Will We Ever Find Alien Civilizations? | Quanta Magazine
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The Joy of Why
Will We Ever Find Alien Civilizations?
By
Janna Levin
and
Steven Strogatz
July 9, 2026
Astronomer David Kipping discusses why claims of extraterrestrial life keep dissolving under scrutiny, why we need a more statistically grounded approach to searching for life beyond Earth, and why it’s rational to believe that we may be alone.
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Chanelle Nibbelink for Quanta Magazine
Introduction
Authors
Janna Levin
Contributing Columnist
Steven Strogatz
Podcast Host
July 9, 2026
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astrobiology
astronomy
exoplanets
extraterrestrial life
James Webb Space Telescope
physics
planetary science
telescopes
The Joy of Why
All topics
Does intelligent life exist elsewhere in the universe? The question has captivated us for centuries, but despite decades of searching it remains frustratingly unanswered. Every so often a curious signal appears — fossilized structures in a meteorite, say, or an unusual gas in an exoplanet’s atmosphere — and for a moment it seems possible that we are not alone before the excitement gives way to a more mundane explanation.
So what would it actually take to find life in the cosmos — and how would we know when we saw it?
David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University, has spent his career finding better ways to answer these questions. His approach is statistical: rather than chasing individual detections, he develops mathematical frameworks for reasoning about where habitable worlds are likely to exist and how confidently we can interpret the signals they produce. In this episode of The Joy of Why, Kipping joins co-host Janna Levin to discuss efforts to frame one of humanity’s oldest existential questions as a tractable scientific problem, why biosignatures have proved so difficult to interpret, and why he believes exomoons may be an overlooked place to search for life.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn or your favorite podcasting app, or you can stream it from Quanta.
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Transcript
[Music plays]
JANNA LEVIN: I’m Janna Levin.
STEVE STROGATZ: And I’m Steve Strogatz.
LEVIN: And this is The Joy of Why.
STROGATZ: A podcast from Quanta Magazine where we discuss some of the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today.
LEVIN: So Steve, I really have a good topic today.
STROGATZ: Hmmm.
LEVIN: It’s aliens. First of all, have you ever seen a flying saucer? Let’s just have it out, Steve.
STROGATZ: Okay, this is where I have to admit, no. But I would like to talk to you about aliens.
LEVIN: Okay, that’s really good because this is serious. I think scientists take very seriously the idea that there’s life out there. Have you ever pondered the question, are we alone?
STROGATZ: A little bit. Years and years ago, I read a book by Francis Crick, you know, better known for his work on structure of DNA. But Crick wrote a book called Life Itself, and he was interested in the idea that life on this planet might have been seeded by a process that people were calling directed panspermia, that maybe life had been sent here.
LEVIN: Yeah.
STROGATZ: But the thing that really sticks with me from Crick’s book was a point that he made, which is about what’s the probability of life starting on a given planet. And he said, “We really don’t know.”
LEVIN: Mmm-hmmm.
STROGATZ: Like, we just really don’t know. And if the number is sufficiently small, like astronomically improbable, it could be that we’re the only life in the universe. That’s not impossible. You know, you always hear people say, “Oh, there’s so many stars and so many galaxies,” that people just assume that’s a big number, so of course there must be life everywhere. But in my heart, I really don’t know. There might be none or there might be a lot. I don’t know.
LEVIN: Yeah. Well, I think that’s exactly the question, that this isn’t just a matter of belief, right? It’s not, I believe in aliens or I don’t. And it’s also no longer beyond quantifiability. We actually have concrete questions we can ask, parameters we can estimate, satellites that search for planets that give us data and intel. And this is kind of a modern and more sophisticated version of something called the Drake equation.
So I spoke to someone who studies deeply the mathematical...