Within the scientific community, there is healthy skepticism. And the question is, 'How do you ever get to a meaningful null result? How long and how hard do SETI scientists have to look for extraterrestrial intelligence and find nothing before they say, 'There is nothing. We are alone.'

Debra Fischer

Ultimately, what we're looking for in the long run is to find other Earth-like planets.

Debra Fischer

Science requires speculation, creativity, and wild ideas.

Debra Fischer

I hope that vigorous space exploration continues and that humankind will have a space station that resides between Earth and the moon. Outside the gravitational field of Earth, we could launch robotic spacecraft to other destinations in our solar system.

Debra Fischer

Once we see stars with three times the metal content of our sun, the planet detection rate goes up to 20 per cent.

Debra Fischer

A 'serious' scientist in 1992 or 1993 had to admit the possibility that planets were really rare, that most stars might not have planets. We've gone from there to here - where most stars have planets.

Debra Fischer

We now know that stars which are abundant in heavy metals are five times more likely to harbor orbiting planets than are stars deficient in metals.

Debra Fischer

If few worlds have microbial life, it dramatically reduces the chances that more complex organisms exist.

Debra Fischer

The universe has told us the most common types of planets are small planets, and our study shows these are exactly the ones that are most likely to be orbiting Alpha Centauri A and B.

Debra Fischer

Kepler's blown the lid off everything we know about extra-solar planets.

Debra Fischer

Naturally, we think that finding another Earth-like planet is identifying a site that's at least friendly here for the evolution of life. The primary goal of the Kepler mission is to statistically assess the occurrence of these small terrestrial worlds.

Debra Fischer

There may be hundreds of small seed planets - or planetesimals - which grow in the disk of matter around a star.

Debra Fischer

In 1999, my team discovered that the star Upsilon Andromedae was circled by three gas-giant planets - the first distant multiplanet system ever found. That same year, other researchers observed the first 'transit' of an exoplanet - a planet blocking out a small fraction of the starlight as it passes in front of the star.

Debra Fischer

Because Alpha Centauri is so close, it is our first stop outside our solar system. There's almost certain to be small, rocky planets around Alpha Centauri A and B.

Debra Fischer

It can be very hard to know the history of a particular star, but once in a while, we get lucky and find stars with chemical compositions that likely came from in-falling planets.

Debra Fischer

The first exoplanet to be found around a sun-like star was discovered in 1995, just two years before I began studying exoplanet detection.

Debra Fischer

Generally speaking, exoplanets can be any size, and they are found in a wide range of orbits. Some have massive gas atmospheres; others are smaller with an icy or rocky composition.

Debra Fischer

One of the first thoughts I had, when doing early exoplanet research, was that Earth and its many companions seemed very different from the planetary systems we were detecting.

Debra Fischer

Further ahead, I'd like to see tiny spacebots - smaller than your cell phone - travel outside our solar system to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. By keeping the mass of those spacebots low, we could more easily accelerate them.

Debra Fischer

Prebiotic chemistry on other worlds is going to be common. Plenty of small rocky planets will have similar chemistry. It's almost a given.

Debra Fischer

The building blocks of life are readily available throughout the universe.

Debra Fischer