We'll Find Intelligent Life in 10 Years, Scientists Say

We'll Find Intelligent Life in 10 Years, Scientists Say

Chances are, we'll find life beyond Earth by 2035, and there's no need to travel to a galaxy far, far away. Our Milky Way galaxy is full of totally suitable environments.

Don't get too excited, though. I'm talking about microbes or chemical markers, not Hollywood-like green humanoids.

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope discovered something incredible. Almost every star has planets, and many might be habitable. Also, we already know that our galaxy is very rich in water. What's hard, though, is finding life itself.

The James Webb Space Telescope, a super-powerful telescope launched into space in 2021, is onto this.

It checks the atmospheres of nearby super-Earths, rocky planets bigger than Earth. It searches for life-related gases and chemicals that can only be produced by living things. And they already found some clues.

For example, they detected signs of such a chemical on a planet called K2-18b. This planet is 120 light-years away, which is pretty close on a space scale. This planet is in the Goldilocks zone, which means a zone around the star where the temperatures are just right for liquid water to exist.

It orbits a red dwarf star, the smallest type of star. Such stars are a bit fainter than our sun.

It will take about a year to check if these hints of life are real. If so, it would mean that life is much more common than we previously thought. But even if it's not, there are 10 more Goldilocks planets on their list to study.

The James Webb Space Telescope is a cool tool, but it has limits. It can't detect small, Earth-like planets due to their size.

To fix this, NASA plans to launch another tool, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. This one will be even better at spotting such planets and life-related chemicals.

And also, we have the SETI project. SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. This project has been on the hunt for extraterrestrial creatures since the 1980s. They also believe that we'll find signs of life within the next 10 years.

But why don't we reach out ourselves?

NASA has sent some signals into deep space. In 2002, their Deep Space Network sent a signal to the Pioneer 10 satellite. But there was an obstacle in the path.

A white dwarf star, 27 light years away from Earth. If there is a planet around this star, perhaps the signal reached them too. If there are any intelligent species there, we could receive a reply by 2029.

The DSN keeps sending powerful transmissions into space. These signals will bump into 222 stars within the next three centuries. Maybe someday we'll receive a reply from somewhere far away.

But why haven't we received a response yet?

There are about 200 billion galaxies in the universe, each with around 100 billion stars. If just 1% of those stars had one planet, that's still 200 quintillion possible planets. And we can narrow it down even further. If the chance of them having a life is 1 in a trillion, that would still leave us a few hundred thousand planets.

So where is everyone?

The universe may be full of life, but this life isn't intelligent in our traditional sense. Some planets might have microbes, birds, or space dinosaurs.

This is called the Great Filter Theory. It suggests that there are certain filters that life has to overcome to become intelligent, and maybe other species just haven't overcome them yet.

Perhaps we keep missing their signals, or maybe we miss the entire species itself. The universe is insanely huge and ancient. It's over 14 billion years old. With such vast distances and periods, the chances of us existing at the same time as other civilizations are slim.

If their civilization lasted only a few millennia, we could easily miss them. But that doesn't mean we should give up our search. Scientists were worried that Earth's radio signals had dimmed over time.

But a recent study showed that it's the opposite. The number of our satellites keeps growing, and this makes our planet more detectable. By the end of the decade, we could have 100,000 satellites, making Earth incredibly bright in the radio spectrum.

If there is an advanced civilization out there, they will easily spot us even from very far distances. Astronomers are super optimistic about it. There is a high chance they'll find extraterrestrial creatures while you and I are still around.

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