Slashdot Mirror
Search For Alien Life On 86 Planets Begins
liqs8143 writes "Astronomers from the United States have begun searching for alien life on 86 possible earth-like planets. A massive radio telescope that listens for signs of alien life is being used for this project. These 86 planets are short-listed from 1235 possible planets detected by NASA's Kepler telescope. The mission is part of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, launched in the mid 1980s. A giant dish pointing towards each of the 86 planets will gather 24 hours of data, starting from this week."
The utter silliness of the idea that "Life" must exist on "earthlike" planets shows the short-sightedness of the SETI project. They continue to look for life that is similar to our own, at approximately the same technology level. How long will it be before we abandon radio transmission as our primary means of communication? 50 years? 100 years? Even if we still are using radio waves for an extremely long time, the power of our transmissions are decreasing over time as our equipment gets more and more sensitive. On top of all that, we're assuming that life needs to be in this habitable zone in which liquid water can exist. Which, on its face, is utterly silly. I'd only be slightly surprised if we found life inside the corona of a star. Everything outside of that is completely believable... even probable. Life on Jupiter? Saturn? Even Pluto? Totally plausible. Interstellar space isn't even that far fetched. It wouldn't look or act anything like us, but that's not really the point is it?