Dr. Sara Seager

One is there's efforts to try to find an Earth twin eventually, but will they be Earth twins?

Or could Venus twins be the most common thing out there?

We don't know yet.

Secondly, if we have two planets, Earth and Venus, that are similar in mass and size and interior composition, yet have such different outcomes at their surface, that begs the question, surely there are more planets that are even just as different from Earth and Venus as Venus and Earth are from each other.

So yes, Venus and studying it definitely affects our perspective on exoplanets.

Well, the reason I mentioned sample return from solar system planets was I think, at least in our solar system, it's going to take us having a sample where we either see little things moving around or we are able to analyze the complex molecules in a complex tapestry that would make up any kind of cell wall.

For exoplanets, I am still enthused about finding signs of life.

But instead of our generation finding a definitive sign, I do think we'll find lots of things that we could attribute to life, but just not very certain about.

And all of these potential biosignature gases will be candidates that will help fuel the next generation of telescopes.

And what is that next generation?

I certainly have my favorite, and it's going to sound way out there, maybe as crazy as finding signs of life in the Venus atmosphere.

But my favorite is called the Solar Gravitational Lens Telescope.

The idea is to send a telescope to 500 times the Earth-Sun distance.

And when we figure out how to do that, that alone would take 20 years to get there.

And use our sun as a gravitational lens because mass bends space.

And we'd have to also block out our sun.

But if we chose the right exoplanet system and lined it up perfectly, we could see that background exoplanet magnified in light to like 100 billion times.

And we could instead put 1,000 by 1,000 pixels across that planet.

So to be convinced, we're going to have to go to like the next paradigm of telescopes.

Yes, we would be using essentially the sun would be our lens.