Debra Fischer

Within the scientific community, there is healthy skepticism. And the question is, 'How do you ever get to a meaningful null result? How long and how hard do SETI scientists have to look for extraterrestrial intelligence and find nothing before they say, 'There is nothing. We are alone.' ”

Ultimately, what we're looking for in the long run is to find other Earth-like planets. ”

The universe has told us the most common types of planets are small planets, and our study shows these are exactly the ones that are most likely to be orbiting Alpha Centauri A and B. ”

I hope that vigorous space exploration continues and that humankind will have a space station that resides between Earth and the moon. Outside the gravitational field of Earth, we could launch robotic spacecraft to other destinations in our solar system. ”

A 'serious' scientist in 1992 or 1993 had to admit the possibility that planets were really rare, that most stars might not have planets. We've gone from there to here - where most stars have planets. ”

It can be very hard to know the history of a particular star, but once in a while, we get lucky and find stars with chemical compositions that likely came from in-falling planets. ”

The building blocks of life are readily available throughout the universe. ”

There's no doubt that the search for planets is motivated by the search for life. Humans are interested in whether or not life evolves on other planets. We'd especially like to find communicating, technological life, and we look around our own solar system, and we see that of all the planets, there's only one that's inhabited. ”

If few worlds have microbial life, it dramatically reduces the chances that more complex organisms exist. ”

Our field is very focused on finding Earth 2.0, and anything we can do to narrow the search is helpful. ”