It is said that given the size of the universe, it should be statistically impossible that we are the only lifeform in the entire universe. And by 'we', I mean the carbon based life on this blue dot of a planet we call Earth.
I personally believe that the universe is teeming with a variety of lifeforms, some that we would even barely recognise as life. Also, I believe that there should be at least some intelligent species out there, capable of exploring the universe.
When or how we will find them is anybody'd guess, but it is certainly not for a lack of trying though. We have set our high tech scientific instruments towards the sky and sent probes to Moon and Mars hoping to get even a hint of any extraterrestrial beings, even single celled ones.
The search continues and it seems like NASA, one of the coveted space agencies, is going to actively explore the most likely candidates that could harbour life in our solar system. Europa, is one such candidate and we might send some really advanced probes to explore it.
Jupiter's Icy Moon - Europa
For a long time now, scientists have known about the potential for life on Europa, Jupiter's fourth-smallest moon which has a liquid ocean of water underneath a thich layer of ice.
On Earth, where there is water, there is usually life and so, it is natural that the body of water on Europa grab our attention as well as far as searching for life is concerned. The problem though is that to reach the underworld ocean, any probe would need to drill as much as 30 km of ice first!
That is certainly a task, even here on Earth (the deepest we have dug is only 12 km). Thus any space probe to Europa would need to be really advanced capable of doing what we have never done before and that's exactly what researchers at NASA's Glenn Research Centre are doing.
They are planning to build a nuclear-powerd tunneling robot that would use a lot of heat from its reactors to make the drilling of the thick layer of ice easier, so that it could reach the liquid ocean world beneath.
At this stage, this is just a concept and there is a lot of work to be done before this can be possible, but if there is even a chance that some alien beings could be swimming in the underworld ocean of Europa, I think it is worth all the work. Will we ever discover such lifeforms there? I certainly hope so.