Astronomers said to congressional lawmakers this week that they will find alien life within the next 20 years.
"At least a half-dozen other worlds besides Earth that might have life are in our solar system. The chances of finding it, I think, are good, and if that happens, it'll happen in the next 20 years, depending on the financing," astrobiologist Seth Shostak said before a committee, according to The Space Reporter.
Dan Werthimer, who runs Berkeley's SETI Research Center, summarized its current efforts to search for extraterrestrial intelligence during a hearing this week of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
SETI programs use the largest radio and optical telescopes in the world to find evidence of advanced civilizations and their technology on far away planets, according to the release.
During a hearing on May 22, Werthimer, of the University of California, Berkeley, outlined current projects to find intelligent life on other planets. He also detailed how NASA's Keplet space observatory is contributing to this effort, according to release issued by the university.
Kepler and his colleagues have helped show that there are trillion planets, three times the number of stars, in the Milky Way Galaxy alone.
"Billions of these planets are Earth sized and in the 'habitable' or so called 'Goldilocks' zone, not too distant from their host star (too cold), and not too close to their star (too hot)," Werthimer said in a statement, according to the release. "And there are billions of other galaxies outside our Milky Way galaxy - plenty of places where life could emerge and evolve."
UC Berkeley runs the longest-running search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). They also run the popular crowd-sourced computing project SET@home.
Werthimer said Earth broadcasts of the TV show "I Love Lucy" have already reached the nearest stars, to show our existence to other intelligent civilizations that may be out there, according to the release.
Click here to download a copy of Werthimer's remarks at the committee meeting.
"I hope today's hearing will enable us to learn more about how research in astrobiology continues to expand this fascinating frontier," Smith said in his opening remarks. "The unknown and unexplored areas of space spark human curiosity. Americans and others around the world look up at the stars and wonder if we are alone or is there life on other planets."
Along with his SETI colleagues, Werthimer has embarked on a new project called "eavesdropping SETI," where they listen only when two planet distant system are aligned with Earth. This gives Earth a chance to intercept targeted communications.
"The Kepler mission has given us a ton of multiplanet systems to look at," said Werthimer's colleague Andrew Siemion, a research scientist at the Space Sciences Laboratory who holds joint postdoctoral appointments at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands, according to the release.
The team now wants to observe the planets around all 30 stars within 13 light years of Earth in the northern hemisphere. To achieve this goal, the UC Berkeley collaborators will have to harness six different ground-based telescopes to find optical, infrared and radio signals simultaneously for extended periods of time.
No confirmed exoplanet detections have been made around any of the stars yet, but Siemion said that they already know that some of the stars should host habitable planets.
"We plan to use every technology we have available to us to look very, very closely at these 30 stars," he added.
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