Found: The Best Place For Alien Life

[sharedholder]

Found: The best place for alien life

Aliens watch out - a US astrobiologist has homed in on your star.
It is the 37th brightest star in the constellation of Gemini to be precise, 42 light-years away from Earth and rather like our own Sun.

The star, 37 Gem, is top of a shortlist of the 30 most promising places to look for life drawn up by Maggie Turnbull of the University of Arizona in Tucson, US.

"This stable, middle-aged star is just a bit hotter and brighter than our Sun," she told New Scientist magazine.

"And if alien life is anywhere, it's likely to be there."

To come up with 37 Gem, she whittled down a list of 5,000 stars within 100 light-years of Earth.

Young, violent stars were discarded as were those which look nothing like our Sun.

With so many to choose from, the obvious candidates are the nearest and most Sun-like.

'Long-shot'

The work is part of long-term plans to pinpoint other worlds capable of supporting life with deep-space telescopes.

The US space agency (Nasa) is launching its Terrestrial Planet Finder in the next decade or so, while the European Space Agency (Esa) plans to station a flotilla of telescopes called Darwin 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.

Dr Malcolm Fridlund, Darwin Project Scientist for Esa, says Turnbull's list covers those closest to Earth where Seti scientists could conceivably pick up a radio signal.

"Seti is a long-shot," he told BBC News Online, "but if you want to look for life you have to limit yourself to a small number of places; you can't look everywhere."

SOURCE (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3177684.stm)

[junkyardking]

I wish they would stop wasting money on searching for ET and instead spend it on actual space ships and space travel.

[james_bond_rulez]

I will be the first one to engage the warp engines ;)

[junkyardking]

Originally posted by james_bond_rulez@11 October 2003 - 11:00
I will be the first one to engage the warp engines  ;)
What i'm saying is that seti is a waste of money but people continue to pour money into it which could be better spent on space travel research.

I was actualy a fan of seti and had the screensaver, but now i think it's a waste of money the recent project nasa had for a new space ferry/ship got binned for a lack of money, but the seti project which has had no results and runs on a pipe dream of contacting aliens still gets plenty of money from private backers.

The space shuttles we got now are expensive to maintain and outdated, they havnt progressed much in 20 years, yet we conitnue to waste money on things like seti and wars. :angry:

[sharedholder]

The space shuttles we got now are expensive to maintain and outdated, they havnt progressed much in 20 years,

I think you ae right ,the same spaceships like 20 years ago.

[Rat Faced]

still gets plenty of money from private backers.





Its those private backers you have to convnce....

[Biggles]

The shuttle was designed back in the 60s. I recall seeing it in book about space travel way back in 1967 as "the future of space travel". It just took a while for it to get from drawing board to launch pad.

Seti is not particularly expensive but then it doesn't actually get many satellites into orbit either.

[dwightfry]

It's not the same technology as 20 years ago. They've made TONS of enhancments....

e-mail

$100,000 sound system which plays CDs, no more records.

New microfiber material on the seats. Most stains such as ketchup and mustard wash off with just soap and water.

Tempur-Pedic Mattresses with real Tempur pressure relieving material. (Which really was designed by NASA)

They have upgraded there phones. They use tone instead of pulse dialing.

They can now recieve over 800 channels on their sony plasma televisions, compared to their 3 channels on there GE black and white TV's which they had before.

Playstation 2 rather than Atari (oh, and get this, it plays DVD's as well)

GIGANTIC WINDSHIELD WIPERS!!!

Comes with Roomba, the automatic vacuum cleaner. No manual labor needed, you just press a button, and it vacuums the shuttle for you.

and I heard, (Hasn't been verified yet), that they have a new anti-echo material on the inside of the shuttle based on duck 'quack' technology.






The list goes on and on. How can you say they haven't changed? ;)

[Billy_Dean]

I hear they've added a warm air bum drier too.



:)

[thewizeard]

Originally posted by junkyardking@11 October 2003 - 11:56
I wish they would stop wasting money on searching for ET and instead spend it on actual space ships and space travel.
As no one will ever be able to travel to even the closest star, SETI is probably the only chance of ever knowing if there is life elsewhere. Even if SETI does discover intelligent life, the mind boggles at the problems of communicating over let's say a distance of 5 light years.

I believe manned spacecraft, except for use in the vicinity of Earth is pointless and a waste of resources.

[Rat Faced]

200 years ago, travelling more than 60 miles an hour was "impossible", as at this speed you would not be able to breath...... just a thought nigel :)

[thewizeard]

Originally posted by Rat Faced@12 October 2003 - 23:11
200 years ago, travelling more than 60 miles an hour was "impossible", as at this speed you would not be able to breath...... just a thought nigel :)
Rat Faced,

You remind me now of something my Grandmother once said to me when I was young! She said to me once, in one of our many conversations about the universe, "Nigel, man will never land on the moon!" Of course I told her she was wrong and that one day, man would indeed land on the moon! We were both right in a way! She died just before man landed on the moon...

Now that you mention that story, which I have read somewhere, I realise that I too must be growing old!

[Barbarossa]

I love these think tanks! :)


It's very hard to predict the existence of life on other worlds, when we don't fully understand the existence of life on this world.

Is life a natural conclusion of certain preset environmental criteria, or a chance occurrence based on an number of extremely unlikely events and situations?

Until we actually find evidence of life evolving on other planets we may never be able to answer this question.

[silent VI]

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