Humans have been searching for signs of extraterrestrial (ET) life for decades. We’ve been listening carefully for strange radio signals, looking for signatures of the artificial altering of stars and digging up rocks on Mars. But alas, so far, we’ve found nothing. As far as we can tell, we’re alone. But it could be that we’re looking in the wrong places.
We know that life can appear around stars like our sun, and we know that stars like our sun will turn into white dwarfs (small, dense stars that are stellar core remnants approximately the size of planets) at the end of their lives. So, perhaps we should be focusing our search around white dwarfs.
Despite decades of hunting within our own solar system and in a host of other star systems, we haven’t found a single creature. As far as we know, we have the whole galaxy — and possibly the universe — to ourselves.