NASA is actively searching for intelligent life in the universe and is looking for habitable planets, official says
- Intelligent life may exist elsewhere in the universe besides Earth, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Tuesday, and NASA is actively searching for signs.
- "If you have a universe that is 13.5 billion years old — it is so big — is there another chance for another Sun and another planet that has an atmosphere like ours? I would say yes,” said Nelson.
- Nelson said NASA has been involved in searching for intelligent life for years, and noted that the agency is looking for life on the planets in our solar system and elsewhere in the cosmos to determine other Suns that have planets with a habitable atmosphere.
Intelligent life may exist elsewhere in the universe besides Earth, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in an interview Tuesday, and NASA is actively searching for signs.
"If you have a universe that is 13.5 billion years old — it is so big — is there another chance for another Sun and another planet that has an atmosphere like ours? I would say yes, so I think we're going to get some indication that there's intelligent life out there," said Nelson during an interview Tuesday.
In a report on unidentified flying objects released June 25, the U.S. government couldn't explain 143 of the 144 cases of UFOs reported by military planes from 2004 to 2021, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Nelson told CNBC's "The News with Shepard Smith" that NASA has been involved in searching for intelligent life for years, and noted that the agency is looking for life on the planets in our solar system and elsewhere in the cosmos to determine other Suns that have planets with a habitable atmosphere.
The former Florida Senator added that part of the search includes learning more about Mars. NASA's experimental helicopter Ingenuity made its ninth flight on Mars on Monday. Ingenuity flew for nearly 3 minutes, going as fast as 5 meters (over 16 feet) per second, according to a tweet from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
"This particular time, it's scouting a very sandy region in order to determine should the rover go there and possibly get stuck in the sand, so Ingenuity is just doing amazing things," Nelson said.
NASA described Ingenuity's latest flight as "the most nerve-wracking flight since Flight 1."