14 DAY TRIAL // Experts working at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View, California, announced on Sunday that we may find alien life within a quarter of a century.
According to SETI senior astronomers Seth Shostak, who spoke at the SETI conference over the weekend, proof that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists is just around the corner.
“I actually think the chances that we'll find ET are pretty good. Young people in the audience, I think there's a really good chance you're going to see this happen,” he said.
The expert bases his predictions on the Drake equation, a scientific formula developed by SETI pioneer Frank Drake to estimate the number of potentially inhabitable planets in the Universe.
The complex equation was developed in order to give as a clue as to how many intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations may exist out there, for us to communicate with.
A large number of factors are included in the calculus, including among others the rate at which galaxies form stars, the number of planets around each star, the number of inhabitable exoplanets and so on.
But, most importantly, the equation also takes into account the number of worlds that may produce life, the fraction of those which produce intelligent life, and the number of those civilizations that reach a degree of advancement larger than our own.
According to Carl Sagan, SETI pioneer and renowned astronomer, the result of the Drake Equation was N (number of civilizations) equals one million.
Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, one of the most renowned authors in the world, said that about 670,000 potential worlds exist out there, that we could theoretically communicate with.
Frank Drake himself calculated that about 10,000 such worlds exist. “This range, from Sagan's million down to 10,000 – that's the range of estimates from people who have started and worked on SETI,” Shostak revealed.
“These people may know what they're talking about. If they do, then the point is we trip across somebody in the next several dozen or two dozen years,” he added, quoted by LiveScience.