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.
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 recently,
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.”
Describing their own estimates as “conservative,”
the NASA planet hunters calculate that 100 million worlds within the Milky Way
galaxy are able to sustain complex alien life forms.
The estimate accounts for
the 17 billion Earth-sized worlds scientists believe to be orbiting the
galaxy’s 100 billion stars.
The NASA panel says that ground-based and
space-based technology – including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Kepler Space
Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope – will be able to determine the
presence of liquid water, an essential sign of potential alien life.
“I think in the next 20 years we will find out we
are not alone in the universe,” said NASA astronomer Kevin Hand, who suggested
that alien life may exist on Jupiter’s Europa moon.
“Do we believe there is life beyond Earth?” asked
former astronaut and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “I would venture to say
that most of my colleagues here today say it is improbable that in the
limitless vastness of the universe we humans stand alone.”
Milky Way Galaxy - Inside Out |
The NASA panel said efforts are focused on finding
signs of alien life on planets on other stars outside of our solar system.
“Sometime in the near future, people will be able to
point to a star and say, ‘that star has a planet like Earth’,” said Sara
Seager, professor of planetary science and physics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. “Astronomers think it is very
likely that every single star in our Milky Way galaxy has at least one planet.”
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