Is There Anybody Out There Reading Passage
Is There Anybody Out There Reading Passage
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Our basic curiosity is the fundamental reason for human search. This same curiosity about the natural world drives all pure science. We are curious about whether we are alone in the universe. We want to know if the right conditions are enough to bring out life or if there is anything special about Earth that fosters a variety of life forms that we see around us. The simple detection of radio signals is enough to satisfy our curiosity. In this way, we can say that SETI is part of the pure science machinery which is continually expanding the horizons of knowledge. There are other reasons also why we are inquiring whether life exists elsewhere. For example, civilisation on earth started only a few thousand years ago, but our survival was disturbed by pollution and the nuclear war that has happened over the last few decades. Can we survive for a few more years, or we’ll be dead? The lifetime of a planet is about several billion years. If any other civilisation survived in our galaxy, then their ages will range from zero to several billion years. We’ll have a positive note just by knowing the existence of such civilisations as proof that long-term survival is possible. We might also gain some lessons on how to tackle threats like nuclear war or global pollution and the threats that we have not encountered as of now from the experience of older civilisations.
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Most SETI scientists have two ground rules in the discussion of whether we are alone in the universe. First, most scientists ignore UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) as they don't have strong evidence which can be considered serious. It is still important to have an open mind since any convincing evidence could emerge in future. Second, we have a conservative belief that we are looking for a life form which is similar to ours, so it is difficult to recognise the life form as a life form if it does not resemble us. To put it another way, the life form we are looking for might have blue heads and five legs, but it nevertheless has similarities to us in that it must communicate with its fellows. It could be interested in the universe, living on a planet orbiting a star like our Sun, and likely it has chemistry based on carbon and water.
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Though we are making these sorts of assumptions, we have a limited understanding of other life forms. For example, we lack knowledge about how many stars have planets or how likely life arises naturally, given the appropriate conditions. When we look at the 100 billion stars in our galaxy and 100 billion galaxies, it is impossible to believe that at least one of the planets does not have a life form on it. Based on our limited knowledge about the conditions for carbon-based life, we can estimate that probably one in 100,000 stars might have a life-bearing planet orbiting it. Perhaps our nearest neighbour could be a thousand light-years away. It is almost like a next door in astronomical terms.
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An alien civilisation could send information in a variety of ways across the galaxy. However, it requires too much energy to send the information, or it could be disturbed while travelling vast distances across the galaxy. In the frequency range of 1000 to 3000 MHz, radio waves travel the greatest distance. To date, All searches have focused on looking for radio waves in this frequency range. For now, various groups have done a number of searches, like Australian searches using the radio telescope at Parkes, New South Wales. Still, nothing has been detected from the few hundred stars that have been searched. Since 1992, the scale of searches has increased tremendously, as the US Congress voted NASA $10 million per year for ten years to perform a thorough search for extraterrestrial life. For this project, a lot of money is being spent on developing the special hardware required to search multiple frequencies at the same time. The project consists of two parts. The first part is a targeted search by means of the world’s largest radio telescopes. The American-operated telescope was in Arecibo, and the French telescope was in France. This part of the project searches for signals in the frequency range of 1000 to 3000 MHz, in the nearest 1000 stars. The second part of the project is an undirected search which monitors all of the space with a lower one using the NASA Deep Space Network’s smaller antennas.
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There is a substantial amount of debate about how we must react if we detect a signal from an alien civilisation. Everyone agrees that we must not respond immediately. Even if it is not possible to send a reply for a long distance at short notice, there are ethical questions emerging that should be addressed by the global community before sending the reply. Is it that we face a cultural shock if we encounter a superior and much older civilisation? Fortunately, there is no urgency about this. We are searching for stars which are hundreds of light-years away. So, it takes hundreds of years of time for their signal to reach us. And it will take a few hundred years for our reply to reach them. Therefore, it is not important whether there is a delay of a few years or decades while the human race debates about whether to reply to them or perhaps draft a reply carefully.
