It’s a sweltering Tuesday in Washington, D.C., the kind of day that stretches the definition of Earth as a “habitable” planet. But on an eighth-floor terrace near the U.S. Capitol building, dozens of people are outside anyway, talking and watching as passersby dart between pools of shade on the sticky streets below. Besides the heat, the onlookers are sweating something else, too—an audacious project to learn, at last, whether we have any neighbors living on Earth-like planets in our neck of the Milky Way.
Back inside, a boisterous reception is underway. Hundreds of scientists and engineers, NASA leaders, lobbyists, congressional staffers and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona are also discussing the search for ET.
Surveilling alien worlds for signs of life is a lot more than a twinkle in this community’s eye. It’s the reason why everyone is here for a four-day science conference in late July, at the height of D.C.’s arguably habitable oppressive summer heat. They are prepping for NASA’s next flagship space telescope, a multibillion-dollar machine that could launch as early as the mid-late 2030s and reveal whether Earths are as universal as sand on a beach or if our watery world is instead a lonely island in a quiet sea. Called the Habitable Worlds Observatory, the telescope’s core mission is to search for signs of alien biospheres on Earth-size planets orbiting sunlike stars—worlds, at least in theory, that could be twins of our own.
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This search demands something conceptually simple but breathtakingly difficult: we need to actually see those faraway planets. To do that, the telescope must separate each world’s almost impossibly faint gleam from the overpowering glare of its star.
“HabWorlds is not out to answer your typical science question,” said astrophysicist Chris Stark of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), using what’s become the preferred nickname for the mission, during a presentation the day before. “It is arguably attempting to answer the single most profound unanswered question in the history of science and in the history of humankind.”
As Stark spoke, “Are we alone?”—in huge letters—loomed over the audience from one of his slides,…
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