For years, humanity has pondered about the existence of life other than in planet Earth. Could there really be aliens? Are we not alone? For Bay Area astronomers, it is a reverberating "yes."
In a meeting Wednesday with the science committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, astronomers with the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) discussed the possibilities of alien life and how enough funding for its research could contribute to more extensive explorations. To them, other forms of life could be discovered in matter of 20 years.
Director Dan Werthimer of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and senior astronomer Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California opened the discussions by enumerating the efforts of space agencies and SETI in searching for other life forms in neighboring planets and galaxies.
NASA's Kepler space probe, which is expected to resume operations following the approval of the K2 mission, is even cited by the SETI astronomers as one of the major contributors to the quest. Werthimer said through Kepler's eyes, scientists were able to gaze at approximately two thousand of Milky Way Galaxy's planets and probably trillions of them are out there, outshining even the known number of stars.
"Billions of these planets are Earth sized and in the 'habitable' or so called 'Goldilocks' zone - not too distant from their host star (too cold), and not too close to their star (too hot). And there are billions of other galaxies outside our Milky Way galaxy - plenty of places where life could emerge and evolve," he said.
Werthimer and Shostak also bared new projects, such as the "eavesdropping SETI," in which they would use sophisticated tools to listen to two far-flung planets the moment they aligned to Earth in case their respective life forms plan to exchange messages through radio signals, and the Allen Telescope Array of small dishes situated in California.
"There is, as of now, no compelling evidence for biology beyond Earth. While the widely reported claims of fossilized microbes in a Martian meteorite generated great excitement in 1996, the opinion of most members of the astrobiology community today is that the claims are unconvincing," said Shostak in his congressional testimony [pdf]. "Nonetheless these same astrobiologists, if asked if they think it likely that extraterrestrial life is both commonplace and discoverable, would nod their heads affirmatively."
SETI is a collective term for all the projects dedicated to search of life other than the planet Earth and such was pioneered by renowned astrophysicists Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. In 1995, the U.S. government stopped the funding to such missions, prompting SETI projects to resort to private institutions willing to fuel the legacy of the search for alien life.
