Funding, telescope time and the giggle factor: what slows the search for life

The Short Version

Three scientists who work on finding life beyond Earth describe a search that is held back by people and institutions at least as much as by nature. Sara Seager took on a mission concept, Starshade, when it "was on the giggle factor side of the line," and says that even finding Earth-like planets is a job costing billions of dollars [1]. Nathalie Cabrol says the search for signals from other civilizations went about 60 years without government funding because no politician wanted to be seen paying for flying saucers [2]. David Kipping describes telescopes so oversubscribed that the observation needed to check his own exomoon prediction was never granted, and that a real attempt at a biosignature would need about four years of one shared telescope's attention [3]. The physics is hard, as all three say. But ridicule decides what gets proposed, money decides what gets built, and committees decide where the instrument points.

Table of contents

What They Said

Sara Seager: laughter first, then a list of problems, then a bill

Seager is an MIT planetary scientist who has watched her whole field cross from disrepute into the mainstream. The first exoplanet around a Sun-like star was found in the mid-1990s, and it was controversial because it orbited so close to its star [1]. She notes that the field was once "sketchy" and not considered a real career; now at least a thousand people work in it [1]. When she started, people didn't believe anyone would ever study an exoplanet atmosphere; today dozens have been studied and hundreds of scientists work on them [1]. Even her father wanted her to choose something more practical, where he could be sure she could support herself [1].

Her clearest account of how reputation works is Starshade. The idea is a giant flower-shaped screen, about 30 meters across, that would fly in formation with a space telescope tens of thousands of kilometers away and block a star's light so that a planet 10 billion times fainter could be seen directly [1]. It was first conceived in the 1960s and revisited every decade until it became buildable [1]. When she took on the leadership role, she says, "it was definitely not on the mainstream okay line. It was on the giggle factor side of the line. And people would just laugh like that's dead." [1] Colleagues would say you can never formation fly, or ask, "why are you working on that?" [1]

What moved it across the line was unglamorous. The team kept what she calls a tall pole list of the hardest problems and worked down it [1]. Formation flying, the objection people laughed about, turned out to be a sensing problem: the issue was how to see the Starshade precisely enough to control it, since a beacon's light spreads out over that distance [1]. Another problem was sunlight glinting off the petal edges into the telescope, which calls for razor-thin edges and the right materials [1]. And the work needed paying for: "money that came from NASA to solve problems is put towards solving it," she says. "So we've got through most of the hard problems right now." [1] What remains is building and testing a full-scale version [1]. Lex Fridman calls this the most inspiring engineering lesson he has heard: "Take a big, crazy idea and break it down into smaller, crazy ideas, order it in a list, and knock it out one of the time." [1]

She describes the same passage from laughable to real in projects that are not hers. Breakthrough Starshot would push thousands of tiny chips with sails to about a twentieth of the speed of light using gigawatt ground-based lasers [1]. Its organizers listed 19 challenges, and they are a mix of physics and paperwork, from building sails the lasers won't vaporize to buying land and getting airspace approval [1]. Seager says that even if the money doesn't make it happen, the idea has "planted the seed" and moved the line between crazy and real [1]. The other project, a telescope sent about 500 times the Earth-Sun distance to use the Sun as a gravitational lens, would take about 25 years to get there, might return an image of perhaps 10 by 10 pixels, and needs a separate telescope for each target [1].

On money she is direct. Asked what huge project we should take on in space, she starts with the basic one: "Just even finding those Earth-like planets is a billion dollar endeavor," because an Earth is so small and so faint beside its star. "It's the proverbial needle in a haystack, but worse." [1] It takes very sophisticated space-based telescopes to find such planets and see which have water and signs of life [1]. Even with them, the search in this lifetime is limited to nearby stars, perhaps a dozen or two dozen suitable for detailed follow-up [1]. Cheaper access to space is one thing she welcomes for that reason: reusable rockets from SpaceX and other companies make getting to space cheaper, which helps her field [1].

She also describes a quieter brake, the scientist's own reluctance. Asked whether we are alone, she says that as a scientist she does not even want to answer, because scientists want numbers and hard facts, not speculation [1]. The same instinct makes many researchers avoid the subject of UFOs altogether; Fridman describes himself as "not as allergic" to it as some scientists [1]. Seager's position is that the bar is "cold hard evidence," not sketchy pictures [1]. On the fear of sending messages to other civilizations, she points to a collective problem: if everyone is only listening, no one makes progress [1].

And she names time. The answer, when it comes, will be a hint and not a certainty, to be followed up by later generations [1]. She speaks of her own search with a clock on it: "that window to solve that problem gets smaller." [1] What she hopes for is a result strong enough "to fuel the next generation" [1].

Nathalie Cabrol: sixty years without a public dollar

Cabrol directs the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute, and her career has met resistance at each stage [2].

Early on, the resistance was scientific fashion. Her postdoctoral work, done with her husband, proposed that water on Mars had pooled in lakes inside impact craters. Channels and seepage were acceptable topics at the time, but when you talked about ponding water like lakes or an ocean, she says, people started waving their arms, and it was a little bit of a battle [2]. The data were part of the problem: Viking's images were so poor in resolution and topography that craters were the only reliable low points [2]. Her career started with a discretionary grant of just 40K [2].

Mars itself shows how public expectation and disappointment steer a program. Before Mariner 4, many people still imagined a Martian civilization; its images showed a moon-like surface and caused huge disappointment [2]. Mariner 9 arrived during one of the biggest dust storms Mars has had and saw nothing for three months [2]. Viking's life-detection experiments produced confusing signals that some still interpret as life, though most scientists attribute them to chemistry, and that led NASA to study the environment first, on the reasoning that "life and environment co-evolved" [2].

Her sharpest example is the search for signals. Cabrol says SETI does not study UFOs: "we are studying extraterrestrial in their natural habitat," while UFO researchers ask whether aliens have entered our airspace [2]. She respects rigorous UFO investigators, and gives her rough statistics for sightings: about 95 percent natural phenomena or misinterpretations, maybe 2 percent secret government programs, about 1 percent unknown natural phenomena, and a tiny remainder unexplained [2]. But she says the folklore has done the scientific community a huge disservice [2]. For about 60 years, no government agency funded the search for signals, leaving it privately funded with very few postdocs, because no politician wanted to be seen paying for flying saucers [2]. That is a research field shaped for two generations by how it would look in a headline.

Things have shifted. NASA now funds technosignature research, and she welcomes the government seeking scientific help on unidentified aerial phenomena [2]. Her motto for the whole subject is "I don't want to believe. I want to know." [2]

She and Fridman disagree about what to do with public excitement. He argues scientists should ride the wave of public wonder, like a surfer, and that communication is a fundamental part of science [2]. She replies, "I will stop surfing that wave when it comes back to bite an entire scientific discipline," while agreeing that communication matters [2]. She also corrects a misimpression that affects how her institute is seen: the search for intelligence is only about 10 percent of what the SETI Institute does, and the rest spans exoplanets, the Kepler and TESS teams, James Webb time, Mars landing site selection and instruments, and missions like Cassini [2].

Cabrol adds one obstacle that is neither money nor reputation, though it interacts with both. Proof will be hard because we don't know what life is; there are 123 definitions of it [2]. She jokes that "the only way we would know that there is life on Mars if there was a rabbit jumping in front of the rover," so scientists use a "ladder of life detection" to make non-biological explanations progressively less likely [2]. A discovery that arrives as a slow accumulation of probability is hard to fund and easy to mock. Her own next proposal is infrastructure: a network of environmental stations on Mars that would map habitability at the scale that matters to microbes, help with planetary protection, and give future astronauts weather data [2].

David Kipping: the queue for the telescope

Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia who runs the Cool Worlds Lab, describes the scheduling problem in numbers [3].

The telescopes that could do the work are shared, and far more is asked of them than they can give. Hubble proposals are typically 10 to 20 times oversubscribed [3]. The James Webb Space Telescope's first cycle was about six or seven to one, and its second was expected to be closer to 20 to one [3]. A time allocation committee decides, and rare, time-critical events such as transits of cool planets are especially hard to schedule [3].

The physics makes the scheduling worse. Cool, Earth-like planets are less likely to line up with our line of sight, about 0.25 to 0.5 percent of them transit compared with about 1 percent of hot Jupiters, and they transit rarely [3]. A hot Jupiter can be found in a week; an Earth-like orbit means watching a star for three or four years [3]. The Kepler mission died after about 4.35 years, just enough to catch four transits of an Earth analog, and Kipping says it found zero true Earth twins around Sun-like stars [3].

Then the example that brings the subject down to one number. Detecting a marginal biosignature on TRAPPIST-1e with JWST would take on the order of 200 transits, roughly four years of staring at one star, which Kipping says will never happen with a shared telescope [3]. The instrument exists. The measurement is, in his account, possible. The allocation is not.

Committees also prefer safe returns. Kipping expects most exoplanet time to go to measuring atmospheres, which almost always returns something, while his own moon search is riskier but could be transformative [3]. His team's pitch is that JWST is the first machine humanity has built that can find moons like those in our solar system [3].

He has paid this cost personally. After Hubble data on Kepler-1625b pointed to a Neptune-sized moon, his team made a testable prediction, with about 80 percent of their models putting the moon before the planet at the next transit, but did not get Hubble time to check [3]. One independent team later recovered the same result and another saw a weaker dip, so the question stays open [3].

Reputation shaped his career as well. An MIT professor once advised him to chase hot Jupiters, the easy and plentiful targets, and he refused: "I don't want to just be the first to something for the sake of being first." [3] He compares exomoon research today with exoplanet research before 1995, when the first planet hunters were seen as mavericks [3]. And he describes the opposite pressure, toward saying too much: when the journal Science asked his team to call the moon a discovery, he insisted on calling it evidence [3]. He warns that a claim of alien life would bring years of back-and-forth, and cites Peter van de Kamp, who insisted until his death that he had found a planet around Barnard's Star despite overwhelming evidence against it [3].

His proposed way out is economic. JWST's 6.5-meter mirror had to be folded like origami, with around 130 failure points during deployment, and space mirrors are made in costly lightweight honeycomb designs [3]. With dramatically cheaper heavy launches from Starship, even at ten times the cost Elon Musk originally promised, you could repurpose existing ground-based mirrors and even give each research field its own JWST-class telescope [3].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

They agree that the physics is hard, and that it is only part of the story. Seager's planet is 10 billion times fainter than its star [1]. Kipping's Earth analog dims its star by only 84 parts per million, like a firefly crossing a stadium floodlight [3]. Cabrol points out we cannot even define what we are looking for [2]. Each then describes an obstacle that has nothing to do with nature: laughter, an empty budget line, a committee's ranking [1][2][3].

They agree that ridicule has real costs and that it fades. Exoplanets were sketchy and are now a thousand-person field [1]. Planet hunters were mavericks before 1995 [3]. Lakes on Mars made people wave their arms, and rovers now target ancient lakes [2]. SETI went 60 years unfunded and NASA now pays for technosignature research [2].

They agree that the answer will be gradual. Seager expects a hint [1]. Cabrol describes a ladder [2]. Kipping calls his own best result evidence [3].

They agree that cheaper access to space would help. Seager says reusable rockets help her field, and Kipping builds his whole remedy on them [1][3].

They differ on how to handle public excitement about aliens. Fridman wants scientists to ride it [2]. Cabrol has seen that excitement, in the form of UFO folklore, cost her discipline six decades of public funding, and will get off the wave when it bites [2]. Seager sits between them: she finds the psychology of believers fascinating, tells the story of a sincere older couple who took her to lunch to share an alien abduction story, and holds the line at hard evidence [1]. Kipping notes that hoping for a wise elder civilization may partly be a replacement for God, and treats his own wishes as a source of error [3]. The disagreement is about risk. Attention brings money and talent; the wrong kind of attention makes the subject untouchable for the people who vote budgets.

They differ on how bold to be. Seager's story rewards audacity: take the idea people laugh at and grind through its problems [1]. Kipping's rewards restraint: say less than the journal wants you to [3]. These apply to different things. Seager is bold about what to build, and Kipping is cautious about what to claim. A field that has been laughed at needs both, since an overclaim that collapses confirms the laughter. Kipping's Venus example shows the tension is real: the claim of phosphine in Venus's atmosphere may instead have been sulfur dioxide, and yet the claim helped spur NASA's VERITAS and DAVINCI missions [3]. A disputed result moved money that careful agnosticism had not.

They differ on where to spend. Seager wants a direct image of an Earth twin around a Sun-like star, a multibillion-dollar goal, while accepting that planets around small red dwarfs are easier near-term targets: "think like Earth cousin instead of Earth twin" [1]. Kipping predicts that any near-term biosignature detection will come from a red dwarf planet, and argues that moons must be included in the search [3]. Cabrol puts her effort into Mars and into understanding what life is, on the view that the nature of life would give a universal signature to look for [2]. Each is allocating the same scarce resources to a different bet.

They differ on who should pay. Cabrol's field survived on private money and she welcomes government funding now [2]. Seager credits NASA money for retiring Starshade's problems and private Breakthrough money for making a wild idea discussable [1]. Kipping looks to commercial launch to change the cost of everything [3].

Why It Works

The sources explain why these human obstacles bind so tightly.

Scarce instruments force a ranking, and rankings favor certainty. When a telescope is oversubscribed twenty to one, a committee choosing between an observation that almost always returns a result and one that may return nothing will usually choose the first [3]. The search for life is made of long, rare and risky observations: 200 transits, a planet that crosses its star once in 287 days, a moon that may or may not be there [3].

The measurement time is long because the targets are faint and slow. Earth-like orbits take years to repeat, and missions end; Kepler lasted just long enough to see four transits of an Earth analog [3]. This is where physics and scheduling compound each other.

Stigma operates through people who control money. Cabrol's account is causal and specific: politicians did not want to be associated with flying saucers, so no agency funded signal searches, so there were very few postdocs [2]. A field with few young researchers produces less and stays marginal.

Laughter stops when an idea is turned into a list. Seager's team converted "you can never formation fly" into a sensing problem with a beacon and a tolerance, and an edge-glint problem with a material answer [1]. Breakthrough Starshot did the same by publishing 19 challenges [1]. A list can be funded item by item, where a dream cannot.

Ambiguous evidence is slow to pay off. Oxygen can appear without life, methane on Mars could be biological or geological, carbon-12 can come from non-biological processes, and a Titan-like moon could fake a biosignature in a single-pixel image [2][3]. Every hint requires follow-up, which requires more time on the same oversubscribed instruments [1][3].

Wanting the answer distorts the work. Kipping cites Percival Lowell, who, convinced Mars was inhabited, saw canals that were not there [3]. His rule is "the more I want something to be true, the more I inherently doubt it." [3] This is why the field polices its own claims so hard, and part of why it has been slow to ask for money loudly.

Cost is set by launch. A mirror that must fold to fit a rocket has 130 ways to fail and has to be built light and expensive [3]. Change the rocket and the telescope gets cheaper, which is the mechanism behind both Seager's and Kipping's optimism [1][3].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

The pattern applies to any research that needs a shared, expensive instrument for a long time on an uncertain target. It fits biosignature searches, exomoons and direct imaging closely [1][3]. It applies to subjects that overlap with popular folklore, where the science inherits the reputation of the folklore, as SETI did [2].

It does not mean money alone would settle the question. Seager says the search rests on what she calls a dream condition, that if the ingredients for life are present, life will form, and that the fraction of planets with life, and with life that makes a detectable gas, cannot yet be measured; her own guess for the second runs from 1 percent on the worst days to 80 percent on the best [1]. Kipping says the chance of life arising from chemistry could be 90 percent or vanishingly small, with no rigorous reason to prefer any value [3]. Cabrol says we lack a definition of life [2]. A fully funded search could still return silence or ambiguity.

It does not mean the skeptics were always wrong. Starshade was revisited every decade from the 1960s until it became buildable, which suggests it really was not buildable earlier [1]. The committees that favor atmospheres are choosing work that reliably produces knowledge [3]. Kipping himself notes that technosignature searches always find interesting new physics even when they fail, which is an argument for funding them and also an admission that failure is the usual result [3].

It does not mean every obstacle is unfair. Some are ethical. For Europa, it is almost impossible to sterilize every microbe on a lander, and the hidden ocean is probably pristine, so Kipping suggests micro-laboratories that send data home [3]. Cabrol's station network is meant in part for planetary protection [2].

And the conspiracy version does not hold. Seager passes on a colleague's view of whether the government is hiding evidence of aliens: "trust me, they couldn't hide it if they tried." [1] The obstacles these three describe are ordinary ones: budgets, schedules, careers and embarrassment.

What To Do With It

1. When an idea is laughed at, ask for the list. Seager's test is whether the objection can be broken into specific problems. Formation flying became a sensing problem [1]. An idea with a worked list of hard problems deserves a hearing; one without a list is not yet a proposal.

2. Separate the claim from the instrument. Be bold about what to build and conservative about what to announce. Seager pushed a ridiculed mission; Kipping refused the word discovery [1][3].

3. Judge searches by what they return when they fail. Kipping's point about technosignature surveys and new physics, and Seager's about research that unexpectedly produced the laser and GPS, are the honest case for funding long shots [1][3].

4. Keep the science apart from the folklore, explicitly. Cabrol draws the line in one sentence about studying extraterrestrials in their natural habitat, and corrects the idea that her institute only listens for signals [2]. Fields near a popular myth have to say what they are not.

5. Expect a hint and plan the follow-up. All three describe evidence that accumulates. Read any announcement of life elsewhere by asking which non-biological explanations were ruled out and what observation would test it next [1][2][3].

6. Watch launch costs. If Kipping is right, the price of putting large mirrors in orbit decides whether a field can have its own telescope and the four uninterrupted years a biosignature needs [3].

7. Use the open doors. TESS data are public, and the crowdsourcing project Planet Hunters often finds signals the team's computers missed [1]. The search has room for people outside the committees.

8. Aim at the easier target first. Red dwarf planets are nearer-term than Earth twins, in both Seager's and Kipping's judgment [1][3].

9. If you work on something unfashionable, pick it for the question. Kipping declined the easy first; Cabrol started with 40K and a contested idea; Seager says loving the work and being good at it carried her through [1][2][3].

10. Count time as a resource. Missions die, telescopes are booked for years, and a career is short. Seager's remark that her window gets smaller is a reason to design searches that the next generation can finish [1].

Sources

1. Sara Seager on the Search for Exoplanets, Signs of Life, and Finding Light After Loss · Lex Fridman Podcast
2. Nathalie Cabrol on the Search for Alien Life, Diving in Volcanic Lakes and Surviving an Earthquake at 20,000 Feet · Lex Fridman Podcast
3. David Kipping on Exomoons, Habitable Worlds and Why We Must Stay Agnostic About Aliens · Lex Fridman Podcast