The title of Meeting 2018 ("The forces that move history are those that make man happy") invites you to ask yourself what really moves man, his daring desire for novelty, knowledge, relationship, and how that movement leads to change the world in which we live.

Since prehistoric times human beings have ventured into unexplored territories in search of new possibilities of survival and development, they have been able to adapt to different environmental conditions, often encountering species of animals and plants that were before all unknown. Having landed on new continents, he sometimes discovered that even those territories were inhabited by other human beings with different somatic features, of which he was unaware of their existence. Almost everywhere on earth, man has found life, and has implanted life. Today our planet is basically explored in its entirety. We are the first generation for which no more "unknown lands" regions appear on the maps of the globe.

Simultaneously, thanks to the progress of space technology, in the last 50 years we have begun exploring our Solar System. One of the main objectives of interplanetary missions, directly or indirectly, is the search for possible forms of life outside the Earth. At the moment, despite all the efforts made in the field, no trace of life has been revealed in planets or satellites of the Solar System outside our planet.
Today we are on the threshold of a new radical expansion of the matter. In recent years it has been revealed the presence of a huge number of planets that revolve around other stars, the so-called "extrasolar planets", or "exoplanets". The recent results of the Kepler probe (2009-2016) indicate that, there are billions of them only in our Galaxy. They are very distant worlds.

Even the closest, at the moment, are completely beyond the reach of our spaceships. But some of them may have characteristics that can accommodate life. Is it possible? Can we ever find out? What tools do we have, and will we have in the future, to look for traces of life in those distant planets? What do we know about these planets today? How are they formed? Under what conditions can earth-like environments be created elsewhere? And how truly did we understand the rise of life and its evolution here on Earth?

If indeed some distant planet housed life, what life could it be? Because an account is the elementary micro-organisms, the other is the complex animal life. Still another is the conscious life, that which we recognize in ourselves. And, if there are other conscious beings in the universe, will we ever be able to communicate with them?
And finally, why is it that we are passionate and worried about the idea that elsewhere, somewhere far away, there can be life? What impact would the news of such a discovery have for the whole world? Or, on the contrary, the virtual certainty of being alone in the universe would change the idea that we have about ourselves or our conception of life, our dignity as human beings?