Are We Alone?

Are We Alone

There are more stars in the universe than all the grains of sand on every beach on Earth, and countless planets orbit those stars. So it would be arrogant to think that we are the only creatures in the cosmos. I think it's easy to imagine life on other worlds, and I'm not alone. A whole category of scientists investigate alien life. They're called Astrobiologists. Lynn Rothschild of the NASA Ames Research Center is one of them. In 1969, a 220-pound meteorite crashed into Murchison, Australia. The Murchison meteorite was more than just a piece of rock floating through space. It was a doorway to alien life. A piece of the meteorite is kept here at the California Academy of Sciences. So what does this mean for our hunt for E.T.?


For one thing, if the common elements of life as we know it are spread throughout the universe, then life on other planets might be similar to life on Earth. If we look at enough SF movies, there are all sorts of weird and wonderful aliens out there, but what we're really interested in is what these organisms are built from.
In the cosmos for us to be alone NASA is optimistic about someday finding simple forms of life on one or more of our neighbors. Microbes may live in the Martian soil or float in the clouds of Venus. Strange creatures could swim in the icy waters of Saturn's moons. In Northern California, SETI is building hundreds of new devices to wiretap E.T. We're here in Northern California at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory. Right now, what we have is the Allen telescope array, an innovative new way to build a radio telescope, a large telescope out of small pieces. It was a marvelous moment, and the world was introduced at that time, in mid October '95, to the notion that our solar system was not alone. The discovery of 51 Pegasi b changed the entire game.
The language of life The Doppler shift method of planet detection was proven successful, and soon Marcy and his colleagues found more and more alien worlds. They have slowly confirmed nearly 450. There are likely billions more. Here we are, about to answer a question that the ancient Greeks asked and humans undoubtedly asked even before then. It's a treasure of a moment in human history that we suddenly have at our fingertips the telescopes, the computers, the light detectors, and the knowledge to answer a philosophical question that humans have been asking since antiquity. The answer to that question Are We Alone? May come sooner than we think. There must be other life-forms in the universe, and I'm even willing to go the next step and say there must be intelligent technological life elsewhere in the universe.
Kepler Space Telescope When you count up all the stars that are out there, those billions, trillions, even more Earthlike planets offer an enormous number of throws of the dice. Even if life is one in a million or one in a billion, there are just too many throws of the biological dice out there in the cosmos for us to be alone. We have no evidence one way or the other of any life beyond Earth, let alone intelligent life. Therefore, my feeling about it is we wait and see. I've got to be skeptical until I get some evidence otherwise. We haven't looked yet. We've hardly begun to search. We ought to do a much better job of searching before we draw any extraordinary conclusions. The building blocks of life are spread all around the universe. It's hard to imagine they haven't taken root in one of the countless other planets out there. Is any of that life what we would consider intelligent? And if alien civilizations are out there, why are they so quiet? Maybe their signals are still on the way, or maybe they use technology we don't understand, or. They may not be there at all. We just don't know. But one thing is certain. If we find life outside of Earth, it will profoundly change the way we look at life and ourselves. In the meantime, we have our hopes and dreams. And the silence of the cosmos.