Top expert in the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life: “We will find them”
The Conversation hosted a public question-and-answer session on Reddit where Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute, explained why it\’s so important to search for intelligent life and why we may soon find it. He asks – Why are we continuing the search ? For example, isn’t it true that radio waves become almost indistinguishable from background noise within a few light-years of their origin? Answer: We can detect radio waves billions of light-years away without much trouble. The idea that they become indistinguishable from noise at a small distance is incorrect. With a large enough antenna, you can always find the signal. But the larger point is that we now know two things that we didn’t know 20 years ago. First, that planets, including those that might be like Earth, are incredibly abundant in the visible universe. There could be a trillion trillion primes in our world. Second, life began on Earth very early. If intel...