How scientists find alien life within this century – as they say they plan to do – will have less to do with spaceships or blinking-light arrivals, as in sci-fi movies, and more to do with looking for signs of evolving microbes on distant planets or detecting faint signals sent by intelligent life as long as millions of years ago.
That’s what a leading astronomer said over the weekend.
Jill Tarter, cofounder of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, said during a presentation on Saturday that astronomers have some promising leads, Popular Science reported.
"I think that in this century we are going to be finding life beyond Earth," Tarter said at the Florida Institute of Technology's Cross Cultural Management Summit in Orlando, Florida.
"We can discover it. We can find biomarkers on planets or moons of our solar system. We can find artifacts in the solar system as we explore. We can look for remote biosignatures in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets. Or, perhaps we can detect the work product of technological civilizations: technosignatures," Tarter said.
Astronomers are now looking for unnatural variations in light and radio waves that could indicate alien civilizations, while others scientists want to send their own signals out into the universe, Popular Science said.
SETI wants to place 96 cameras at 12 sites across the world to monitor for flashes as brief as a millisecond or less in hopes to picking up on possible alien beacons or waves, the magazine said.
Astronomers also are looking for planets with imbalanced atmospheres like Earth, which could be a sign of developed life, if not intelligent life.
Mary Voytek, NASA's senior scientist for astrobiology, told Space.com in January that recent technology advances, like the agency's Kepler Space Telescope and its probe mission to other planets in the solar system, are making a huge difference for professional alien hunters like herself.
"For a long time, the sort of research we do in astrobiology was technology-limited," Voytek told Space.com. "(Modern technological innovations have) blown things open for us."
Voytek said while most researchers struggle to come up an agreeable definition of what life is, everyone is an astrobiologist in some respect and can play a role in finding alien life.
"Everybody gets really excited about being a part of answering this really big question," Voytek told Space.com. "It's very unifying."
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