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From the first landing of the human moon to the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, which has given us an unprecedented view of the wonders that hover over the clouds of the Earth, NASA has accomplished a great deal in 60 years. But finding strangers is unfortunately not on this list.
Despite decades of research, intelligent life forms have remained inaccessible. Many experts agree that it is not unlikely that there is extraterrestrial life somewhere – it is estimated that our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is home to at least 100 billion planets, with one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe.
The beginning of the modern quest for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is often postponed until 1959, at a time when the uncertainties of the cold war were mingled with the excitement of space exploration possibilities.
In an article published in the journal NaturePhysicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison claimed that if extraterrestrials existed, they would most likely come into contact with other civilizations (such as ours) by sending electromagnetic signals in the hope, in the hope that they would be captured .
Read more: 60th Anniversary of NASA: 60 Amazing Facts on Space Agency and the Cosmos
Drake's equation is another innovative tool in the astrophysicists toolbox for finding alien life. In 1960, astronomer Frank Drake performed the first SETI experiment by directing a radio telescope to the stars near the Sun. About three years after Cocconi and Morrison presented their findings, Drake devised an equation to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations that might be present in the Milky Way galaxy.
The Drake equation, as described by SETI:
N = R * p fp * ne * fl * fi * fc * L
Or:
N = the number of civilizations of the Milky Way whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable.
R * = The rate of star formation adapted to the development of intelligent life.
fp = The fraction of these stars with planetary systems.
ne = number of planets, by solar system, in an environment adapted to life.
fl = The fraction of the appropriate planets on which life actually appears.
fi = The fraction of living planets on which intelligent life emerges.
fc = The fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence in space.
L = The length of time these civilizations release detectable signals in space.
"The values of the various terms are very uncertain, consistent with the lack of life elsewhere in the universe on the one hand and with many civilizations on the other," Roger C. said. Wiens, from the Los Angeles Space Remote Sensing Group. Alamos National Laboratory and the University of New Mexico where he is looking for signs of Martian life, explained to Newsweek.
And it's one thing to present ways of thinking about the discovery of little green men, and another to develop the technology and the infrastructure to do it.
The official commitment to SETI in the United States has been irregular. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, NASA attempted to join SETI with projects such as the Orion Project, the High Resolution Microwave Survey, the Microwave Observation Project, and waves and other planetary systems.
In 1992, NASA launched a SETI program, but Congress dropped it less than a year later. The non-profit institute SETI has continued part of this initiative, with individuals and universities, including the late Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner in 2015, with their innovative initiatives. Still no luck.
That year, Drake lamented in an interview with Space.com: "The situation with SETI is not good. The company is falling apart due to lack of funding. "
A lack of money of course makes it difficult for scientists to answer fundamental questions that could advance SETI. Astrophysicists recognize that there are three barriers between us and other intelligent life forms: time, distance and lack of technological progress.
For example, scientists can only guess at the frequencies that extraterrestrial civilizations would transmit, said Dr. Michael Garrett, a professor at the School of Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. a lot of computing, "he said Newsweek.
And on the 4.5 billion years of life of Earth and the 13 billion years of the universe, cognitive life, such as humans who have access to a technology capable of communicating and to be "heard" in the space, has existed for only 100 years, explains Wiens. "It's less than a drop in the bucket in terms of time."
Mike Windle / Getty Images for Vanity Fair
"Now, suppose there are other civilizations that have developed elsewhere in parallel with us." If they had been active on the radio for only 100 years, we would only detect them if they lived unless 100 light years from us.
"If they grew a little earlier than us, say 100,000 years ago, then yes, we could already" hear "their radio waves if the show was strong enough, but only in our own galaxy, earlier they should have grown, for example, millions of years earlier if they were in different galaxies, and that does not mean the radio power needed to hear something so far away.
In addition to waiting for extraterrestrials, we can search for ourselves. But where to start? Near here, for the moment, says Wien. If life were growing on Earth, it would also have developed on Mars in the habitable zone of our solar system, said Wiens. The ice moons around Jupiter and Saturn, where scientists have found organic molecules necessary for the development of life, are another potential exploration site.
"From my point of view, our exploration of places like the Mars moon and Jupiter, Europa, could give exciting results in the early stages of life, which will not help us to understand the genesis of life, and the frequency with which life develops. "
Thanks to the dedication of physicists, over the past decade, space exploration techniques have progressed rapidly, said Wiens. Now astrophysicists are now more optimistic that we could find an intelligent life outside the Earth. "These are extremely exciting times," says Garrett.
"I think that over the next 20 to 30 years we might be able to say something definitive about the question of whether there is life in other organs on the solar system, "explains Garrett. "As for the universe, well the universe is a big place – I doubt we can ever say definitively that life was only present on Earth."
In April, NASA launched a new tender to find life by launching the exoplanet transit satellite (TESS); a satellite programmed to capture 200,000 images of stars, some of which are within 10 light years from Earth. Its creators hope that it will find life by 2020.
What we call super telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is expected to succeed the Hubble Space Telescope in 2021, and the large infrared optical infrared surveyor (Luvoir) could also bring us closer together. As could the Observatory of Habitable Exoplanets, a conceptual mission for the image of planetary systems around stars similar to the Sun.
"The TESS mission is currently our most effective way to search for potentially habitable planets," said Dr. Peter Behroozi, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona. Newsweek. "The best method to look for signs of life is currently to look for signs of oxygen, organic molecules and water in the atmospheres of the planet because breathing through any form of life (no matter the primitive) will change the atmospheric composition. "
"Unless you're very lucky, JWST will probably not be powerful enough to do this kind of detection; however, two flagship missions proposed by NASA, such as LUVOIR and HabEx, would be able to regularly measure planets' atmospheres for signs of life. "
But maybe we're looking at it all wrong, Garrett argues. "Maybe it's not a technical breakthrough we need, maybe we need to win the right to be part of the galactic club – it could be a technical leap that we should be doing for hundreds of years in the future, the time we can share resources on this planet and learn to live together in peace, we will have the answer. "
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