The Drake Equation Revisited: An interview with Sara Seager

In this interview, MIT scientist Sara Seager explains how a revised Drake equation could help people think about the odds of finding signs of life on a distant planet in the next decade.

Planet hunters keep finding distant worlds that bear a resemblance to Earth. Some of the thousands of exoplanet candidates discovered to date have similar sizes or temperatures. Others possess rocky surfaces and support atmospheres. But no world has yet provided an unambiguous sign of the characteristic that still sets our pale blue dot apart: the presence of life.

That may be about to change, says exoplanet expert Sara Seager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Upcoming missions such as the Transiting Exoplanet Satellite Survey and the James Webb Space Telescope, both due to launch around 2018, should be able to find and characterize Earth-like planets orbiting small stars.