Post by auntym on Jan 1, 2011 18:40:55 GMT -6
www.ufocasebook.com/2010/searchheatingup.html
UFO Depiction
Editorial - Mankind's Search for Extraterrestrial Life Heating Up
Published: December 30, 2010
Jeremy Muir
The serious search for extraterrestrial life moved on from sightings of UFOs and little green men many years ago.
As well as gazing deeper and deeper into the universe, for 50 years now astronomers have monitored the vast ocean of space hoping to pick up a radio message from the neighbours.
This search, called SETI and employing excess capacity on personal computers around the world, has looked closely at only 750 of the Milky Way’s billion or so star systems.
It is about to be turbocharged by a cluster of radio telescopes being built in California with SETI in mind.
Powerful new space telescopes are helping astronomers find planets circling distant stars, with hundreds charted since the first exoplanet was discovered in 1995.
Kepler, launched in 2009, is the first to home in on Earth-sized planets that orbit in the “habitable zone” where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for water to remain in its liquid state.
It is monitoring 100,000 stars in a sector of our Milky Way galaxy. SETI and other searches for possible evidence of life — such as pollution — will focus on the most plausible targets as these planets are discovered.
In many ways the search for extraterrestrial life is only just getting under way. Earth is a small planet circling a minor sun on the edge of just one of an estimated 125 billion galaxies. Out in space are a thousand billion billion, suns that may have planets supporting life.
The physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked why no extraterrestrials had shown up on Earth when there were likely to be so many solar systems where life could have evolved.
One answer is that our Earth really is unique, and we are alone.
Another is that aliens have visited but found our planet so dull they crossed us off their inter -stellar travel guide.
A more sobering possibility is that intelligent alien species do evolve quite readily but are inherently unstable, and destroy themselves before they can signal their existence to one another.
UFO Depiction
Editorial - Mankind's Search for Extraterrestrial Life Heating Up
Published: December 30, 2010
Jeremy Muir
The serious search for extraterrestrial life moved on from sightings of UFOs and little green men many years ago.
As well as gazing deeper and deeper into the universe, for 50 years now astronomers have monitored the vast ocean of space hoping to pick up a radio message from the neighbours.
This search, called SETI and employing excess capacity on personal computers around the world, has looked closely at only 750 of the Milky Way’s billion or so star systems.
It is about to be turbocharged by a cluster of radio telescopes being built in California with SETI in mind.
Powerful new space telescopes are helping astronomers find planets circling distant stars, with hundreds charted since the first exoplanet was discovered in 1995.
Kepler, launched in 2009, is the first to home in on Earth-sized planets that orbit in the “habitable zone” where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for water to remain in its liquid state.
It is monitoring 100,000 stars in a sector of our Milky Way galaxy. SETI and other searches for possible evidence of life — such as pollution — will focus on the most plausible targets as these planets are discovered.
In many ways the search for extraterrestrial life is only just getting under way. Earth is a small planet circling a minor sun on the edge of just one of an estimated 125 billion galaxies. Out in space are a thousand billion billion, suns that may have planets supporting life.
The physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked why no extraterrestrials had shown up on Earth when there were likely to be so many solar systems where life could have evolved.
One answer is that our Earth really is unique, and we are alone.
Another is that aliens have visited but found our planet so dull they crossed us off their inter -stellar travel guide.
A more sobering possibility is that intelligent alien species do evolve quite readily but are inherently unstable, and destroy themselves before they can signal their existence to one another.