Contact: NASA Scientist Believes We're on the Brink of Discovering Aliens

[onedef92]

NASA Scientist Believes We're on the Brink of Discovering Aliens

Apr 8, 2015, 9:26 AM ET

Not only does NASA's chief scientist believe alien life forms likely exist, but she said the space agency knows where to look and could discover signs of extraterrestrial life within the next decade.

Speaking on a panel discussion on Tuesday about water in the universe, NASA's chief scientist Ellen Stofan said she believes the first indications of alien life could come by 2025 -- with more concrete evidence of extraterrestrial life coming in 20 to 30 years.

"We know where to look. We know how to look," she said. "In most cases we have the technology, and we're on a path to implementing it, so I think we're definitely on the road."

While Stofan predicts mankind is likely not alone in the universe, she said she expects alien life won't be "little green men."

"We are talking about little microbes," she said.

Water is one of the necessary elements in NASA's quest to find habitable planets and life forms beyond Earth. It's been found in surprising places, including the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

By exploring these other worlds, it's only a matter of time before NASA could strike on evidence proving the existence of alien life.

[onedef92]

CONTACT (1997) - Official Movie Trailer - YouTube

and shet....

[8Up]

[C5SilverBullet]

"Discovering"

[DukeAllen]

I see aliens every time the grass gets mowed. Send NASA over.

[Kerrmudgeon]

Funny logic saying that they expect to find microbes that are the basis of life, in the same way that evolved here, and not fully evolved life forms as a result of those building blocks. The only variable is time. How can she possibly guess about that?

[Mike Mercury]

NASA Scientist Believes We're on the Brink of Discovering Aliens

translation:

"we're at the point where we ask for more funding"

the problem is...

in the Milky Way (with stars a plenty, in the billions)... our Sun is a relatively new star compared to the rest. Which means that life elsewhere should of had hundreds of thousands of years (or millions of years) head-start on us.

If there was other life out there - they would of found us.

[96LT4]

How could this be the only place with "life"?

[Mike Mercury]

Originally Posted by 96LT4

How could this be the only place with "life"?

define "life"

if all we discover is a few stagnent microbes... how much of your taxes are you willing to spend on that ?

Intelligent life somewhere, can be looking for us too.

[island14]

Originally Posted by Mike Mercury

define "life"

if all we discover is a few stagnent microbes... how much of your taxes are you willing to spend on that ?

Intelligent life somewhere, can be looking for us too.

And might consider us to be just a few stagnent microbes..

[Gina]

I think it's small-minded to think life will be found only where water is present. Sure, life as we know it depends on water, but maybe somewhere else beings are far different.

[8Up]

Is it still accepted norm that the universe is infinite? If that is true, and if you truly understand what 'infinite' means. Then you know there are 'infinite' planets out there with 'infinite' forms of life in 'infinite' galaxies at 'infinite' distances from ours. If the galaxy is 'finite', then its possible that we are alone.

[Cybercowboy]

Originally Posted by Mike Mercury

If there was other life out there - they would of found us.

Well, not necessarily. It could be that faster-than-light space travel is simply utterly impossible and even space-fairing intelligent life are restricted quite severely on how far they can go. We've only been spewing out detectable radio waves for about 100 years, so such an entity would have to pick up our emanations from, say 25 light years out (very very close in cosmic terms, meaning very improbable) and then travel here at sub-light speed for perhaps 75 years to see who we are. Would they bother? Not likely.

Much more likely is that intelligent life would explore the galaxy using self-replicating robots. Using such a method, and restricting the travel between star systems to, say, 1/10 the speed of light (reasonable) it would only take a couple million years to put a robot probe in each star system in the galaxy. Probe lands in a star system, builds two of itself and sends them on their way to two other star systems, and then stays to explore its assigned system and radio the results back to the home world.

So, would we even notice if an alien robot probe visited us at some point? What are the chances it visited us during the tiny fraction of the time we possibly would have been able to detect it from orbit?

[Mike Mercury]

Originally Posted by island14

And might consider us to be just a few stagnent microbes..

right; and that's possibly why "they" haven't bothered with us; we might be insignificant to other problems and issues within their culture.

NASA (who I think highly of) is just fishing-for-dollars on this specific.

[Cybercowboy]

Originally Posted by 454_71Stingray

Is it still accepted norm that the universe is infinite? If that is true, and if you truly understand what 'infinite' means. Then you know there are 'infinite' planets out there with 'infinite' forms of life in 'infinite' galaxies at 'infinite' distances from ours. If the galaxy is 'finite', then its possible that we are alone.

The universe is, for all incense and porpoises, infinite. It's estimated that the observable universe (approximately a sphere 28 billion light years in diameter) is roughly 1% of the entire universe. Since the other 99% of the universe lies outside of our light-cone forever, we'll never glean any information from that portion. In just our little fraction of the universe, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies containing billions of trillions of stars. There are more stars in our observable universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world combined.

So imagine that, on average, each galaxy has 10 space-faring intelligent civilizations at any particular time. You are a microbe that lives on a grain of sand on a beach, and you can move from grain to grain in about a single lifetime. How likely are you to run into another alien microbe on a beach containing 100 billion grains of sand, of which nine of them has alien microbes?

[DukeAllen]

Originally Posted by Cybercowboy

Much more likely is that intelligent life would explore the galaxy using self-replicating robots. Using such a method, and restricting the travel between star systems to, say, 1/10 the speed of light (reasonable) it would only take a couple million years to put a robot probe in each star system in the galaxy. Probe lands in a star system, builds two of itself and sends them on their way to two other star systems, and then stays to explore its assigned system and radio the results back to the home world.

Great. We'll be visited by Berserkers.

[Cybercowboy]

Originally Posted by DukeAllen

Great. We'll be visited by Berserkers.

If the alien race that built these probes were, say, a machine race which was spawned by their biological forefathers, became sentient, and revolted and exterminated their biological forefathers utterly then I guess it would be part of their imperative for the probe to exterminate all biological life it encounters with extreme prejudice, to keep the galaxy pure for the true machine race.

Believe it or not, it's actually one of the more plausible scenarios that would explain "Where is everybody?"

[Mike Mercury]

[Kerrmudgeon]

I bet they've already been here and said.....
"We're outta here mang, these hoomins is way too fk'd up to help"

Chariots of the Gods.....and shit!

[VatorMan]

Originally Posted by Cybercowboy

So, would we even notice if an alien robot probe visited us at some point?

Only if it's from Uranus.