Aliens are definitely out there, and we could find them within 20 years. That’s what astronomers that the Search of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) believe. Over the past few decades, humans have made several attempts to find out whether life beyond the Earth exists. We can find answer to that baffling question in the next 20 years, with sufficient funding.
Aliens could be present on more than six worlds in our own solar system
SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak said during a hearing of the House of Representatives’ Science and Technology Committee that numerous pieces of evidence suggest that conditions and components necessary for life are “perhaps ubiquitous” in the galaxy. He said that the institute is conducting a three-way search to find life on other planets or beyond.
So far, most of the efforts and funding to discover aliens have been focused on Mars and moons in our solar system. Shostak said there are, besides Earth, at least six worlds in our solar system that might have life. And chances are scientists will find them in the next 20 years. Under the second initiative, astronomers look for signs of oxygen or methane on distant planets. Oxygen and methane gases are tied to life, reports Discovery News.
Third, the institute hunts for aliens that are technologically advanced and send radio or other signals in the outer space. SETI’s idea is to eavesdrop on signals that are accidentally or deliberately leaked from another world. The institute uses the world’s biggest optical and radio telescopes to find out evidences of advanced civilizations in the galaxy.
Milky Way has over a trillion planets, aliens could be present on many of them
Dan Werthimer of the University of California, Berkeley, explained at the hearing how NASA’s Kepler observatory is contributing to the search efforts. He said Kepler space observatory has shown that the Milky Way galaxy has more than a trillion planets, almost three times the number of stars. And billions of these planets are in the “habitable” zone, i.e., they are neither too hot nor too cold. That’s not all, there are billions of other galaxies besides our Milky Way.
