“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.”
— Albert Einstein
From Albert Einstein, who spent the final years of his life on a quest for a unified theory he never found, to Vera Rubin, who uncovered compelling evidence for dark matter without ever knowing its true nature, some of our most consequential questions have been pursued with no guarantee of resolution.
Discoveries—from the infinitesimal to the astronomical—are made along the way, as people build instruments, write equations, and design missions that extend far beyond their own lifetimes. But for many scientists and engineers, it is not the certainty of success that sustains the work. It is a constellation of virtues—perseverance, curiosity, hope—that keeps them moving forward even when ultimate answers remain out of reach.
We spoke with scientists and engineers who search the universe for the conditions necessary for life, including MIT professor and exobiologist Sara Seager, and Tracy Drain, Chief Engineer on NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. Their work spans distant exoplanets and icy moons closer to home, including Europa, where an ocean hidden beneath miles of frozen crust may hold the chemical conditions necessary for life.
They describe a form of scientific pursuit grounded not only in rigor, but in belief. Belief that a question is worth asking, even when answers lie beyond the horizon.
The Long Arc of a Mission
When Tracy Drain chose a career in space exploration, she did so with a clear understanding of time. Space exploration, especially missions to the outer planets, unfolds over decades, not years. Engineers may help design and launch spacecraft only to move on to other missions long before discoveries are made. “Maybe you won’t even be alive to know what happened downstream,” says Drain. “That’s sort of par for the course…You come to appreciate being a piece of that journey.”
Europa Clipper is designed to study whether Europa could support life by examining its chemistry, energy, and water. That knowledge will require years of analysis to take shape.
“For me, it’s this burning curiosity about what is out there,” says Drain. “And once you have a chance to see it or glimpse it through instruments from millions of miles away, you’re like, wow, that’s amazing. I didn’t expect it to be like that. Well, why is it like that? And it’s just the endless fun of exploring new things.”
For Drain, meaning lies not in completed accomplishments but in continuity. “When we look back to the people who discovered scientific things in the past, we appreciate them,” says Drain. “I get to know that my colleagues and I, hopefully, will be appreciated by future generations for the things that we were able to discover.”
Leadership Under Pressure
That long view was tested repeatedly. Over the course of Europa Clipper’s development, Drain and her team navigated a global pandemic, a hurricane at the launch site, wildfires that shut down NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and last-minute technical anomalies.
From the outside, these moments register as crisis. Inside the mission, the response was quieter and more deliberate. “What are the things we can control?” she asks. “What can you not control? What is your timeline?”
She credits mindfulness practices with helping her remain grounded and focused on the work at hand. Safety always came first. “We care deeply about the mission, but we also recognize our limits as human beings.”
Seeing Without Seeing
Sara Seager is known for reshaping the search for extraterrestrial life by focusing on biosignatures—chemical traces, such as gases in planetary atmospheres, that life might leave behind.
“We cannot just bask in the wonder and glory of it all,” Seager says. “We can do something concrete about it with real tools: physics, chemistry, computers. I really just love the idea of trying to find out what is behind all that awe and wonder. We actually can peel away the layers of the onion and understand that, and we can do the same for the night sky.”
Seager has turned part of her attention to Venus, a planet long dismissed as inhospitable, and to the possibility that life could exist not on its scorching surface, but in its clouds.
Through repeatable laboratory experiments, Seager and her colleagues have shown that certain biomolecular building blocks can survive in concentrated sulfuric acid—a finding that challenges assumptions about where life could exist.
If you can do a rigorous and repeatable experiment, “and you find something unexpected,” she says, “that’s where wonder and awe show up… it’s just one of the biggest joys ever.”
Belief Without Certainty
Seager is careful not to romanticize uncertainty. Traces, she notes, are not the same as answers.
“In science, we often have a hunch or a belief…Until it moves into that wonderful, [provable and] repeatable phase, we really do rely on belief more than people realize.”
Searching for life elsewhere has shaped how she sees humanity itself.
“Our planet will survive whether humanity does or not,” she says. “That’s frightening and reassuring at the same time.”
A friend once told me that science was her religion—not in a doctrinal sense, but as a way of orienting herself toward the world, grounded in evidence, discipline, and humility before the unknown. Yet even for the most committed empiricists, progress is often sustained by something that looks like faith: faith in an idea worth pursuing, in a mission larger than oneself, or in enduring values like curiosity and perseverance, rooted in rigor and wonder, even when there is no guarantee of answers.
“At some level we're desperate to know we're not alone,” says Seager.
It is a desire that echoes through both science and religion, a shared yearning for meaning, connection, and reassurance that our path is not solitary.
We have peered into a new world and have seen that it is more mysterious and more complex than we had imagined. Still more mysteries of the universe remain hidden. Their discovery awaits the adventurous scientists of the future. I like it this way,” writes Vera Rubin in Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters.
Is the Search Enough?
Both Seager and Drain are asked a version of the same question: If life is never found—on Europa, on Venus, beyond our solar system—would the work still have been worth it?
Seager says her life’s work will indeed still have been worth it, for myriad reasons, even if the answers never come. But that doesn’t mean she’ll be satisfied. “I think it’s about that belief and hope,” says Seager, adding that without these, she wouldn’t feel the same motivation.
“We want to find that it’s not just us here on our planet fighting every day,” Seager adds, “but that there’s way more out there—something even more positive.”
For Drain, the answer is clear. Europa Clipper will radically deepen understanding of an icy world and advance engineering knowledge. Both are invested in inspiring and training future scientists and engineers. Discovery is not the only measure of value.
“We’re never going to stop looking…This is a generations-long search,” says Seager. “We just want to understand why we’re here. What is our purpose? Where did we come from? Even if we don’t get all the answers yet, the search itself still matters.”
Alene Dawson is a Southern California-based writer known for her intelligent and popular features, cover stories, interviews, and award-winning publications. She’s a regular contributor to the LA Times.
