Shouldn't Mr. Spock be here by now, or at least some little green men? We've been speculating about other intelligent life in the universe for a long time now, with no solid evidence yet. It will take some patience: we were only sure there were planets outside our solar system--exoplanets--within the last 31 years.
Science writer Jaime Green catches us up on our exploration of the universe and what it takes just to understand it, in the book The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos.
The odds of intelligent life go up all the time, because at last count there were well more than 5,000 exoplanets identified. The author joins us for a perusal of what she's found.