Searching for life in the universe

Listen 18:15 Ways To Subscribe Apple Spotify YouTube Music NPR App Amazon Music If scientists ever found evidence that we are not alone in the universe, what would happen next?

I posed that question to Bill Diamond, CEO of the SETI Institute in 2023 during an interview for our podcast Are We There Yet?.

“Well,” he told us “we’d probably call a press conference.”

For what is likely to be the most consequential scientific discovery for humanity, the answer to how we would tell the world we’re not alone in the universe was a press conference.

As a journalist covering space for more than a decade, I’ve covered hundreds of press conferences. They’re usually pretty mundane – a mission status update, the announcement of a new launch contract. Sometimes, they can be quite exciting, like when NASA named the crew of the Artemis II moon mission.