Things You Didn't Know About ... Aliens
Things You Didn't Know About ... Aliens
1 Astronomers Margaret Turnbull and Jill Tarter of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., have compiled a list of 17,129 nearby stars most likely to have planets that could support complex life.
2 According to Turnbull, stars must be at least 3 billion years old (to allow life time to evolve), have low mass, and have high levels of iron; metals are needed to form rocky, Earth like planets.
3 Leading the list is Epsilon Indi A, a dim orange star just 11.8 light-years away, in our local corner of the Milky Way.
4 What's the frequency, Frank? Astronomer Frank Drake made the first scientific attempt to contact alien beings in 1960, when he used an 85-foot radio dish at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia to listen for signals from two nearby sun like stars.
5 You haven't heard about it because his search turned up zilch.
6 The more sophisticated efforts of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, haven't fared any better. Since 1995, this privately funded project has scanned more than 1,000 stars, at a cost of $5 million a year, for alien radio squeaks.
7 Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at SETI, for reasons best known to him, reckons that the 350-antenna Allen Telescope Array, now being built, "will trip across a signal by the year 2025."
8 Download software from the SETI@home project to sift for alien signals on your home PC. 187,000 other people have
9 Most likely spots for alien life in our solar system: underground refuges on Mars, hot spots on Saturn's moon Enceladus (whose south pole is dotted with geysers), and Jupiter's moons Europa and Callisto (whose icy crusts may conceal vast, underlying oceans of water).
10 Perhaps the earliest UFO sighting occurred in 1450 B.C., when Egyptians saw bright circles of light in the sky. Some UFO obsessives interpret Ezekiel: 1 in the Bible as a UFO report.
Comments
Post a Comment