14 DAY TRIAL // Expert Seth Shostak, from the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California predicts that intelligent alien life may be discovered within the next quarter century.
By around 2040, the scientist says, astronomers will have scanned a sufficiently-large area of the night sky to potentially pick up electromagnetic signals produced by an extraterrestrial civilization. Humans are also producing such signals, which “pollute” the space around our solar system, and beyond.
Even with current technologies, astronomers have thus far been able to identify over 3,500 exoplanets, scattered in star systems across the galaxy, and in other galaxies. It is entirely possible that advancements in science will enable future generations of scientists and telescopes to create even larger inventories of alien worlds within much shorter time frames.
Eventually, Shostak argues, by scanning enough alien worlds, our chances of actually finding alien electromagnetic signals – if any exist at all – will increase drastically. It is therefore reasonable to expect that humans will find extraterrestrial civilizations within our life span.
“I think we'll find E.T. within two dozen years using these sorts of experiments. Instead of looking at a few thousand star systems, which is the tally so far, we will have looked at maybe a million star systems” by 2040, he said on Thursday, February 6.
“A million might be the right number to find something,” Shostak added at the 2014 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) symposium, which was held at the Stanford University. Much of his optimism is based on encouraging results from the NASA planet-hunting Kepler Telescope.
“The bottom line is, like one in five stars has at least one planet where life might spring up. That's a fantastically large percentage. That means in our galaxy, there's on the order of tens of billions of Earth-like worlds,” the SETI expert went on to say.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence experiment began in 1960, and it involves using radio antennas to try and pick up any potential transmissions that do not originate on Earth. Thus far, the search has been in vain, but only a minute percentage of the night sky has been covered to date.
Future assets such as the NASA James Webb Space Telescope – currently scheduled to launch in 2018 – will contribute to our search for extraterrestrial life, by scouring alien worlds for any potential signs of microbial life, Space reports.