is that life on Earth arose "immediately" in a very simple way, and to reach a species with the capacity for thought, technology and even interstellar communication, it took about 4.5 billion years.
This leads to reflection, for example, that to have hope that the search will be fruitful, a civilization must live a long time, so there will only be hope of contact if a part of humanity lives for tens of millions of years.
For this researcher, the search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence "is one of the most important undertakings that humanity can carry out, whether the answer is positive or negative".
If the answer is negative and "we convince ourselves" that there is no extraterrestrial life, that would say that intelligence is something scarce, and therefore extremely valuable, so it should be preserved, protected and cared for "with much more care", Héctor Socas continued.
Antonia Varela, researcher at the IAC and director of the Starligth Foundation and the Museum of Science and the Cosmos of Tenerife, also participated in the meeting, who pointed out that "it is not known if there are many inhabited worlds, and she believes that it is important to establish international protocols in which specialists in various subjects participate".
Carlos Briones, researcher at the CSIC at the Center for Astrobiology (CSIC-INTA), stated that, as an astrobiologist who works on questions of the origin of life, he knows that a sufficiently complex chemistry can give rise to living beings, but it is not known how frequent it is because there is only one example.
Zachary Murguía, professor of Environmental Sciences at Montana State University-Bozeman and member of the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute) commented that he looks at the sky but as a geologist he looks more at the ground, and there nutrients for life can be found there.
The conference, organized by the LIOM (Innovation Laboratory in Optomechanics) project of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) under the name 'From Silence to Contact', is a meeting to reflect on the search for extraterrestrial life and the options for contact with other civilizations.
