Extraterrestrial life will never be "definitive" unless aliens wave at humans on camera, says an astrobiologist.
Victoria Meadows said that the discovery of such life is going to be an "incremental process" unless "something wanders past the camera and waves to us".
"Or [unless it] encodes pi and transmits that in a radio signal, it’s not going to be definitive," said the University of Washington researcher, as per ScientificAmerican. "And there’s going to be a lot of discussion going on."
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It comes as one of the world's leading experts in the search for extraterrestrial life boldly claimed we may only be a "few years away" from announcing that we've discovered alien life.
Lisa Kaltenegger, who directs the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell, believes the James Webb Space Telescope will bring us closer to confirming life outside of planet Earth.
Kaltenegger said because the Webb Telescope is designed to detect biosignatures, science jargon for "signs of life" including organism-produced methane gas, we may find ETs very soon.
In her new book Alien Earth: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos she said with the Telescope's technological leaps, humanity is now in "this era of golden exploration, with thousands of other worlds on our doorstep, that we now can actually explore".
She is interested in the four planets surrounding Trappist-1, a red dwarf planet located just 40 light-years away and thought to contain water and maybe life. It was discovered in 2017 and appears to have several planets in the so-called "habitable zone" where they could host liquid water.
Kaltnegger thinks it's likely we'll find life here and it "could be just a couple of years from now". She said: "We have a chance to find the gases on these worlds. And to figure out if there’s biosignatures on them within the next, let’s say, five to 10 years.
"If life is everywhere, it can be in that system. It may be that we need to observe 100 systems before we find life, or 1,000. But it could also be that we just need to observe one system."
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