Quoting respected members of the scientific community that included UK astrophysicists Maggie Aderin-Pocock and Becky Smethurst, as well as astronaut Tim Peake, all of whom seemed to strongly allude to a discovery currently still on the path toward peer review
“I think we are going to get a paper that claims to have strong evidence for a biosignature in an exoplanet’s atmosphere very, very soon,” Smethurst was quoted saying. “Let’s just say it’s on my bingo card for 2024.”
Peake had been even less ambiguous while speaking during a CNBC interview in the first days of the new year, where he said the prospects that alien life might have been discovered were looking increasingly good.
“Potentially, the James Webb telescope may have already found [it],” though also emphasizing that nothing conclusive had been released yet since scientists involved in the prospective discovery “don’t want to release or confirm those results until they can be entirely sure,” though adding cryptically that “we found a planet that seems to be giving off strong signals of biological life.”
In other words, if these observations are what they appear to be, then it seems like there’s a good chance that we may already be on course for a tremendous discovery this year; one that could potentially offer the most convincing evidence to date that life may exist on worlds beyond our own.