Has Extraterrestrial Life Finally Got into Contact? Astronaut Spots Stowaways Outside Cargo Spacecraft Resupplying the International Space Station

Given that the Solar System is only about 4.5 billion years old, which is young compared to the rest of the universe, and interstellar travel might be fairly easy for other life forms in space, this begs the question of why intelligent life has not visited Earth yet. Could the photo recently shared by a cosmonaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) be the first evidence of their first attempt to contact?

The Fermi Paradox takes its name from the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi who speculated about the existence of extraterrestrial life during a lunchtime conversation in 1950. It has made other scientists scratch their heads as they still do not have any answers until now.

Are Those Stowaways Watching the Astronauts?

On June 1, cosmonaut Sergey Korsakov tweeted a photo of the Russian cargo resupply spacecraft leaving the space station to head home to Earth. But something caught his eyes that had him wondering if there were stowaways watching them in the space laboratory.

"Progress MS-18 successfully undocked and departed. But who are those stowaways watching us?" Korsakov wrote on Twitter. So, whose eyes are those looking straight at him?

The people in the comment section offered some insights, with several saying that it could be from Dr. Who's Daleks or R2D2 and Jawas from Star Wars.

With all those wild guesses, Korsakov also shared a close-up photo of the spacecraft with the beady-eyed onlookers. It turns out that those are just outside components of the spacecraft catching the light and not from any extraterrestrial creature.

ISS Progress 79

According to IFFL Science, the spacecraft is known as ISS Progress 79 to NASA and had been resupplying the ISS for quite some time, sending fuel, research equipment, oxygen, water, and food.

Moreover, the spacecraft is also used to correct the space station's orbit by either helping it jump out of the ever-increasing space junk or reboosting the ISS when it starts to drag.

Cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev told Russian state newspaper TASS that the ISS Progress 79 has been docked at the space station for 214 days already and has removed a total of 1.3 tons of garbage, end-of-life equipment, and debris.

But the resupply ship from Roscosmos has already reentered Earth last week, according to NASA and left a plasma trail in the atmosphere for a fiery but safe demise above the Pacific Ocean.

Where Are the Extraterrestrials?

Representative of the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View, California, wrote that Fermi had grasped the concept that any civilization with a modest amount of rocket technology and an immodest amount of imperial mindset could have already colonized the galaxy.

That means every star system could be brought under the wing of an empire of extraterrestrials within a few tens of millions of years, which might sound like a long project but is relatively short compared to the age of a galaxy.

However, there seems to be no intelligent life from outer space present on Earth, suggesting that there could be no other advanced civilizations in the galaxy.

Therefore, scientists emphasized that further research in biochemistry, planetary formation, and the atmosphere is necessary to narrow down the answer as to where the extraterrestrials are.

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