Extraterrestrial

British astronaut Tim Peake thinks we're close to finding alien life

By T.K. Randall
May 26, 2025 ·  10 comments

Tim Peake aboard the ISS. Image Credit: NASA Like many astronauts, the 53-year-old - who journeyed to the International Space Station in 2015 - has a distinctive perspective on humanity's place in the cosmos and the likelihood of discovering life beyond Earth.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he appears quite confident that extraterrestrial life is out there.

"When you look at just our own Milky Way galaxy with 200 billion stars, that's one of a number of hundreds of billions of galaxies that we can see," he told Mail Online.

"So the chances are that there is complex, intelligent life elsewhere in the universe."Not only that, but Peake also believes that we are getting very close to finding it.

"We know that the universe is abundant with water, it's abundant with the seeds of life," he said.

"We've discovered so many thousands of exoplanets in our neighborhood which are orbiting stars, many of which have very good signs of potential habitability with liquid oceans for example."

"Within the next five to 10 years, using the James Webb Space Telescope for example, we could even get to the situation where scientists feel confident enough to be able to say that they found signs of biological life on another planet."

"That's the kind of thing that we're getting close to be able to say for sure."

Source: Mail Online | Comments (10)

Tags: Tim Peake, Extraterrestrial