We’re searching for life beyond the Earth but truly what we’re searching for is our own future.
The last couple of centuries have been a triumph of modern astronomy. We can now trace back the history of the universe to just seconds after the big bang, when our universe began. We can watch the cosmic microwave background and map out the structure of the very early universe. We can track the very first stars that formed in the first few hundreds of millions of years after the universe was born. We can track the formation of galaxies. We understand nearly everything that there is to know about the way that the universe was born and the way that the universe continues to evolve, except for one very glaring exception: life.
