Alien Life b y 2040

By 2040 or so, astronomers will have scanned enough star systems to give themselves a great shot of discovering alien-produced electromagnetic signals, said Seth Shostak of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

"I think we'll find E.T. within two dozen years using these sorts of experiments," Shostak said last week during a talk at the 2014 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) symposium at Stanford University.

The Fermi Paradox ponders the lack of evidence of another transmitting intelligent civilization -- of all the stars and all the galaxies in the universe, you'd think one intelligent alien race would have bothered to call by now?

Either we're on the interstellar "do not call" list, or we're the most advanced life form out here (scary thought), or (even scarier) we're the only life form out here.

The search for any extraterrestrial life is one of the most profound things we, as a species, can do. 

But, extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) searching can be a hard-sell.

Still, the search continues and scientists are thinking up more and more extreme ways to fine-tune our high-tech array of astronomical instruments to detect intelligence in the stars.

"Instead of looking at a few thousand star systems, which is the tally so far, we will have looked at maybe a million star systems" 24 years from now, Shostak said. "A million might be the right number to find something."

Shostak's optimism is based partly on observations by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which has shown that the Milky Way galaxy likely teems with worlds capable of supporting life as we know it.

"The bottom line is, like one in five stars has at least one planet where life might spring up," Shostak said. "That's a fantastically large percentage. That means in our galaxy, there's on the order of tens of billions of Earth-like worlds."

Shostak and his colleagues think at least some of these worlds host intelligent aliens — beings that have developed the capability to send electromagnetic signals out into the cosmos, as human civilization does every second of every day. 

So they're pointing big radio dishes toward the heavens, hoping to detect something produced by living beings.