Looking for Extraterrestrial Life The search for extraterrestrial life has become a legitimate search. A few years ago, it would have been frowned upon as foolishness, because many people believed we were alone in the universe. They equated the search for life other than ours as being related to flying saucers and such and laughed at those who proposed it. Well guess what? NASA has created a unit to search for such life and this should give that search an appropriate approval from the rest of the scientific community. The idea of looking for other living things has finally become serious. This doesn’t mean we are only looking for intelligent beings however. We are looking for signs of any type of life, but finding intelligent beings is the ultimate goal. There are all different tools which we have that could lead to eventually finding life. A new one was just announced by NASA. It would not directly find life, but it would indicate a planet might be much like ours. Scientists have found Earth’s atmosphere extends far beyond the orbit of the moon. Yes, it is very weak by our standards, but never the less it is observable using the correct instruments. They say hydrogen atoms called the geocorona exist where our atmosphere merges with outer space. This can be found with very sensitive equipment. It is believed if planets have hydrogen in their atmosphere, they have water vapor closer to their surfaces. Scientists currently believe the existence of water on a planet gives a better chance for the existence of life. When the first modern search for life on another world took place, it was on the planet Mars. Giovanni Schiaparelli was an Italian astronomer. In 1877 he accidently used a word which has been misinterpreted to describe what he thought he saw through his telescope. He thought he saw channels and used the word canali which was immediately thought to mean canals by non-Italian scientists. Amateur astronomer Percival Lowell immediately grabbed on to the idea there were canals on Mars and when we talk about canals, we mean something which is manmade. As years went by and cameras got better resolution it became obvious there were no canals on Mars, but the idea hung on far too long. The idea we were being visited by extraterrestrial life began thousands of years ago. We can find evidence of this in many different places such as on ancient cave walls, petroglyphs and even ancient temples. Our ancestors were convinced people from the stars had visited them and even believed they ruled them. The modern era which brought up this idea started during World War II when strange craft called foo fighters began to appear in the skies above areas which both the allies and axis pilots were flying above. For awhile both sides thought they belonged to the other, but due to their speed and maneuverability they soon realized they had technology far beyond anything we had. Nikola Tesla had built a wireless electrical transmission system and in later years he was upheld in court as having invented the radio, not Marconi. Anyway, he had stated he picked up signals from Mars in 1899. Many years later in 1960 Frank Drake, an astronomer conducted Project Ozma which examined the frequency of two stars for intelligent radio signals. The Soviets became interested in searching for radio signals at the same time. In 1971 NASA funded Drake to conduct a Search for Intelligent Life or SETI search. Over the years SETI has continued, but has often been up against hard times. It has had to look for public funding when the government defunded it in 1988, but its equipment has improved over the years. One of its most promising signals which it intercepted was named the WOW signal. The problem was SETI had a policy which stated if they received a promising signal, they then had to slew the telescope away and slew it back to try and regain the signal. When they did this with the WOW signal, they could not relocate it. The SETI search continues to this day. We are not the only ones searching for alien life. China is getting into the game in a big way. They have built the biggest radio telescope in the world dwarfing out giant telescope in Puerto Rico. A bit of trivia, the scope is named Tianyan. It has a diameter of 500 meters. This is misleading since only 300 meters can focus at a time. Everyone within 3 miles of the telescope site were put out of their homes. The U.S. Arecibo telescope has a diameter of 305 meters but uses 270 meters of the scope. The Chinese telescope does incorporate newer advances such as focusing panels. With other countries conducting this type of research we have a much greater chance of finding intelligent radio signals if indeed any beings are using radios. Today we have rovers and space probes and at least part of their duties is looking for life. Along with these devices we are launching more and more powerful telescopes. There have been many other planets found outside our solar system and scientists have decided any planet they find which is within a certain distance of its star and of a composition near the same as earth, and especially one which shows evidence of water has a greater chance of containing life. These planets are known as exoplanets and we have discovered thousands of them. The last time I checked there were 3916 discovered. NASA lists planets discovered by those that have a radius and those with mass among other things. I am not an astronomer so I can’t explain this any further. NASA is looking for signs of life such as indications of industry. I guess smoke and certain chemicals in the atmosphere might be some of these indications. NASA is getting ready to launch the James Webb telescope into space. When a telescope is launched into space it avoids having to look through the Earth’s atmosphere so it can get a clear view. Earth telescopes have become bigger and now feature adaptive optics which adjust the telescope thousands of times a second, so it can clearly see through the Earth’s atmosphere also. Probes are checking things out closer to home as they explore the planets, moons and other bodies in our own solar system. It could turn out there might be life right in our own backyard. Two moons are thought to have oceans and oceans could mean life. They are Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons and Europa a moon of Jupiter. A NASA mission may happen in the future which is being talked about now to explore Enceladus. The mission might contain a submarine type device which can melt miles of ice so it can get into the water and explore for life.
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