NASA Reckons We’ll Find Alien Life in The Next Twenty Years

In news that is both completely terrifying and fucking awesome, NASA has claimed that up to 100 million worlds in the Milky Way may be home to alien life and predicted that humans will find life on another planet within the next twenty years.

Earlier this week NASA announced it will be launching the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in 2017, a satellite that will spend two years circling the galaxy’s brightest stars and seeing how many of them have planets of their own.

“Just imagine the moment when we find potential signatures of life. Imagine the moment when the world wakes up and the human race realizes that its long loneliness in time and space may be over — the possibility we’re no longer alone in the universe,” said Space Telescope Science Institute director Matt Mountain, before gazing wistfully into the night sky.

“What we didn’t know five years ago is that perhaps 10 to 20 per cent of stars around us have Earth-size planets in the habitable zone. It’s within our grasp to pull off a discovery that will change the world forever”, he added, probably weeping softly with joy at the majesty and incomprehensibility of the universe.

The “habitable zone” is the region around a star with the right conditions to theoretically support life. Earth, happily, bounces around nicely within the Sun’s habitable zone, which is why you and all your friends have the light, heat and oxygen human beings require to yell at each other on the Internet. One of TESS’s biggest jobs will be to find planets orbiting other star’s habitable zones, before stumbling across the epic galactic war that has been raging for thousands of years.

NASA astronomer Kevin Hand said he believes “in the next twenty years we will find out we are not alone in the universe”, before retiring to ponder the inconceivable insignificance of his existence against the vast, indifferent weave of the cosmic dance.

TO SPAAAAAAACE!