Posted on 07/15/2014 9:28:58 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
Cambridge, Mass. (CBS CONNECTICUT) – NASA predicts that 100 million worlds in our own Milky Way galaxy may host alien life, and space program scientists estimate that humans will be able to find life within two decades.
Speaking at NASA’s Washington headquarters on Monday, the space agency outlined a plan to search for alien life using current telescope technology, and announced the launch of the Transiting Exoplanet Surveying Satellite in 2017. The NASA administrators and scientists estimate that humans will be able to locate alien life within the next 20 years.
“Just imagine the moment, when we find potential signatures of life. Imagine the moment when the world wakes up and the human race realizes that its long loneliness in time and space may be over — the possibility we’re no longer alone in the universe,” said Matt Mountain, director and Webb telescope scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which plans to launch the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018.
“What we didn’t know five years ago is that perhaps 10 to 20 per cent of stars around us have Earth-size planets in the habitable zone,” added Mountain. “It’s within our grasp to pull off a discovery that will change the world forever.”
(Excerpt) Read more at connecticut.cbslocal.com ...
If life could spring up here (as they claim) from existing material merely by chance, then why shouldn't we assume that other life could spring up in other environments based on different materials?
In fact, if life arose here by mere chance, then it should also have arisen pretty much all over the universe... it should be everywhere.
So what? Are we close to being able to send and return people to another solar system? Given that we are yet to travel to another planet in our own, the answer is no! Finding other planets in other solar systems that may support life is easy. Getting there is the hard part. So, until we are capable of getting to another solar system, speculating on if there is life on any of them is a waste of time.
Even if all of their scientific assumptions (read, presumptions) are correct, nothing would be close enough to permit travel with any known technology. The nearest star is over 4 light years away. A mission there is impossible with existing modes of transportation. If we had the ability to achieve warp speed, it would take a decade with no communication possible for most of the journey. Even if warp speed were possible, normal means of propulsion requires tremendous g-forces for extended periods of time.
One g force of continuous thrust would take about a year to reach light speed without accounting for the diminished thrust capacity as the speed of light is approached.
Unless time travel is invented and a cheap, abundant energy source is found or utilized (such as the sun), no interstellar travel is feasible. A vessel propelled by a solar sail would take nearly a century to make a round trip at best. That is just to check out the nearest solar system. Even by NASA’s logic, what are the odds of life being found in a single, random, solar system?
ayep. nirvana is just around the corner...just keep us funded until then,,just until then y;know...then we’ll all be in utopia. just keep the cash rolling in for a little while longer...
Then lets wait and have them fix global warming.
I don't think NASA or anyone else interested in astronomy doubts life can exist under extremely different conditions than we are accustomed to on Earth.
Finding life thriving around thermal vents, with no sunlight, deep in the ocean on Earth opened many eyes.
For all we know, there is an awful lot of non-carbon based life out there.
As I posted earlier, astronomy is still in its infancy. Much more so for astrobiology.
We could prove it a lot sooner just by rocketing Hillary, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, Pelosi, Boxer, and those of their ilk to another planet right away. Of course it wouldn’t be intelligent life, but the benefits are still obvious.
Our transmissions would be extremely faint after 10s of light years of travel. It's unlikely that there would be anything noticeable against background noise at that distance.
Is it possible that God put all that there just to give us...the one place in all the Universe to support life...a mind-boggling show of His amazing creative power?
Yup, if only we had more money we could get to the bottom of this.
Most ‘life’ on this planet isn’t ‘friendly’.
Most ‘life’ on this planet is ‘deadly’.
Yes but extremophiles evolved from more conventional life forms not the other way around. It would be much more of a challenge for life to originate in such an environment than to adapt to it.
Depends on what you mean by 'intelligent'. All life forms are intelligent.
“Speaking at NASA’s Washington headquarters on Monday, the space agency outlined a plan to search for alien life using current telescope technology, and announced the launch of the Transiting Exoplanet Surveying Satellite in 2017. The NASA administrators and scientists estimate that humans will be able to locate alien life within the next 20 years.”
Whatever your view on the possibilities of “Alien Life” it seems foolish to me to be putting a time-table on the eventual discovery. As Secretary Rumsfeld said, “We don’t know what we don’t know.”
NASA seems to be a bureaucracy adrift. They have no real mission now. Muslim outreach & providing evidence for Global Warming seems to be it for the moment.
Einstein was right when he said there may be life up there, but we will never know. The distances are so far that we will never be able to find proof. There are thousands of things that would be necessary for life to exist besides the proper distance from the host star. Proof can be seen in the planet mars. It is in a habital range yet it lacks so many things necessary for life to exist.
I think is is sad that in order for NASA to be self-propagating, they must resort to crap such as this.
Yeah, they have. They're just hard to read.
Aliens (X) master the technology and sophistication to build space craft which travel at light speeds, avoid black holes, asteroids and space rubble, gravitational pull of all sorts of phenomenon, solar radiation, temperature control, hydration, nutrition, and arrive at a spot one trillionth of a speck, enter our atmosphere without burning up or being detected, and when they get 100 feet above the ground they need to turn on bright lights to see where they are going?
I don't think so folks.............
Suppose there are 100,000,000 Earth like planets capable of sustaining intelligent life.
Also suppose that the Earth is 5,000,000,000 years old.
We have been exploring the universe and broadcasting radio waves for the last 100 years, and suppose that we may yet do so for another hundred.
So the window of time that we are detectable to an extraterrestrial intelligence will be 200/5,000,000,000 or one in 25,000,000 years.
So if the assumptions are true, the number of intelligent civilizations detectable to Earth explorers at any time is not 100,000,000 but more like four.
The fact that we are not seeing these other civilizations is merely an indication that the duration of a climax technological civilization like ours is very short, astronomically speaking, on the order of 200 to 1000 years.
Given what we can all see of human civilization, this seems very plausible.
Even the so-called 'intelligent' life..................
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