Ask Ethan: If intelligent alien life exists, will we make contact?

For countless generations, humanity has gazed at the stars, planets, and great canopy of the Milky Way in the night sky, wondering who else or what else may be out there. Here in 2026, we’ve searched tens of thousands of star systems for signs of life, for signals of potentially intelligent extraterrestrial origin, including through radio waves, other forms of light, and even cosmic particle signatures. While we’ve discovered thousands of planets around those stars, including some that may be candidates for housing life on their surface or in their atmospheres, we have yet to find a single planet beyond Earth with any forms of life on it at all.

But the Universe is vast, and the number of chances for some type of success in the great cosmic lottery is a profoundly large number. That leads to Brian George Melville’s question, as he asks: “I fully believe there is intelligent life in the Universe in addition to life on Earth. Do you think we will ever contact other intelligent life, given the vast distances involved, given that Proxima Centauri is 75000 years away at a speed of 38,000 miles-per-hour?” If the only way we could possibly make contact was by traversing the great interstellar distances that separate us from the other star and planetary systems that are out there in the cosmos, we would be aimless in our quest to find alien life.

We’d only be able to choose star systems at random, and at that, we’d likely restrict ourselves to the closest ones. However, given all we know about searching for life in the Universe, even without a positive detection so far, we have every reason to be optimistic about the possibility of contact in the future. Before its collapse in 2020, the Arecibo telescope was the first to see multiple fast radio bursts from the same source.

Although they are not a signal of intelligent alien origin, the telescope has been used to set many of the strictest limits on the existence of transmitting alien civilizations, as well as having been used to transmit messages from humanity out into the Universe. Leveraging radio telescopes remains perhaps the most powerful tool for searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. When it comes to the abundance of alien life of all different types and complexities that could be out there, we have a big, unknown problem before us: the only known successes that we have, at present, make up a sample size of one.

Only on Earth do we have an example where we know that life successfully arose. Of course, it did much more than arise: If each world that arises in this Universe is a “lottery ticket” with a chance at for life, sustained life, complex life, intelligent life, and technologically advanced life, then planet Earth is a proven winner in terms of the conditions that brought all of these about. However, Earth is the only example of success — on any of these fronts — that we have to point to at the present time.

For the rest of the Universe, we only have constraints on what types of life isn’t there. When we send a light signal from Earth, it only travels at the speed of light. A star that’s located 100 light-years away will need to wait 100 years before receiving that signal.