Loneliness in the Milky Way
At a recent panel discussion on the search for habitable worlds, NASA's chief scientific adviser, Ellen Stofan, made a bold prediction: signs of extraterrestrial life will be found in the next 10-20 years. It turns out that the Americans not only know exactly where to look for brothers in mind, but also have the appropriate technology for this.
The first project to establish contact with aliens was invented by the German mathematician and astronomer Karl Friedrich Gauss back in the 19th century. He proposed to cut down a huge area of forest in the shape of a triangle in the Siberian taiga and sow it with wheat
Finding one's own kind in the vastness of space is an old dream of mankind. In 2008, even the church surrendered - the Vatican's chief astronomer said that belief in aliens does not contradict belief in God, and the vastness of the universe makes it possible for life to exist outside the Earth. But, as they say, the fairy tale will soon tell itself, but it will not be done soon.
That there are humanoids - on the planets available to us, not even signs of bacteria were found. All hope now rests on exoplanets found in plural numbers by the Kepler astronomical satellite. But until we get to them, a lot of time will pass.
The last trick in the search for intelligent life in the Universe is infrared radiation. Back in the 1960s, physicist Freeman Dyson wrote that according to the fundamental laws of thermodynamics, energy from computers, spaceships and other equipment on a galactic scale should be radiated as heat. That is, any highly developed civilization will certainly "flicker" in the infrared range over great distances.
In 2009, a special space telescope, WISE, was even launched to test this theory. The results of his work were recently presented in the Astrophysical Journal. In short, there were no sensations, but there are promising findings. For example, from the entire catalog of galaxies identified by WISE (and this is about one hundred million), about a hundred thousand objects with slightly increased infrared radiation and about 50 galaxies with unusually high radiation were found. It is in their direction that the views of astrophysicists are now directed - what if? However, skeptics say that high levels of infrared radiation may be the result of ordinary astrophysical processes associated, for example, with the formation of planets or supernova explosions. But you never know what is happening there in the vastness of space.
Promotional video:
So far, the SETI project, which has been working since 1971, has not yielded positive results, within the framework of which the search for extraterrestrial civilizations in the radio range is being conducted. Distant and not so stars are in no hurry to wink at us reassuringly. Nevertheless, many people are sure that aliens exist and often come to visit us. And that the leadership of the largest world powers (in particular, the United States) for some reason carefully conceals their contacts with representatives of other worlds. And since this topic is constantly promoted by the cinema and the yellow press, it is certainly endless.