Last week, the hacktivist group Anonymous made claims that NASA was on the verge of announcing the discovery of alien life. It's just too bad there's no actual evidence to suggest that's the case.

On June 25, Anonymous—or at least, someone claiming to be affiliated with the nebulous group—released a lengthy video filled with outlandish conspiracy-theory claims. One thing the video was missing, however, was any sort of evidence that NASA had found any kind of alien life.

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Primarily, the video references a statement made by NASA Associate Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen to the House Science Committee two months ago. In the statement, Zurbuchen spoke about NASA's search for alien life. But the quote Anonymous uses to argue that NASA has secretly made contact with alien life is completely different when taken in its proper context.

The video from Anonymous quotes Zurbuchen as follows, in what appears to be a clumsy paraphrase of what he actually said:

"Our civilization is on the verge of discovering evidence of alien life in the cosmos. Taking into account all of the different activities and missions that are searching for alien life, we are on the verge of making one of the most profound, unprecedented discoveries in history."

To the right sort of conspiratorial ear, it can almost sound like Zurbuchen is saying NASA knows something about aliens it isn't telling us. In the context of the whole statement, you can see the point is quite the opposite.

NASA has spent a considerable amount of time and effort trying to find evidence of extraterrestrial life, and in some ways that search is paying off. Obviously, NASA hasn't found life yet, but the agency has discovered thousands of planets orbiting other stars, some of which may be habitable. NASA has also found liquid water on multiple moons around Jupiter and Saturn, and organic compounds on comets and asteroids.

Taken together, this suggests there's a good chance that life of some kind exists elsewhere in the universe. We may not find alien civilizations, but there may be small microbial life elsewhere in our own solar system, and if it is there, we are getting closer to finding it. But of course, we won't have found it until we have found i. This is what Zurbuchen said before Congress back in April.

NASA is not content to just hope there's life elsewhere in the cosmos. Over the next few decades, the agency will likely send missions to some of these moons to see if life is really there. Given all these recent discoveries made by NASA it's not unreasonable to assume that we might find some hint of life in the near future.

When Zurbuchen spoke about "the different activities and missions that are searching for alien life," he was talking about missions like Europa Clipper, which will fly by one of those watery Jupiter moons sometime around 2024, or NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, which could look at some of those planets around other stars and possibly spot signs of life in their atmospheres.

There's a long list of new spacecraft scheduled to be launched in the next few years, and a whole bunch of scientists anxiously waiting to see the results from them. There's a good chance one of those could dramatically change the way we think about the universe and our place in it.

But if you were hoping for some big news following the Anonymous announcement, you'll likely have to wait a bit longer.

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Avery Thompson
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