The first steps to solve the millennia-old mystery of our true place in the universe happened, of all places, on a brisk and early Tuesday morning in the unremarkable conference room of a hotel in Washington, D.C. Here a team of legendary heroes assembled on Halloween—Gandalf and a Star Trek captain among them. Yet these were not just costumes donned by trick-or-treating scientists. They were a fitting metaphor for the 60 astronomers chosen to begin one of the grandest tasks imaginable, not just in space science but across the spectrum of human history: to design a telescope that can find, or refute, signs of life on planets orbiting other stars. Such a goal seems almost fanciful. Can we actually build a multibillion-dollar observatory with a good chance of discovering aliens on worlds beyond the solar system? The answer appears to be that we can, and if a growing list of pivotal decisions can be surmounted, we will. Life may be abundant in the universe or it may be incredibly rare—learning which is closer to the truth would be epochal. By this NASA-led project’s end, the aim is to “have enough observations to know either way,” says Courtney Dressing of the University of California, Berkeley.
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