Is there anybody out there? We might be about to find out!

The first time I heard about possible life thriving in the soil on the planet Venus, I was eight years old. We were studying our fifth-grade science textbook when a cartoon caught our eye. It was a NASA rendering of a hypothetical scene on the surface of Venus — a blue-skinned woman, stripped down to a futuristic bikini, standing next to a robot.

“Whoa,” my friend Chris said. “If humans ever go to live on Venus, there will be space women.”

“Space women!” I said. “Dang.

I spent the next 20 years of my life in constant disappointment that we may not discover extraterrestrial life in my lifetime. But that might be about to change.

A growing body of evidence suggests that life is abundant in our solar system. While we have spotted water on planets orbiting other stars, the closest we’ve come to finding life in our own solar system is when a NASA probe discovered subsurface oceans on Jupiter’s moons Europa and Enceladus. Both moons are thought to have enough heat and energy to support life inside their icy shells. With scientists finding potential conditions for life in the most extreme places in our solar system, hopes are growing that we might be on the verge of discovering life beyond our blue marble.

Mars has long been held up as the best candidate among the planets in our solar system.

In the summer of 1976, Viking I and Viking II became the first spacecraft to land on Mars. On the surface of the red planet, the landers tested samples of Martian soil and analyzed the atmosphere, before returning their data to Earth.

The Viking results were ultimately ambiguous. The landers found organic material in the Martian soil, but the data were not sufficient to determine if it was formed on Earth and then carried to Mars, or if it was formed on Mars.

But that wasn’t the only thing the data were ambiguous about. The results were also pretty much inconclusive about whether Mars was hospitable to life. While Mars has an atmosphere (at least for now — it was once much thicker), evidence suggests that Mars is too cold and dry to support liquid water on its surface for very long.

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