Friday, April 2, 2010

The Search for Extraterrestrial Life


I recently read a chapter in The Search for Extraterrestrial Life by Don Nardo. In the chapter "Hunting for Earth-Like Planets", Don talks about how NASA and scientists would try to find other life inhabiting planets in the universe. Earth bases telescopes are not strong enough to dectect light from distant planets orbiting stars. Not even the Hubble Space telescope can locate that light. They predict in the near future that they will have the technology to do so. They also estimate the amount of Earth-like planets in our galaxy. They said to assume that there were 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Now, 10% of those stars have orbiting planets. And 20% of the planets in that system have an Earth-like planet. If those statistics were accurate and not made up, that would mean that there would be 2 million terrestrial in our galaxy alone: let alone the universe.

I think this chapter was pretty interesting. I like how the author writes the book into chapters and sections making it similar to a textbook. The information seems pretty reliable. Personally, I think that there could be life inhabitable planets out there. Just the fact that we could be the only civilization in the whole universe seems pretty rediculous.

Nardo,Donn.The Search for Extraterrestrial Life.Farmington Hills, MI:Gale,2006.1-24.Print.

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