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10/01/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 10/01/2026 04:36

Is Anyone Out There

Published Date

October 01, 2026

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The next 10 years are poised to be the most transformative decade yet in the space industry. With eyes on the construction of a planned NASA lunar base by 2032 and a potential future mission to Mars, a fundamental question has persisted for millennia: Is anyone else out there?

Curiosity drives almost all of us, particularly when it comes to exploration and space. The fascination stretches from the earliest fiction written in 2 A.D. to recent blockbuster movies such as "Project Hail Mary," based on the novel by former University of California San Diego student Andy Weir.

But the possibility of life beyond Earth isn't confined to books and movies. Scientists are exploring it too, and it's just as intriguing as science fiction.

"For researchers, the search for life beyond Earth is a serious scientific question with profound implications," says planetary scientist Meenakshi Wadhwa, director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, vice chancellor for marine sciences and dean of the School of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

"Finding even microbial life on Mars or in the subsurface oceans of Europa, the fourth largest of Jupiter's moons, would reshape our understanding of science and philosophy, forcing us to reconsider whether life is a cosmic accident or an inevitability in so-called "habitable" environments on planetary bodies," Wadhwa says.

To better understand life outside of Earth, UC San Diego researchers are working in the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, astrobiology and more.

Shelley Wright's team and collaborators have invented instrumentation that improves the ability of researchers to view wider swaths of the night sky at fractions of a second. The detector array that collects the images, left, and graduate students Sanchit Sabhlok and James Wiley assembly one of the telescopes in the lab, right. (Photos courtesy the Regents of the University of California)

Looking for artificial light among the stars

Shelley Wright, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics, and her collaborators have invented instrumentation to look for light signatures in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, a field best known by its acronym, SETI.

Wright and her team are looking for technosignatures - that is, signs of light created artificially by technology.

Light already is used on Earth as a way to communicate and transmit information, including data collected by the satellites that orbit Mars which is then transmitted to Earth via optical lasers. The thinking is that since Earth is "technologically an infant," as Wright phrases it, other beings in the universe are likely already using light to communicate with one another as well.

As might be expected, most modern telescopes were designed to look at natural bodies in space, such as stars, galaxies and planets. But the technology designed to do that isn't the best to look for light created by an artificial source, Wright says.

The solution? Invent new technology.

"The SETI telescopes we build are designed to detect extremely brief, nanosecond (billionth-of-a-second), flashes of optical light that would appear artificial in nature," Wright says. "Imagine a Morse code signal - a series of beeps - that is clearly technical in origin."

But one of the sticking points is that because it is unknown where such artificial light signatures might appear, the instrumentation must simultaneously capture wide swaths of the night sky.

Wright's inventions can do this (and more) and she has SETI technology housed at Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton in Northern California and at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County. UC San Diego astronomy students have the opportunity to collect and work with the images from these telescopes.

Now that data is being collected by the new instrumentation, figuring out how best to analyze it is the next step. "There's a billion frames per second, so we have to figure out how to cleverly use it," Wright says. At the moment, much of it is processed on campus at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, utilizing AI algorithms to search for signals.

Hunting for traces of life

On the flip side of technosignatures is biosignatures. And that's where Adam Burgasser '96, professor of astronomy and astrophysics, spends his time studying space.

"Imagine a Morse code signal - a series of beeps - that is clearly technical in origin." Shelley Wright, professor of astronomy and astrophysics
As part of The James Webb Space Telescope's construction, its mirrors completed deep-freeze tests at the X-ray and Cryogenic test Facility at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. (Photo courtesy Emmett Given, NASA Marshall)

To measure biosignatures, Burgasser and his team focus on objects smaller than stars known as brown dwarfs, which are used to stand-in for planets that exist outside our solar system. Brown dwarfs don't fuse hydrogen, the life blood of stars, so they cool off to temperatures similar to planets like Earth. Since brown dwarfs aren't hidden in the glare of a host star, they are ideal targets to search for the chemical imprints life can leave in planetary atmospheres.

The instrumentation that Burgasser uses is not in a lab, but rather approximately a million miles away. And that is not hyperbole. The James Webb Space Telescope is located 930,000 miles from us in an orbit known as the Lagrange point, a balance point in the gravitational forces pulling from the Sun and the orbiting Earth.

The telescope is NASA's newest flagship infrared observatory that enables researchers to view distant points in unprecedented detail, and is an international collaboration between the agency, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

"With the James Webb Space Telescope and other facilities that are coming online in the next 10 years or so, we believe we will have the sensitivity to start to systematically characterize the atmospheres of many of these worlds," Burgasser says.

To crunch their data, Burgasser and his team also utilize the San Diego Supercomputer Center as well as other advanced computing facilities located across the country. "We use the supercomputers to run the time-consuming calculations that predict what the atmospheres should look like," Burgasser says. Machine learning tools also are helpful to quickly characterize chemical imprints.

Currently, Burgasser and his team are looking for biosignatures for life that are similar to what has evolved on Earth but they are ready and eager to discover different types of life in the future.

Amina Schartup, an associate professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, left; Emily Paris '20, then a graduate student at Stanford University, center; and Maggie Weng, then a graduate student at Georgetown University, right, sampling an acid-brine lake in Western Australia in 2022. (Photos courtesy of Jeff Bowman)

Modeling space missions on Earth

Jeff Bowman, associate professor of biological oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, specializes in astrobiology and locating planetary analogues on Earth. For that, he searches for extreme - and remote - areas that come close to mimicking what others might find in space. His work stems from the physical and chemical characteristics discovered on moons and planets in our solar system by NASA and European Space Agency missions.

By locating close matches on Earth, Bowman and his team's work prepares those planning future space missions on how to look for proof of life in similar environments in space.

"We still have a very limited capacity to go out to other places in our solar system and really investigate them," Bowman says. So, to maximize the work of those future missions, he and his team examine how such remote ecosystems function by "looking for environments here on Earth that fit the necessary geochemical or physical similarities."

This includes geologic and water or ice composition, and the presence of certain chemicals and salts.

Western Australia, for example, contains thousands of lakes that are unusual in that they have low pH and high salinity. "Because of this they are thought to be good analogs for ancient Mars as it transitioned from a wet to dry world," Bowman says.

For other environments, finding a matching environment "might be related to temperature, pressure, presence of oxygen, absence of oxygen or different sources of energy," he says.

This search for life in the universe is "quite a profound thing to think about," Bowman says. "Maybe life is very abundant out there."

Exploring the edges of life and death in space

Gürol Süel, a professor of molecular biology in the School of Biological Sciences, studies spores - tiny, single celled organisms - which tests at the International Space Station have shown have the surprising ability to survive in space.

A microscopy image depicting several bacterial spores. The colors (purple to yellow) indicate the electrochemical potential strength, which represents the overall electrical charge difference between spores and their environment. (Photo Courtesy of Süel Lab)

"A spore is a dormant dehydrated form," Süel says. "It's kind of like a plant seed, but in contrast to plant seed which is large because it has a nutrient reservoir with it, spores don't have a nutrient reservoir. They are the most minimal thing - sort of like carry-on luggage versus a checked bag."

Süel and his team have discovered that spores might appear completely dead, but when pulsed with short environmental signals in a brief pattern they demonstrate memory and the ability to count and decide if - or when - they will come back to life. "We show that even when they are essentially dead, they are still capable of sensing the environment," Süel says. "

"Nature is very surprising. It has had a lot of time to figure out solutions to problems and I love uncovering how supposedly simple organisms, like bacteria, have survived so many mass extinctions and all kinds of stress," Süel says. "What are their secrets? How are they so good at surviving, even in outer space?"

Understanding what makes spores so tough also will allow researchers to better understand where life could be possible on other planets. And perhaps even more importantly, Süel notes: "Our work shows that when we bring back samples from Mars, we have to be extra careful because what may appear to look like a dead fossil could be alive and aware."

So, is anyone out there?

"Whether we're looking at a far shore across the ocean or at another world, we've always wondered what's out there and whether it is something we can communicate with or learn from," says Burgasser. Space is merely the next, not the last, frontier.

Is it likely we will find life outside of Earth? "I think at some point in my lifetime, we will have strong evidence of life around another world," says Burgasser. For him, the evidence is likely to be microbes rather than an alien life form waving back at us. "But just the idea that there is another biology on another world will be a groundbreaking discovery," he says.

Wright, on the other hand, isn't convinced she will detect a technosignature in her lifetime. But for her, the search is still crucial.

"I think that the questions of 'Are we alone?' and 'What's the purpose of life?' get to the core of our existence and understanding of why we're here on planet Earth," Wright says. "Most of the time in human history when you look at the universe in a new way, it surprises you."

This article is the second in a series exploring the work of UC San Diego researchers, staff and alumni in and around space and how it will revolutionize the future for generations to come. Find out more about UC San Diego research in and around space at space.ucsd.edu.

Read more news about: Physical Sciences, Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing, Space

UCSD - University of California - San Diego published this content on October 01, 2026, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on October 01, 2026 at 10:36 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at [email protected]