Now what will religion have to say about this when it happens.
We’ll discover alien life in next decade, predict Nasa scientists
Nasa is less than a decade away from discovering crucial signs that we are not alone in the universe, the space agency’s top officials said.
“Giant leaps” in space exploration and new missions under development have placed humanity on the brink of proving that alien life exists elsewhere in our solar system and beyond. However, they added that the chances were that the only life we would be able to detect in the near future would be microbial rather than little green men.
“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,” said Ellen Stofan, Nasa’s chief scientist. “We know where to look. We know how to look. We’re definitely on the road.”
The forecast came as part of a panel discussion, Our Solar System and Beyond: Nasa’s Search for Water and Habitable Planets, at Nasa’s Washington headquarters. Nasa’s continuing Kepler mission has already shown that the Milky Way galaxy is probably home to billions of Earth-like planets where conditions are ripe for liquid water, and potentially life, to exist.
Yesterday, astronomers working at an observatory in the Atacama desert, Chile, said they had discovered another crucial prerequisite for alien life.
By looking at the spectrum of light coming from a star system 455 light years away, they identified the presence of complex organic molecules in a disc of comets and small rocky planets orbiting the star. Considered the building blocks of life, this is the first time that such molecules have been spotted outside our own star system.
It is believed that bombardments from comets landing on Earth seeded our planet with the molecules that would later form amino acids, proteins and, eventually, life.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/a ... 405554.ece
