It’s a sweltering Tuesday in Washington, D.C., the kind of day that stretches the definition of Earth as a “habitable” planet. But on an eighth-floor terrace near the U.S. Capitol building, dozens of people are outside anyway, talking and watching as passersby dart between pools of shade on the sticky streets below. Besides the heat, the onlookers are sweating something else, too—an audacious project to learn, at last, whether we have any neighbors living on Earth-like planets in our neck of the Milky Way.
Surveilling alien worlds for signs of life is a lot more than a twinkle in this community’s eye. It’s the reason why everyone is here for a four-day science conference in late July, at the height of D.C.’s arguably habitable oppressive summer heat. They are prepping for NASA’s next flagship space telescope, a multibillion-dollar machine that could launch as early as the mid-late 2030s and reveal whether Earths are as universal as sand on a beach or if our watery world is instead a lonely island in a quiet sea. Called the Habitable Worlds Observatory, the telescope’s core mission is to search for signs of alien biospheres on Earth-size planets orbiting sunlike stars—worlds, at least in theory, that could be twins of our own.
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