America Is Killing Its Chance to Find Alien Life
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In April, scientists announced that they had used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to find a potential signature of alien life in the glow of a distant planet. Other scientists were quick to challenge the details of the claim and offered more mundane explanations; most likely, these data do not reveal a new and distant biology. But the affair was still a watershed moment. It demonstrated that humans have finally built tools powerful enough to see across interstellar space and detect evidence of biospheres on distant worlds—in other words, tools truly capable of discovering alien life.
Given the telescope technologies we astronomers have now and the ones we’ll build soon, within a few decades, humans might finally gather some hard data that can answer its most profound, existential question: Is there life beyond Earth? What’s arguably even more remarkable is that unless something changes very soon, the humans making that epochal discovery might not be NASA and the American space scientists who power it.
The U.S. space agency is facing a funding and personnel crisis that the Planetary Society has called “an extinction-level event.” The Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget—a version of which passed Congress and now awaits the president’s signature—slashes NASA’s funding by almost a quarter. That means, adjusted for inflation, NASA would get the same level of funding it had in 1961, before John F. Kennedy called for the United States to put a man on the moon.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/america-killing-chance-alien-life-131140370.html