An Age-Old Search

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We all occasionally look at the night sky and wonder "Is anybody out there?"  In the absence of evidence, we use our imagination to populate the universe.  In the 19th century some people believed that living beings inhabited the sun and developed experiments to look down sun spots to see them.

In 1965, the first photographs from Mars revealed a lifeless planet.  As exploration of the solar system continued, the next contender Venus, turned out to be a torrid furnace.

Our attempts to find a planet like Earth which orbits around a star like our sun have led us to recognize how rare it is to find a place that is ‘just right’ for life.  If Earth were any further from the sun it would have frozen long ago.  If it were closer, it would be scorching like Venus.  Even the moon which circles a planet must be large enough to stabilize its axis of rotation so that it doesn’t flip chaotically.

To have intelligent life we need the right sized planet with its right sized moon, circling at just the right distance from a right sized sunstar.  As far as we can determine, Earth is the only planet in the galaxy that meets these conditions.

Although the odds of a positive outcome are small, we continue to look for radio signals sent by other civilizations.  Our search for extraterrestrial intelligence goes on.

So next time you look up to the sky, think how fortunate we are to have this warm, wet niche in the Universe on which to enjoy our life.