Giday, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. And it's the most dangerous

idea out there, the question of are we alone in the cosmos? You might have seen some

reports recently that suggests, in fact, we have just discovered we're not. In a world more than

120 light years away, scientists say they've found the strongest

signs yet of extraterrestrial life.

Astronomers detect a signature of life on a distant planet.

Signs of life on an exoplanet?

What's up with that?

Being something of a nerd of the cosmos and alien life and sci-fi myself, I wanted to get to the

bottom of this with someone who I trust, who is an expert in this field, and ponder not only on

what exactly this latest discovery really means, but on all kinds of things to do with whether

we're alone in the cosmos, what the purpose of the cosmos might be,

why it seems fine-tuned for life,

whether or not life originated on planet Earth or elsewhere in the galaxy,

how we look for alien life, what we might be missing,

why we haven't found any.

I wanted to address the Fermi paradox,

which is basically this conundrum about why if the conditions required for life to arise are as permissive as the evidence on planet Earth seems to suggest they are, then why isn't extraterrestrial life abundant and why isn't it sufficiently common to have been detected so far?

The person who I

turn to for all such questions is Sarah Webb. She is an astrophysicist at Swinburne University of

Technology in Melbourne. She is really one of the rising stars of astrophysics globally. She did her PhD

in machine learning for processing astronomical data, which is coming in particularly handy at this

...