Well, there’s really nothing new in what Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI institute, is saying. It’s the fact that he put a date on it and said it in front of a congressional committee. “It’s unproven whether there is any life beyond Earth,” Shostak said. “I think that situation is going to change within everyone’s lifetime in this room.”
Since he was speaking in front of a congressional committee, some of those old farts are 70,even 80 years old. He’s saying we expect to detect alien life in 20 years, tops, maybe ten.
I’m pleased to hear it, I hope he’s right, but I wonder about the methodology. We really have no clue when we will detect alien life, because we haven’t detected it yet. It’s like asking “How long are you going to be looking for your phone?” Since you will look for it until you find it, you have no idea how long that will be.
We might find life in the ice covered Seas of Io – or was that Titan? Never mind, we’ll check them both. We might search for signs of life, but really…we’ve no idea what we’re looking for and, still, despite the miracles of modern science, exoplanets (we ,might find fish on Io, but not a technological civilization) are really, really far away and it’s kind of miraculous that we can detect their existence at all.
We’ll send out signals. Many think that would not be wise. They might be right. But it’s what we’re going to do, because it’s who we are. Throughout human history, curiousity has won out over fear, more often than not.
We’ll colonize the few colonizable worlds in our own Solar System. We’ll send out multi-generational star colonizing ships.
We are going to keep looking. 20 years would be really cool, though.
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