Two of the world’s preeminent extraterrestrial astronomers (as in,they research extraterrestrials, not that they’re aliens themselves) have told US Congress that there is alien life out there in the universe — and with adequate funding, we could find that alien life within 20 years. This statement was presented to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, which is currently assessing our efforts in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and whether it should receive more public funding.
Now, you could say that the two astronomers — which both have “SETI” in their job titles — have a slightly vested interest in convincing Congress that there’s life out there. But to be fair, all they really did was tell Congress about the sheer scale of the universe, and that “it would be bizarre if we are alone,” said Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institutein California. The astronomers cite the nearly-two thousand planets already identified by NASA’s Kepler telescope, and how we estimate that 70% of all stars are accompanied by planets — meaning there’s around one trillion planets in the Milky Way alone. “It bears mentioning that the Milky Way is only one of 150 billion galaxies visible to our telescopes,” said Shostak, inviting Congress to think about the quintillion or sextillion habitable planets in the entire universe.
With that many planets, there’s a “good” chance that there’s alien life somewhere in the universe — but, as Shostak and Dan Wethimer, director of SETI research at the University of California Berkeley told Congress, we won’t find it unless we have the funding. So far, humanity’s efforts to probe deep space for signs of life have been lackluster to say the least. In recent years, it has been SETI@Home, and that’s about it. Because the universe is vast, and because our radio telescopes can only listen to a tiny fraction of the sky for signs of alien life, we simply haven’t looked in many places. With just a few million dollars in funding — for larger telescopes and more computer processing power — we could turn over many more interstellar rocks. With enough funding, Shostak and Wethimer think we could find alien life as soon as 20 years from now. (As a fun aside, both Shostak and Wethimer also told Congress that they don’t think Earth has ever been visited by aliens. “I don’t think that that would be something all the governments would have managed to keep a secret,” Shostak said.)
To find alien life, we’d need a big array of radio telescopes — like this Square Kilometer Array
Personally, I’m a little more dubious. Shostak and Wethimer are obviously going to veer towards optimism when billions of delicious research dollars are on the line. Yes, we could cover the Earth in huge parabolic dish antennas and listen really closely for signs of life. [Read: IBM to build exascale supercomputer for the world’s largest, million-antennae telescope.] More realistically, though, increased funding might allow us to listen for faint signals emanating from a few percent of the night sky. In either case, listening for alien radio signals is one hell of a long shot. The odds of an alien civilization being advanced enough to produce strong radio signals, and sending them in our direction — remember, the universe is almost infinitely large — are tiny. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, our two civilizations would have to overlap. Human civilization is tens of thousands of years old, but we have only been able to transmit and measure radio signals for less than 100 of those. The universe has been around for almost 14 billion years — what if there was intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy a million years ago, or a billion years ago, or 10 billion years ago, but their radio signals washed over us long before we could hear them? [Read: Alien spotting: By 2020, we’ll finally have the ability to locate life-harboring, alien planets.]
A really advanced alien civilization may have built a star-encompassing Dyson sphere
And how long do you think we will be around? Another 100 years? Probably. Another 1,000 years? If we’re lucky. In the grand, utterly stupendous scale of the universe, humans are the tiniest of blips — and it stands to good reason that any other intelligent civilization would be exactly the same. The big exception, of course, is if there is an alien civlization out there that has survived for millions of years and has already populated multiple star systems or galaxies. In that case, there’s a pretty good chance that our civilizations (and thus SETI efforts) would overlap.
Now, whether we actually want to find a highly advanced empire that has colonized multiple galaxies is another question entirely. I don’t think humanity would cope very well with suddenly being number two on the food chain…
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