E.T. – Life Beyond the
Stars

E.T. – Life Beyond the Stars

Every day, scientists and researchers are unearthing secrets of extraterrestrial life. And they’re teaching us so much about ourselves. They teach us about conditions in other parts of the Universe and what it is like to be among the stars, so far away from home.

Once we started looking for life outside of Earth, we found it everywhere. We know that some of these organisms might be as old as Earth itself. And some could live for millions of years. But there are so many unknowns about them and their worlds. For example, photosynthetic bacteria live in regions of space where Hydrogen is one of the most abundant elements in existence. They use this element to build their bodies, which contains no carbon–a handful of other known compounds can be found only on Earth, but not one of those is located outside our planet. They may be here on Earth, but somebody or something could have brought them to us.

We know about the oxygen in our atmosphere. We might assume that the whole planet was fairly oxygenated before Earth formed. But it wasn’t all that long ago either: about three billion years ago – if not a little older. If life were ubiquitous at that stage of the formation of Earth, then all of the oceans would be full of alien-looking organisms. One of the first real-life exploration projects took place in August 1924, when a team of scientists led by astronomer David Peck Todd used an airship to place a radio receiver a few miles above the ground - the best place to hear messages from creatures on Mars which was closest to Earth at the time, it was believed.  

As captured by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, Jupiter’s ocean-hosting moon Europa is considered one of the best solar systems to harbor alien life. This groundbreaking scientific initiative, called the Galileo Project, was initiated by Israeli scientist Prof. Avi Loeb of the Astronomical Institute of Harvard University, who was a leading scientific voice for the possible existence of alien life elsewhere. The meaning of the project name is inspired by the astronomer Galileo Galilei of the 17th century, who pioneered telescopes and astronomy to discover Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons, the first satellites to orbit outside of Earth and prove the Heliocentric model for the solar system.

In recent years, scientists have found evidence of planets around more than 60 nearby stars. These discoveries come from current space probes and careful astronomical observations. For 36 years, SETI scientists have been precisely listening to signals from space with massive radio telescopes such as the Allen Telescope Array.

Our curiosity and the rapid deterioration of Earth’s resources urge scientists to find life outside our world. We must wait and see what we will encounter at the end of our expeditions. One of the most shocking results in this area would be us finding Homo Sapiens on another earth. Such a discovery might lead us to war like the one in James Cameroon’s Avatar, depending upon who is technologically advanced to dominate the other. However, the studies now are slow-paced due to our limitations in traveling across planets and retrieving samples. Fifty years from now, when life on Earth will attain radical progress across the globe, nations might venture out on conquering galaxies and fulfilling the sci-fi fantasies of our age .