The latest attempt to work out how much alien life is out there suggests there may be a lot more than most people thought. According to a new statistical analysis based on how quickly life got going on Earth, life will start on at least a third of Earth-like planets within a billion years of them developing suitable conditions. And with recent discoveries that planets are common around Sun-like stars, there's probably no shortage of prospective homes.
A new telescope, docked on the International Space Station, will be capable of not only probing the depths of the Universe, but also listening for the chatter of other civilizations and spotting Earth-threatening asteroids.
An overview of the work of Dr. Douglas Vakoch who is trying to craft a message that can be sent to extraterrestrial civilizations to communicate that humans are peaceful and altruistic.
The SETI Institute wants the cosmos to know we can play nice. Should we humans receive a signal indicating that another civilization exists elsewhere in the galaxy, the message chief for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence says encoding the concept of altruism in our reply might make for a good first impression.
A SETI Institute survey on people?s beliefs about etraterrestrials found, not surprisingly, that respondents projected characteristics on E.T. based on how they view their own life. For example, the study found that people who feel like the world is cold and cruel are more likely than other people to imagine extraterrestrials as being cold and cruel as well.
New calculations by Lineweaver and Daniel Grether, both of the University of New South Wales in Australia, predict that there are at least 30 billion Jupiters are out there orbiting sunlike stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
A message that will be broadcast into space later in 2002 has been released to scientists worldwide, to test that it can be decoded easily. The researchers who devised the message eventually hope to design a system that could automatically decode an alien reply.
New Mexico State University physicist Slava Solomatov argues that "the more scientists learn about the conditions that make life possible on Earth, the more they realize how complex those factors are -- and how a relatively small change in one condition or another could have rendered the planet uninhabitable."
Looking for life elsewhere is a tough task for human or robot. The good news is that the scientific skill and tools to search for, detect and inspect extraterrestrial life are advancing rapidly.
Researchers at the Arizona State University have developed reliable criteria for identifying traces of life, or "biomarkers," for use during future astrobiology missions.