Signs of Alien Life Will Be Found by 2025, NASA's Chief Scientist Predicts.

[astr0144]

Signs of Alien Life Will Be Found by 2025, NASA's Chief Scientist Predicts.



Humanity is on the verge of discovering alien life, high-ranking NASA scientists say.
"I think we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years," NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan said Tuesday (April 7) during a panel discussion that focused on the space agency's efforts to search for habitable worlds and alien life.
"We know where to look. We know how to look," Stofan added during the event, which was webcast live. "In most cases we have the technology, and we're on a path to implementing it. And so I think we're definitely on the road." [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]
Former astronaut John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, shared Stofan's optimism, predicting that signs of life will be found relatively soon both in our own solar system and beyond.
"I think we're one generation away in our solar system, whether it's on an icy moon or on Mars, and one generation [away] on a planet around a nearby star," Grunsfeld said during Tuesday's event.
Many habitable environments
Recent discoveries suggest that the solar system and broader Milky Way galaxy teem with environments that could support life as we know it, Grunsfeld said.
For example, oceans of liquid water slosh beneath the icy shells of the Jupiter moons Europa and Ganymede, as well as that of the Saturn satellite Enceladus. Oceans covered much of Mars in the ancient past, and seasonal dark streaks observed on the Red Planet's surface today may be caused by salty flowing water.
Further, NASA's Curiosity rover has found carbon-containing organic molecules and "fixed" nitrogen, basic ingredients necessary for Earth-like life, on the Martian surface.
Farther afield, observations by NASA's Kepler space telescope suggest that nearly every star in the sky hosts planets — and many of these worlds may be habitable. Indeed, Kepler's work has shown that rocky worlds like Earth and Mars are probably more common throughout the galaxy than gas giants such as Saturn and Jupiter.
And just as the solar system is awash in water, so is the greater galaxy, said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division.
The Milky Way is "a soggy place," Hertz said during Tuesday's event. "We can see water in the interstellar clouds from which planetary systems and stellar systems form. We can see water in the disks of debris that are going to become planetary systems around other stars, and we can even see comets being dissipated in other solar systems as [their] star evaporates them." [6 Most Likely Places for Alien Life in the Solar System]
Looking for life
Hunting for evidence of alien life is a much trickier proposition than identifying potentially habitable environments. But researchers are working steadily toward that more involved and ambitious goal, Stofan and others said.
For example, the agency's next Mars rover, scheduled to launch in 2020, will search for signs of past life and cache samples for a possible return to Earth for analysis. NASA also aims to land astronauts on Mars in the 2030s — a step Stofan regards as key to the search for Mars life.
"I'm a field geologist; I go out and break open rocks and look for fossils," Stofan said. "Those are hard to find. So I have a bias that it's eventually going to take humans on the surface of Mars — field geologists, astrobiologists, chemists — actually out there looking for that good evidence of life that we can bring back to Earth for all the scientists to argue about."
NASA is also planning out a mission to Europa, which may launch as early as 2022. The main goal of this $2.1 billion mission will be to shed light on the icy moon's potential habitability, but it could also search for signs of alien life: Agency officials are considering ways to sample and study the plumes of water vapor that apparently erupt from Europa's south polar region.
In the exoplanet realm, the agency's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an $8.8 billion instrument scheduled to launch in 2018, will scope out the atmospheres of nearby "super-Earth" alien planets, looking for gases that may have been produced by life.
JWST will scan the starlight that passes through the air of super-Earths, which are more massive than our own planet but significantly less so than gaseous worlds such as Uranus and Neptune. This method, called transit spectroscopy, will likely not work for potentially habitable Earth-size worlds, Hertz said.
Searching for biosignature gases on small, rocky exoplanets will instead probably require direct imaging of these worlds, using a "coronagraph" to block out the overwhelming glare of their parent stars, Hertz added.
NASA's potential Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, which may launch in the mid-2020s if given the official go-ahead, would include a coronagraph for exoplanet observations.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/signs-alien-life-found-2025-nasas-chief-scientist-212655192.html#4H4V9bM

[rdunk]

This is very likely one of the most truthful, and safest of bets, that NASA has ever put forth! When you know that you already know that you know that you know the "Signs of Alien Life" are now crystal clear, there is no risk in paying forward such an announcement, which is only up to 10 years away anyway!!

And please note what they are announcing now, not real alien life, but "SIGNS" of alien life. The NASA photos of Mars have a plethora of such alien SIGNS NOW- -

Why wait up to ten years to tell everyone about what they absolutely must know now?? - a long drawn out public disclosure that could/should just as well be made today!!

[RUSSO]

"SIGNS"

Why wait up to ten years to tell everyone about what they absolutely must know now??

Maybe because knowledge is power...

TINSTAAFL

[rdunk]

Maybe because knowledge is power...

TINSTAAFL

John Lear's tin-foil hat has come a long way from what these folks are wearing, doncha think??

[RUSSO]

John Lear's tin-foil hat has come a long way from what these folks are wearing, doncha think??

You know what they used to say... the bigger the better results in not having your mind read

John just developed a new technology

[Pimander]

Further to the prediction we will find life soon, I'll predict that panspermia is a reality.  If we do detect life similar to on Earth within the Solar System then it likely has a common origin to life here.

Panspermia would be an explanation for our failure to satisfactorily explain how life originated on Earth.  The explanation is that it did not originate on Earth but arrived from elsewhere in some way.

[Amaterasu]

Further to the prediction we will find life soon, I'll predict that panspermia is a reality.  If we do detect life similar to on Earth within the Solar System then it likely has a common origin to life here.

Panspermia would be an explanation for our failure to satisfactorily explain how life originated on Earth.  The explanation is that it did not originate on Earth but arrived from elsewhere in some way.

The thing I don't like about "panspermia" is that it merely puts off the question of how life originated.

"Why is there life?"

"Well, it didn't start here."

Some answer!  LOL!

[Pimander]

"Why is there life?"

"Well, it didn't start here."

Some answer!  LOL!

It isn't an attempt to explain how life started so it is not surprising that it does not answer that question.  It is an attempt to explain how life got here.

Scientists are possibly chasing their tails when they try to explain how life originated on early Earth is some "primordial soup".  If it originated elsewhere then it is obviously only going to be pure speculation how it occurred because we have no idea whatsoever where it happened.

The fact that a theory is not trying to explain something outside its scope should be reassuring however amusing you may find it.

[A51Watcher]

Well let's hope the NASA chief is right, from what I understand from a Pentagon relative, that is the year scheduled for disclosure about Roswell and everything.

Won't need a NASA announcement after that.


In other news, FRB's may hold the evidence -

"For the past eight years, astronomers have been scratching their heads over a series of strange radio signals emanating from somewhere in the cosmos. And now, the mystery has deepened.

"There is something really interesting we need to understand," study co-author Michael Hippke, a scientist at the Institute for Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, told New Scientist. "This will either be new physics, like a new kind of pulsar, or, in the end, if we can exclude everything else, an E.T."

"These fast radio bursts could conceivably be 'wake up calls' from other societies, trying to prompt a response from any intelligent life that's outfitted with radio technology," Dr. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer and director of the Center for SETI Research who was not involved in the study, told The Huffington Post in an email. "On the other hand, they could also be perfectly natural, astrophysical phenomena."

The scientists looked at a specific feature called the "dispersion measure" -- which represents the time differential between the detection of a burst's high frequencies and its low frequencies. (Low frequencies travel more slowly through space dust, and thus take longer than high frequencies to reach Earth.)

To their surprise, they found that the dispersion measure of every pulse was a multiple of the number 187.5.

Such an even spacing "is likely not produced by something like a supernova explosion," Hippke told HuffPost Science in an email. "All frequencies leave the nova at the same time, and the DM [dispersion measure] is created by dust crossing. As the amount of dust varies, the DM would seem random."

Hippke said the pulses probably are generated by some as-yet-unidentified source here on Earth that emits short-frequency radio waves followed by high-frequency ones -- perhaps something as simple as a cell phone base station. If that's not the explanation, it's possible they come from a new, unknown kind of cosmic object in deep space.

Or those aliens.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/02/radio-bursts-alien-signals_n_6984870.html

[ArMaP]

Well let's hope the NASA chief is right, from what I understand from a Pentagon relative, that is the year scheduled for disclosure about Roswell and everything.

What year, 2025?

I wonder if that's why they used that year on the title when what was said by the chief NASA scientist was "in 20 to 30 years".

[Norval]

Better late than never, , , , , 


Crater Chains, the true signs !

http://www.thelivingmoon.com/forum/index.php?topic=7228.0