The search for aliens has become a grassroots movement for billionaires.
The last few years demonstrate that extraterrestrial research has finally moved into the mainstream — and money is pouring in fast.
Aside from a strange blip in the 1950s and early 1960s, the search for extraterrestrial life has primarily taken place at society’s fringes. Public figures have not historically risked their reputations advocating the search for alien life. And within the scientific community, the subject was largely (and understandably) sidelined until recent years, when telescopes that could detect new planets and instruments that found the ingredients for life on other worlds allowed serious-minded researchers to pass the laugh test.
As a result, the last decade has seen a surge of interest in extraterrestrial research within the scientific community that has seized the public imagination. For example, the recent discovery of water on Mars immediately raised serious hopes from serious people we might find Martians. Every announcement that scientists have found another potentially habitable exoplanet (which includes the nearest exoplanet to Earth) causes days of clamor on the internet.